Firsts of Many
by moonswirl
Summary: Daily updated project, running January 1-December 31, all centered around Lucas & Maya. Sequel to "Endings, Beginnings, and the Journey in Between," following Lucas and Maya, as they return to Austin after graduating college and move into their house.
1. Their House of Family

_**A/N:** Happy New Year everyone! Today marks the start of my fifth year of this Lucaya Project. This year's project will be a sequel to last year's story, carrying along with the narrative of the past three years, and like previous years, there will be a new chapter a day. Hope you enjoy it!_

**_Texas Series_**  
_1\. A Hart in Texas (2017)_  
_2\. Our Brand New Years (2018)_  
_3\. Endings, Beginnings, and the Journey in Between (2019)_  
_4..._

**_FIRSTS OF MANY_**

January 1st 2020

_Chapter 1  
Their House of Family_

For near as long as they had been big enough to do so, Maya's young sisters had made a habit of sneaking into her room in the morning, whenever she and Lucas would be spending the night in the room which had been hers, and then theirs, and then hers all over again. They had gotten much better at being sneaky, that had to be handed to them, though the expectation had a way of spoiling that surprise. Maya would always play along, and so would he. Only this time…

This was the first night the two of them spent at the Hunter Hart house as residents of Austin. Two weeks had gone by since Zay and Nadine's wedding, and as they'd quickly decided, they had packed up and left Houston three weeks ahead of their original plan. As little as they looked forward to leaving their friends behind any sooner than they had to, they really just wanted to make it to Austin already, to be near their families again, to get started settling up to move into the house… Maybe it was the fact that they were now engaged to be married, making them want to maintain this traction into their future.

Lucas had been hypnotized, looking at that ring on her finger as she slept, curled up at his side. The morning was hitting the diamond in such a way as to unlock its array of colors. _Just like her, full of brightness, full of colors…_ The previous day, getting everything on to the rented truck, saying goodbye to everyone, unloading everything… She'd been spent, and now here she was, sleeping like a stone, enabling him to lay here and watch her. His fiancée… It still felt like a dream a lot of the time, that night when he'd proposed, but then there'd be the ring, proof of reality.

Also their parents, inquiring at every turn in their 'subtle' ways after their plans, but mostly the ring.

In the stillness of morning, any sounds in the house became amplified, and always the telltale sign of an approaching visitor would be the slow, deliberately 'covert' steps coming down the stairs. Lucas heard them now, and in an effort to allow Maya to sleep on, he quietly got up and moved to the door, pulling it silently open just in time to find three-year-old MJ Hunter standing there with his small hand in the air, about to reach for the handle which now found itself out of his grasp. He gasped, caught.

"She's sleeping, okay?" Lucas whispered, holding his index to his lips. The blond boy looked around him, to the bed. After he'd spotted his sister and confirmed as much, he looked unable to decide what he might do next. Lucas motioned for him to step back a bit before stepping out and shutting the door again. "Anyone else up?" What time was it?

"Mommy and Haley are upstairs, Daddy went with Nellie and Gracie," the boy informed him.

"Went where?"

"Pancakes," MJ declared with a surge of anticipation which Lucas took to mean Shawn had taken the twins to pick up breakfast for everyone rather than a sit-down meal just the three of them.

"Ma Maggie's?" Lucas guessed, and MJ nodded before looking to the closed door. He still wanted to see his big sister, and knowing her, Maya wouldn't care so much about missing a few minutes' sleep when someone wanted her attention and that someone was family. "Alright, come on, but we stay quiet, yeah?" Lucas whispered. MJ agreed at once.

It was just after ten in the morning, as Lucas finally established when he led Maya's young brother back into the room. No wonder they were the last to rise.

Lucas lifted up the boy and deposited him next to Maya, where he sat on his knees and stared at her like he wasn't sure what to do next. Seconds later, very suddenly, an arm swiped up to capture him and he had his vow of silence pushed out of him in favor of giggles.

"Hey, Sneak," Maya mumbled, cuddling her brother near.

She had so been looking forward to this, so much that it defied words. They didn't know exactly how long they would be staying here before officially moving into the house. It wasn't about the place being ready or not. She'd only really wanted to spend some time with her family, with her family, after having been far off in Houston the past four years. She'd left having two siblings here and she'd returned with twice as many. MJ and Haley weren't strangers, nor was she one to them, but then it wasn't the same as with the twins, was it? She'd needed this time with them, and Lucas, being Lucas, had been all for it. So, they were living here, for now, and until they both felt ready to go.

"We're eating pancakes!" MJ tipped his head back until he could see Maya's face.

"You mean _we're_ having pancakes, while _you_, Matty J, go stacking up potato wedges in a tower that you'll gobble all up before you remember you have pancakes and then you won't be hungry anymore," she squinted at him with founded suspicion. Her brother, looking more and more like their mother and her every day, tried and failed to cover his urge to laugh.

"Do not!"

"Do, too!" Maya countered, leading to a few more rounds back and forth before Maya called on Lucas to give the verdict. He came and sat on the bed.

"Bunch of potatoes, bunch of rolls, you two are set."

"Hey, hey, you didn't have to pull me into this!" Maya 'complained,' making her brother laugh again.

A few minutes later, Lucas went off with MJ so the two of them could take the dogs for a walk. Maya bowed out, blaming post-move aches.

"Lazy morning?" She lifted her head from where she still lay on the bed, taking in the sunshine of that June morning. Her mother stood in the door, one-year-old Haley perched in her arms.

"Moving is hard," Maya sighed over-dramatically.

"Motion or relocation?" her mother teased, approaching her. Haley grew fidgety in her arms, and finally Katy held her youngest to her eldest, who happily received her.

"All of it," Maya smiled, sitting up with her baby sister, running her fingers through her fine hair. She could feel her thoughts shifting, sliding into the place she'd been evading since the previous morning.

"Hey, what's going on in there?" her mother asked. Maya looked up, feeling her mother's finger prodding at the side of her head.

"Oh, so many things," Maya hummed. Katy sat with her, smiling as they both watched Haley drag her tiny finger along the shapes tattooed on her sister's forearm.

"What's the headliner?" Katy asked. She didn't even have to say it. She looked at her mother, and it must have been all over her face. "Are you sure?"

"I'm not, actually. That's kind of the thing, and I just… We went through this once before and it… it really messed with us for a while. I've been going around with a… a possibility since yesterday. Right now it could be nothing again, or…"

"Or it could be…" Katy breathed out, looking to her daughters before getting up. "Come with me," she moved out of the room. Maya blinked, startled.

"Wait!" she moved to rise, holding Haley with care. "Where's she going, huh?" she asked the girl as she stepped out and saw that their mother was going up the stairs. By the time she got to the top of the stairs, Katy was out of sight. "Mom?"

"Bathroom!" She reached the door just as her mother stood back up from fishing something out of the cabinet. "Here," she held out the box.

"I…" Maya hesitated. "Do you just keep a stock of pregnancy tests or something?"

"Just had the one left," Katy shrugged. "Take it, use it. You know how." Maya squinted at her.

"I do," she confirmed. "But I… I don't know," she shook her head.

"Do you want to wait for Lucas…"

"No," Maya cut in, taking the box. "If it's negative, I don't…"

"Okay… okay. Here," Katy took Haley back. "I'll be downstairs, unless you want me to wait out there."

"I'll be fine," Maya smiled. "Thanks."

"Always."

Shutting the bathroom door, Maya let out a sigh, pressing her forehead to the wood. She wasn't even worried about what would happen if the test came positive. She had her degree, but she didn't have a teaching job yet, so it wouldn't have been the worst timing, though it might alter a thing or two about the wedding. And Lucas… Lucas would be over the moon. It was the negative that worried her, remembering what it was like, three years ago. She didn't want to go through something like that again.

Would she though? They'd done plenty of growing, him and her, since that Halloween night, and things were different. They were just moving back, preparing to start new things, to move into their house, to get married… If that test came out positive then they'd just add having a baby to that list. And if it came negative, well… then it just wouldn't be the time, not yet. She repeated as much to herself, once and again, tearing the test box open.

She didn't have to tell Lucas. He already knew, guessed that she suspected it at least. Much as she'd tried to be covert about it, the day before, he could tell she was trying to be careful about lifting things, making it seem like she was participating in the move more than she actually did. And he'd recognized the look on her face. He hadn't said anything, didn't want to get ahead of wherever she was in her thoughts.

But then when he came back from walking with the dogs and MJ, when he saw her again, he found a new look on her face, a shift in her posture. The doubt was gone. She wasn't pregnant.

She looked good, took it better than three years before. He guessed she wasn't going to tell him, but he understood why she wouldn't, and that was her choice. So long as she was okay, he was, too.

"Hey," he gave her foot a tap under the table after breakfast was over. "What do you want to do today?" Maya planted her chin in her palm, considering the question.

"It's a beautiful day, not too hot… It'd be a shame to waste it. We could go to the pool."

"Pool sounds good," Lucas nodded.

"And if we happened to make a detour at the hardware store before or after, I mean…"

"More colors?"

"A girl can never have enough," she declared with a meek smile.

"I think if you want more you'll have to invent them yourself at this point," he smiled back. She grinned.

"Now that's a job I'd like. Naming colors, for swatches, you know? Wouldn't make a lick of sense but you'd want that color on your walls because it'd sound fun."

"What would you call… this?" Lucas pointed to his shirt. She sat back, considering the green fabric.

"Oh, that's a tough one… Could be a turtle, or a lime, or something… springy…" Lucas chuckled, making a springing motion with his hand. "No, like the season," she laughed along.

"Think you're on to something then," he agreed. Silence regained for a beat, and in that moment, looking to one another, it felt like letting walls down, momentarily, long enough to allow room for honesty.

_I thought we were…_

_I know. Are you okay?_

_Completely okay._

"Can't wait until Sam comes around," Maya smiled. "I was thinking you and I could drive up to Tucson to get him, day after Haley's birthday."

"Road trip…" Lucas nodded. "I like the sound of that. Maya beamed.

"No summer complete without one."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	2. Their House of Friendship

January 2nd 2020

_Chapter 2  
Their House of Friendship_

"We could pick up a couple pizzas, too," Lucas suggested as he leaned on the bar of the basket he pushed down the grocery store aisle. Maya trailed at his side, sometimes picking up something to add to their load, other times looking at her phone. She stopped now, turning to him.

"We're going to need paper plates… and napkins…" she declared, looking at the small list she had underneath her phone.

"We just passed those in the last aisle," Lucas pointed back, and Maya took off at a jog, returning several seconds later with the items in question.

"Maybe we don't actually need the plates," she reflected now, inspecting the pack she held tucked under her arm. "Just like…" she mimed holding a slice of pizza.

"Don't look at me, I was raised by Melinda Friar, we use plates," Lucas declared.

"Oh, so, it was fine when we were in Houston, but now we're back in Austin it's back to Friar law, huh?" Maya teased with a smirk.

"Shh, she shops here," he whispered. She just chuckled and went to deposit the paper plates into the basket, making a big show of it. "Thank you," Lucas couldn't help but smile. Maya looked to her phone once again. "You know, they won't get here faster just because you keep checking," he pointed out, earning himself a look which very much translated into 'says you.' She looked back at it again, just in case his claim might be disproved right here and now, for effect. The phone remained regrettably quiet, and Maya grumbled before continuing along the store aisle.

They had been back in Austin a week now, but today was to bring more of them back into the city where they had grown and become friends, while another would be leaving her own hometown in favor of this one. Today was the day Sophie and Chiara would have the old Houston house to themselves, at least until Asher and Ray arrived from New York. Today, Riley, Dylan, and Rosa were packing up and driving in to move in to the apartment they had rented together. Naturally, they had several willing helpers ready to assist once they arrived.

"How's this for a home warming present?" Nadine inquired as she and Zay came down from the other end of the aisle, with a basket of their own. She held up what looked to be an iced tea kit, with a pitcher and an infuser and a selection of tea leaves.

"The way it is out there, get two," Maya nodded. Of all the days for the trio to have their moving day, it had to be one where the heat was out of control.

"Right," Nadine put the kit in her basket before sprinting off to get another.

"Wait, we need ice, too!" Zay maneuvered the basket around to trail after his wife.

Lucas smiled, watching them go, and more so as Maya turned back toward him with a smile of her own. He knew where that came from, it was the same as him, just this amused awe at the thought that the pair of them were now married, as much as the thought that they were back living near them once again. It felt much easier now to admit just how deeply they had missed Nadine and Zay while they were off in Boston the last four years. They would never have said a thing about it before, but now they were here and all was as it should be, so yes, they had hated being away from them and they were ecstatic to have them back again.

Maya's phone chimed a moment later, and she nearly dropped it before looking to find just what she'd been waiting to see.

_Riley: We are baaaaaack!_

She had attached a picture, showing Dylan in the driver's seat, Riley at his side, and Rosa in the back, the three of them posing together – Maya guessed – while stopped at a red light. Riley had vowed to let her know when they had passed from the long road and started through the streets, which would mean…

"We have to go get those pizzas, come on!"

Once they had hurried through the rest of their errand and returned to the sweltering summer day, the four 'moving assistants' packed into Lucas' car, deciding to get the pizzas delivered, the better to get to the apartment in time to meet their friends as they arrived. Though the air conditioning was going strong, Maya and Nadine gladly spent the length of the ride with the bags of ice between them, looking like they'd found the most genius spot for relaxation.

They pulled up to the building just a few minutes before the car came along, carrying the trio of the day. Heat or no, they all quickly went to meet one another. Riley rightly bolted into Maya's arms like she hadn't seen her in months instead of a week.

"Your side's all cold," Riley declared in a tone that suggested she approved.

"I made friends with a bag of ice," Maya revealed. She'd barely let go that she was seized by her 'partner in shortness,' also known as Rosa Del Vecchio. "Welcome to Austin," Maya laughed, squeezing her good. Her bandmate pulled back with a grin.

"Happy to be here. The movers didn't look happy," she countered. Their belongings were being driven over by hired movers, and the day's heat was not agreeing with heavy lifting.

"We're going to need more ice!" Maya called back to the others.

The bags they already had were presently ushered up to the apartment and into the refrigerator – a gift from Riley's parents – like patients being rushed into urgent care. This, along with the oven gifted by Dylan's parents, and the dishwasher gifted by Rosa's mother, was not the only thing they already found on the premises when they walked through the door. Where bedroom furniture went, those were on the truck making its way up from Houston. For the rest, there had been much shopping to be done, most of it seen in stores in Houston and ordered and delivered to Austin, with one friend or another present to receive them. Some things needed to be placed, others assembled, There was air conditioning to be installed, which Lucas saw to with Nadine's assistance. Maya and Rosa saw to the iced tea before joining Zay, Dylan, and Riley in the assembly of one item after another.

The pizzas arrived just minutes before the movers did. It could only be awkward for the seven of them to stand there, rightfully exhausted from all they'd done, eating their slices while the movers walked back and forth near them. There was no way they couldn't smell the pizza, and it was just so good…

At long last, the truck had been emptied out, the movers were gone, and everyone went about helping Rosa, Riley, and Dylan as they figured out what would go where. All the painting had been done beforehand, with the Matthews, the Orlandos, the Hunter Harts, and Maya and Lucas, and then Zay and Nadine fresh from their honeymoon… All that was needed now was for the three tenants to arrive.

"Finishing touch…" Maya told her bandmates and Dylan, as she and Lucas pulled a framed painting out of hiding. It was her work, easily recognized, and the trio received it gladly.

"I think… we did enough for today…" Riley finally declared, plopping down on the couch some time later. The others didn't have to be convinced. They found whatever space available on the couch, the love seat, or the floor, and for a few minutes all that could be heard was the sound of ice moving in glasses as they emptied out the pitcher of iced tea.

"You know, I know I haven't lived at home with my mom for a couple years already, but this one feels different. I can't explain it…" Rosa observed after a while.

"You pay rent," Lucas suggested.

"That might be it," Rosa pointed to her former co-worker and roommate. Some of the others laughed. "One third of it anyway," she turned to her new/old roommates.

Rosa wasn't _so_ much younger than the rest of them, but still she had always carried something like a 'kid sister' vibe among the group. Now, as she had gone and joined Riley and Dylan in their new living situation, the feeling got to be something more like she was just their kid. It was weird and also not.

"So, when's practice going to be?" Rosa looked to Maya, Riley, and the newly reinstated Nadine. All three gave a sort of exhausted 'not today' sort of groan. "I know that, but when?"

"Well, first things first, where are we even going to have those?" Nadine inquired.

"Our neighbors aren't next door," Maya shrugged, pointing to herself and Lucas, who gave an approving nod.

"And you're not… indoors… yet," Zay frowned, as his point got away from him. He resolved it with a sort of 'you know what I'm saying' shrug. Maya and Lucas hadn't technically moved into their house yet.

"Doesn't mean we can't get everything set up in the basement," Lucas told him.

"And I still need to figure out what I'm going to be playing instead of drums," Nadine added.

"And Kayla is still on her trip with Will and Franny and the Weaver Kings girls," Maya went on.

"So 'not now' is what you're saying," Rosa sighed, halfway twitchy in a way the others could understand it. They all missed it as much as the next of them. Relocating the home base of TXNY, even if it was back to the place where they had begun, was understandably difficult. In Houston, for four years, they had really grown and expanded into something solid, and now it felt like they might have to start all over again. They would do it, they could do it, as they had done time and again.

"How was it this morning, back at the house?" Lucas asked the trio. It had only been a week since they'd left, and for all they'd been up to, it still hadn't quite sunk in that they had left Houston, and the house, and Sophie and Chiara…

"It's been so quiet since you guys left, with two of the dogs, too," Dylan told him.

"And they're bringing Peanut over when they'll visit in a couple days," Rosa added, sounding almost like she worried they might decide to keep the little guy. "I think they're going to go and maybe adopt another one. House wouldn't feel right without any pups," she declared, to overall agreement.

"Who cried?" Maya wondered, because there was no way no one had cried. The trio looked to one another like they weren't sure what to say. "Everyone?" Maya guessed.

"It was sweat," Rosa defended, to suspicious smiles from Maya and Lucas and the newlyweds. "It's so hot outside," Rosa waved pathetically. "Is there more pizza?" she got up and dashed for the kitchen.

"I'm so glad you're here, you know," Maya told Riley later on as they were getting ready to head on home. "I've been spoiled, four years living with you," she told her best friend, arms looped together. Riley gave a good nod ensuring that she'd been feeling the same.

"You have the key."

"And you have ours," Maya beamed. Looking around, to the rest of their little group, it was impossible not to smile. It would be even better if they were all in the same city once again, but a short trip to Houston was so much better than having them near across the country. It was somewhere between a new beginning and a return to old times. Whichever way they looked at it, everything was headed in the right direction.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	3. Their House of Colors

January 3rd 2020

_Chapter 3  
Their House of Colors_

"Is that Dot?"

Lucas had been coming back up into the attic after grabbing some supplies from downstairs when he heard Maya's voice from within.

"What?" he asked. She turned from where she stood, paint roller brandished at her side like a staff and staring out the window. She pointed with her other hand, which was dotted with paint stains.

"That's her truck, isn't it?" Lucas moved to stand with her and spotted the vehicle coming along. From up here they could see a good length of the lane leading up to their house, and by now it was nearly to the turn into the space next to where _his_ car was parked.

"Yeah…" he blinked, setting his things down and moving back toward the steps. Maya wasn't far behind. They made it all the way out the door, finding Dot along with all three of her kids climbing out of the truck. "Hey!" Lucas greeted them. They turned and waved as he and Maya jogged down the front steps to join them. "We weren't expecting you…" Lucas looked from his aunt to his cousins and back to Maya.

"Surprises, you know," Emmett Jr. smirked.

"For us?" Maya asked, which sounded almost beside the point, because who else…

"Well…" Dot looked to her nephew, and suddenly he knew exactly why they were here. He didn't know how else to look except stunned. She was done? He looked to the truck. They couldn't see what was inside, but… "I was talking with your mom last night, and she mentioned how the two of you would be up here today, so what better time?"

It was meant to be Dot's wedding present, as suggested by Lucas months ago. Of course, he and Maya weren't married yet, and seeing as they hadn't so much as set a date yet, there was no telling _when_ that would change. But then no matter when that would come to pass, they would have moved into the house already by that time. What sat in the back of the truck just now… well, it was a focal point if ever there was one. It needed to go in sooner rather than later.

"Are you nearly done with the attic?" Alex cut in, getting a look from his sister for being overly direct.

"Actually, yeah," Maya answered him. "Why?" She was getting curious, Lucas could see, and for a moment he just wanted to bask in how cute she looked.

"Should we wait?" Dot asked Lucas.

"Wait for _what_?" Maya looked between the two of them like she really just wanted one of them to say _something_ already.

"Come on, I'll explain upstairs," Lucas took her hand, leading her back toward the house before stopping and looking to his aunt again. "Give us twenty minutes?"

Back into the house they went, up the stairs and then up into the attic. They _were_ nearly done, only had to do finishing touches, and then let it all dry and they'd be good to go. Over the past week, after the trio's arrival from Houston, Lucas and Maya had been going about doing some of the work they had left to do in the house, the things which had been left intentionally undone, so he could do them with her. The attic was the most involved room they had to tackle, so they did it last. This had started with flooring and now today they had been painting… They might not have been able to set the gift in its final spot, but it could be brought in, assembled…

"You know stuff, tell me," Maya pointed at him. He held up his hands in 'surrender.'

"When Dot was here, to help restore the bedroom set, I told her what it was all for, the house…"

"The proposal," Maya smiled now, and he smiled back.

"Yeah. The bed frame and the dresser and all that, they were a wedding present to my grandparents, you know." She nodded. "Well… Dot and I got to talking, about something she might be able to do for us, for _our_ wedding."

"Oh…" Maya blinked, starting to understand. Her smile brightened with curiosity. "Did she tell you what it was going to be?"

"Yeah, well, we sort of decided together. I asked if she could make something… for you." Maya stepped up at this, curiosity turned to appreciation.

"What did you do?"

"_I_ did nothing, I just made a suggestion," Lucas smirked. Maya thought for a moment, looked around.

"Oh, it goes in here, doesn't it?" she asked. He nodded. "Okay, well come on, we have to finish," she tapped his arm and they got to work.

Ten minutes after they had gone up to the attic, they heard the light sound of Dora Cassidy's voice, asking if she could come up. When she was told that she could, she poked her head through the opening until she could see her cousin and his fiancée.

"Need a hand?"

"We're nearly done, it's alright," Lucas told her.

"Okay," she nodded and remained where she stood on the steps, giving off the impression that she might have come up here for a whole other purpose than to offer her assistance. "It looks nice here, I like the floor," she reached past the rails surrounding the opening in the attic floor and touched the wood. "White oak, nice…"

"Actually, we could use another…" Maya started to say, deciding to put the girl out of her misery, and before she could finish her sentence Dora was climbing the rest of the way to join them. Going off her clothes they could tell she'd come here with the intent of doing work which might lead to stains or rips. Her long hair had been pulled into a massive bun atop her head.

"What can I do?" she asked eagerly.

They really could have finished it just the two of them, and well in the time they'd said they would. But now, with Dora there to assist, they finished early, all the better for them to suss out what she really wanted, or at least to get her to say it. Both Maya and Lucas had a pretty good idea what this was about.

"Talked to Sam lately?" Maya casually asked as they were picking up everything that needed to be taken out of the attic. Dora turned to her, looking almost surprised. It was the first time Maya had acknowledged how she knew that her brother and Lucas' cousin had been in contact. She had officially discovered this connection on the night Lucas had proposed to her, though she had suspected it before, but as far as Dora knew, she'd had no idea.

"Yes… this morning," she finally admitted with a smile. "He told me how you were going to drive to Tucson to get him next week."

"We are, yeah," Lucas confirmed. For all those little traits of hers, which had seen her compared to some woodland creature for as long as he could remember, this shy side of his cousin's was a new one. The sixteen-year-old had always come off almost above nerves, but now Sam Hart had come into the picture and triggered whatever part of her was, at heart, a teenage girl.

"That's nice," Dora smiled and nodded, fingers twisting together.

"Dora?" Maya smiled back and the girl looked at her. "Would you like to come with us?"

"To… Tucson?" she asked, blinking.

"To Tucson," Lucas repeated with a nod.

"I… I need to ask my mom," she trailed off and back down the stairs. Once they couldn't hear her steps anymore, Maya looked to Lucas with a barely concealed laugh. It was impossible not to love Dora Cassidy. _Sam sure knows that…_

"Hormone police," Lucas whispered at her ear. Maya turned on him.

"Don't even," she pointed in his face, even as she went on laughing, leaning to him as he closed his arms around her. "We did pretty good up here, huh?" she asked, eyes scanning the room without moving from him.

"Now we just need to… get stuff up here," Lucas nodded.

"Including that mystery gift," Maya whispered.

"Patience," he whispered back.

In order to keep the surprise a surprise until the right moment, Lucas and Maya had been instructed to go off for an hour.

"Is it weird that I don't want to wash this off?" Maya asked, staring at her arms as she sat in the passenger seat. They were on their way to the diner for lunch, paint stains be damned… or praised, with how Maya took in the various colors on display over her arms. Some of them were from today, others from the day before, even the day before that. Lucas had written it off to her being tired at the end of the day, but now maybe it was just that she liked what she saw.

"Kind of suits you," Lucas decided as he looked over.

"It does, doesn't it?" Maya beamed. "We made some great choices."

"Now it just needs to look like a house…" Lucas breathed, thinking of all those boxes, from Houston and before, and furniture, and just all of their belongings, waiting to be arranged into what would be their home, for years and years to come.

"Almost there," Maya promised him.

When they returned from lunch, they were informed of two things. First, Dot was on board with letting Dora head into Tucson with Lucas and Maya. Second, they were still working on this mysterious surprise, but by now they were okay so that, while the attic remained off limits, the rest of the house was clear, so whatever needed doing could be done. They didn't actually have all that much left that could be done today, while paint dried here and there, but what could be done was done.

In mid-afternoon, Dot came to find them and announced that they were all done in the attic. With many thanks, Lucas' aunt and cousins were seen off to their truck, leaving the two on their own once again.

"Well…" Maya turned to Lucas with an expectant grin.

"Come on," he laughed, leading her toward the attic. "I'd tell you to close your eyes, but…" he pointed to the stepped ladder.

"Not a good idea, no," she agreed. "I just won't look up until you say so, yeah?" He went up first, though he decided not to look before her. He wanted to see it at the same time she did. When she climbed up, they came to stand together, eyes averted until finally, on a count of five, they looked across the attic floor to find Aunt Dot's gift.

The drawing desk was everything Lucas could have imagined and then some. He thought it was even better than the bedroom set, but then that was him. The true test would be found in Maya's opinion. The desk was for her.

He turned his head to look at her and found her in tears, happy ones, stunned, overwhelmed, joyful tears. She was speechless.

"I… I thought it might look great over there, in front of the back window?" he pointed with one hand, the other moving to loop with hers. "You can see so much out there…"

"Yeah… I love that," she finally spoke, nodding. She approached the desk with near reverence, taking in the details, the elements… Dot had really done fantastic work. She had done this piece with love, with someone very specific in mind. She had also furnished a proper stool to go along with it, and Maya sat there for a moment. Lucas could just see her working here, and she probably saw herself right now, too. Until she could do all that, she contented herself in looking back at him, knowing the role he'd played in bringing this desk into existence. That he would have thought of it, that he would have chosen for Dot's gift to be this… it was a hundred percent him, and she expected no less.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	4. Their House of Siblings

January 4th 2020

_Chapter 4  
Their House of Siblings_

"I had no idea one-year-old birthday parties were such ragers…" Maya grumbled, barely awake, Monday morning after Haley's birthday. She turned herself around until she could look at Lucas. He looked about as worn out as she did. "What's the matter? Pony's worn out?" she asked, getting a barely concealed yawn out of him. "That bad?" Maya chuckled. "Are you going to be okay to drive today?"

"Four and a half hours each, that's the plan, and I'm sticking to it," Lucas promised.

"Do you want the last stretch so you can nap in the car?"

"Yes, please," he agreed at once, making her laugh as she set some energizing kisses to his forehead.

It wasn't as though the party had gone well into the night, not when the birthday girl's bedtime went no further than eight in the evening. But it _had_ been a very lively day, and by the time the rest of them had gone to bed they could all have used a full night's sleep, which was alas not in the cards for the trio bound for Tucson that next morning. It would take somewhere north of thirteen hours to get there, not counting breaks and potential traffic jams. If they wanted to make it at a decent hour, then the only option left to them was to leave Austin early. And that meant getting up before the sun rose.

The rest of the household was to be left to sleep a while more and likely to miss their departure. The dogs had been left in the basement, the better to enable this, and even so Lucas and Maya crept quietly from the room, the better not to wake their guest if she still slept. To what degree this might be possible, with her hearing aids out for the night, they couldn't say, but they took no chances.

"Morning," Dora beamed casually, sitting up on the couch which had been her bed. She'd already folded up the sheets neatly and set them aside with the pillow, suggesting she'd been awake for some time. She was reading a book under the light of her phone's flashlight.

"How'd you sleep?" Lucas asked his cousin.

"Great," Dora told him, rising to join him and Maya as they moved toward the kitchen, phone and book still in hand. "Not a lot, but what I got was fine." She was excited to hit the road, they could see it on her face, whether she said it or not.

Breakfast was had, travel mugs were filled with coffee to go, and by five they were out the door and in the car, where Maya would take the first stretch behind the wheel. Lucas was convinced into the backseat, in case he felt like catching up on sleep, under the excuse that they should let Dora have the passenger seat, to enjoy the view.

"Are you going to live in the house now that Sam will be here?" Dora asked Maya as they moved through the streets on their way out of Austin.

"Uh, not yet," Maya told her.

"But all the work's done, isn't it?"

"It is, yeah," Maya confirmed with a nod. "We still need to unpack a lot, and put everything where it'll go, get the stuff we still don't have. But there's also that I want to spend more time with my brother and my sisters back there when we get back from Arizona." They would be staying two nights out there, to rest from the long drive as much as to spend time with the other half of her siblings before they went and left with one of them.

"I wish I had little siblings like that," Dora declared. "I only have Alex, and he's almost the same age as me most of the time."

"Hey, you never know," Maya told her. "When my mom had the twins I was seventeen, then by the time Haley came around, I was twenty-two." More and more, as her Hart siblings had grown to be part of her life, she would be left to wish she could have known them from the time they were just babies, like with her Hunters. The closest she'd come to that had been Wyatt, who'd only been one at the time, but then he was so far away, and their contact was limited… But they were in her life now, when for a while they had been strangers, and really that was all she needed to think about.

They'd mapped out their trip well enough to find where they would stop along the way, to rest, get food, switch drivers… When they hit stop number one, Maya was just sending off a quick text back home and ahead to Sam, to they all knew how things were progressing, when she heard Dora chuckle. Turning to her, she saw the girl was staring into the backseat, so she looked, too. She couldn't say exactly when he'd dozed off, but Lucas was presently sound asleep.

"He looks so much like Pappy Joe when he naps," Maya whispered to Dora, who bit back a smile and nodded in agreement. "Come on, we'll give him a few more minutes."

They got out of the car and went off to the bathroom before grabbing lunch, which they brought back to their sleeping cowboy. They got back in the car – now with Dora in the driver's seat and Maya as passenger – and waited for the scent of the food to reach the back and draw Lucas back. He actually startled when he woke up, which made the girls in the front burst out laughing.

"Where are we?" he looked around, scrubbing at his face.

"One third of the way between Austin and Tucson," Maya declared. "Fries?" she held out the bag with his lunch.

"In a minute," he climbed out of the car and off to find the bathroom.

When time came for them to head back on for the next stretch of the drive, with Dora at the wheel, both Maya and Lucas couldn't help but be more attentive. She was still a relatively new driver, although even before she'd started to learn it had been more or less expected that she would be good. She just had this temperament to her, calm, observant, that gave you all the confidence in the world that you could put her behind the wheel of a car and she would do great.

Both Maya and Lucas would later reflect on how they had apparently reached the point in their lives where they would think something along the lines of 'but she's so young!' as though they hadn't been her age when they'd done the same. It was both depressing and amusing.

Dora did just fine though, and by the time they reached stop number two, they had more or less forgotten about any concerns they may have had. They focused instead on much the same things as at the last stop. Lucas had volunteered to do the snack run this time around. Maya suspected he didn't trust her not to return with arms full of chips and candy… He knew her well enough that way.

He returned to find her and Dora waiting in the backseat of the car, laughing over something on Maya's phone. Lucas knocked on the back window to get their attention and Maya rolled it down an inch.

"Yes?" she asked, like he was some stranger intruding. He held up the bag of snacks. Her smile instantly shifted. "Hi, honey!"

"Ten years of you calling me Huckleberry, that just didn't feel right," he told her as she rolled the window down far enough to receive the bag.

"I wasn't going to say anything, but now that you mention it…

They were making good time, though they had been put just a bit behind schedule due to an unexpected traffic jam. They hadn't expected to reach Abigail's house by dinner time, but at this rate some of the younger kids might have been gearing up for bed by the time they arrived. Knowing them, Wyatt especially, they would do everything in their power to stay awake though they'd appear to sleep.

"I've never been out here before," Dora commented as they passed the Tucson city limits. Every time they had passed out of one state or city and into another, she had looked like she wanted to take every detail in, and that spirit had a way of being infectious. Maya and Lucas started to feel it, too.

"Well, we'll be here all of tomorrow, I'm sure Sam would be glad to show you around," Maya casually pointed out, and she had to hand it to Dora for keeping most of her composure and not blushing like a tomato.

"That's a good idea," she simply said.

"Right?" Maya nodded with a smile. In the driver's seat, Lucas just nudged back the urge to chuckle.

The trip as a whole hadn't been so rough, despite being over half a day on the road. Still, by the time they were nearing Abigail's house, they were all eager to be done with driving for a while.

There was no mistaking whether they'd arrived or not. If they hadn't already been here before – two of them anyway – the sight of Sam, Cara, and Eliza sitting on the front steps would have been enough to tell. Eliza had been the first one to spot them, and she pointed even as she sprang to her feet, quickly followed by her brother and sister. Almost as soon as the car had come to a stop, Maya was climbing out, which was as good as a signal for her sisters to come sprinting to meet her.

"Hey! Oh, I've never been so happy to see you, hey…" she laughed, squeezing them close as they threw their arms around her. Much as they all got to see one another more often now that Abigail had moved the kids out to Arizona, sometimes it really wasn't enough. They were family, and it never felt right to be apart.

"I'm going to see if it's too late to start the movie," Cara bolted back for the house, while Eliza moved to greet Lucas. When Maya turned to find her brother, he was standing with Dora, the two of them talking in hushed tones. The both of them looked like they were filled with sunlight. You wouldn't know it was the first time they actually stood in the same place at the same time.

"I'm in so much trouble…" Maya breathed to herself.

Leaving the two of them to their meeting/reunion, she went into the house, where she met with Abigail. Her stepmother gave her a quick hug before informing her that she was 'expected' upstairs. With a smirk, she went up to find her young brother. He was not in his bed, in the room across the hall from what had been and would remain Sam's room, and without a moment's pause, Maya went right along toward the stairs leading into the attic, _her_ room, also known as Wyatt's ship.

"Hey, bud," she whispered after sitting on the bed and gently waking the seven-year-old boy curled asleep in the middle of the mattress.

"Mom said I could sleep here," he yawned.

"You wanted to make sure I'd have to wake you when I got here, huh?" Maya guessed and her brother nodded. "So smart," she laughed, pulling him into her arms. Much as he had been prepared over the past months, for the day when his big brother would be leaving, they knew this moment was going to be rough on him most of all. Much as he'd adjusted in the time since Kermit's passing, he still struggled with separations. "You and Sam having a sleepover tonight?"

"In my room," Wyatt nodded as they moved toward the stairs. "His room has boxes in it."

"Yeah, so's mine," Maya told him, and her young brother laughed.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	5. Their House of Returns

January 5th 2020

_Chapter 5  
Their House of Returns_

Abigail had agreed to let them all watch a movie before the girls had to go on to bed. The fact that her eldest child was about leave the house at fifteen to head to college out of town might have played into her loosening the rules. She sat just at Sam's side the whole time, which might have been awkward, what with Dora on the other side of him, but then Sam was unashamed to say he would miss his mother, so he _wanted_ to be near her, too.

Anyway, his little sisters were getting in on this, too. Now and again, Eliza would go and squeeze herself between Sam and their mother, leaning against her brother's arm until he'd set it around her shoulders. When she'd get too hot, she'd go back to sit on the ground, but sooner or later she'd return. And then there was Cara, now finding herself on the precipice of being 'the oldest kid in the house' but wanting to hold on to her position as second a little while longer. She achieved this by running through that routine she and Sam had long developed, swapping whatever snack they had in hand every so often. They'd been doing it since they were little, since the days when it was just the two of them.

When the movie was done, the girls had hurried off to bed, not needing to be told twice. They wanted to make the most of the next day. Lucas took Dora upstairs, to get his cousin settled into the guest room, which left Maya to finally have a moment one on one with her brother.

"Hey…" Sam laughed when he got a big hug from his older sister.

"I owed you this one, remember?" she told him, nearly lifting him off the ground… her little Sammy not so little anymore.

Thinking of that ten-year-old boy she'd met back in that school gym… She would go back to that moment more often than she could say, the moment where so much had changed in her life, and in their lives, too. They had started as strangers, which was made eternally more awkward by the fact that they were siblings. But they hadn't grown up together, so all those bonds that came ready made with that time… They had to build it from the ground up. That would have been difficult under any circumstance, but then there was the reason why they hadn't known one another before, and the rift between their father and Maya…

Five years hardly seemed like enough time for all the things that had happened since then, but then they'd lived them and they had all the memories, the joys and the scars to prove it.

"For the house," Sam nodded, remembering this IOU on a hug.

"Yeah, for the house," Maya pulled back to look at him with a smile. "_Our_ house," she specified, her finger looping to point at herself, at him, and vaguely upstairs to where Lucas would be. "And the dogs," she added after a beat. "You're okay about staying with my parents for a little while, yeah? Couple more weeks, that's it," she promised.

"It's fine," Sam told her. "I get it." He had to, now more than ever.

The next day, their one full day in Tucson, was to be Sam's farewell, complete with dinner out with his family, his mother and his siblings, Lucas, Dora, and Abigail's boyfriend James, with his kids, and Granny Lizzie, and Luna and her girls. The last addition had remained an uncertainty up to the very end. After he'd moved to Tucson, Sam had not been overly concerned with making friends, like he knew deep down he wouldn't be sticking around very long. But then Javi had happened, and the two of them had been growing as friends. And the closer the day had come for Sam to head to Austin, he was left to realize that Javier Cabrera might have been his best friend, just as the boy realized the same about him. The imminent separation had led to an argument, and then for a while Sam was left likely to leave Tucson without saying goodbye to one and only friend.

But then they'd all shown up at the restaurant, and there was Javi sitting in wait. He'd dressed for the occasion, even tamed his mass of curly hair into something like a ponytail. It mostly made Eliza giggle, but the intention was what mattered, to Sam especially. He introduced his friend to Maya and Lucas, and to Dora, and when Javi saw her he got this look like 'oh, so that's the girl you've been telling me about.' Sam had given _him_ a look that said 'cool it, man.' Maya had turned to Lucas, the better to hide her laughter.

With another day on the road ahead of them, early the following morning, everyone had done their best to turn in early. Maya suspected this would be easier said than done. She and her siblings absolutely subscribed to the issue where eagerness equalled insomnia. She'd ended up going from one room to the next, spending some time with each of her brothers and sisters until they'd finally go and sleep. By the time she'd gotten back up to the attic, there was little time left for herself.

"How about it, you want to take up the napping on _this_ ride?" Lucas asked with a smirk when the alarm set on his phone had gone and woken them both. Maya grumbled.

"Get off my ship," she pointed imperially, before 're-examining her stance' as one kiss and another was planted at her shoulder. "Alright, I guess you can stay," she finally sighed, pointing as though to say 'keep going.' Lucas was happy to oblige.

Lucas would take the first stretch of the drive, and while Maya was gladly looking forward to catching some sleep in the car, she wouldn't be doing it from the back seat, as Sam and Dora had already taken up that space, leaving her to the front passenger seat, which was just fine by her. Between the open trailer attached to the back of the car, and the trunk, and a bit of the back seat, there would have been no space anyway.

After some lengthy and sometimes repeated farewells, the quartet started on its way back to Texas. Maya had dozed off almost immediately, and Lucas had let her stay that way as they drove on and nearly up to their first stop. With the pair in the backseat locked in conversation as they were, the car was fairly quiet for the majority of those next three hours. That was fine by him. Lucas spent a lot of that time thinking things through in his head, thinking about what he needed to do before the start of his semester in the fall.

For both him and Maya this meant finding and starting work. In his case it was a lot simpler, he knew. As it was back in Houston, his primary focus had to be his studies, but work was also important, if for nothing else then for getting money they would need to get by. They weren't splitting everything seven ways anymore. It was him and Maya alone. Sam wanted to contribute, with whatever work he'd get, though neither Lucas nor Maya was looking to take too much from him. They preferred to let him boost his savings.

For Maya, it was something else, of course. She was done with school, at least the part where she was the student. She didn't have a teaching job yet, which she had sort of expected, her first year out of college, but he knew it would weigh on her mind until that changed. And in the meantime, she was looking to find her first full-time job, temporary basis or no. Finding something that would motivate her, but not so much that she wouldn't mind letting it go when she'd finally get to use her degree… For her, it would be difficult.

"What time is it?" she asked, when she finally woke again.

"Coming on ten," Lucas told her. "We're stopping to eat in a half hour or so," he estimated.

"Oh, good," she resettled in her seat, yawning. Sneaking a quick look in the rear view mirror, she kept her hands low in her lap, so no one in the back could get wise and interpret the signs she made, looking at Lucas. _"How's it going back there?"_

_"Quiet,"_ he replied in the same fashion. _"I think we'll both be in the back when Dora takes her turn to drive."_

_"Fine by me. There are worse things than you and me in the back of a car,"_ Maya declared, making Lucas laugh.

"What is it?" Sam asked from behind.

"Nothing," Maya and Lucas replied at once, which only made them laugh harder.

As expected, Sam had taken the passenger seat up front when Dora took the wheel, and so sister and cousin were relegated to the back. Maya entertained herself by sending texts to her brother in the front, in the spirit of some playful teasing over his clear infatuation with the girl sitting by his side, and watching him try to act natural the whole way.

"Maya…" he muttered when they'd stopped the second time and Dora had gone almost skipping off to get something to eat.

"Yes, Samuel?" she asked, in all innocence. Sam tried to say something in return, but he had nothing, so he gave up, which got him a side hug. "Hey, I have years to make up for on messing with my little brother, cut me some slack?" That got a smile out of him. He couldn't argue with that.

"Fine, then you're on, sis," he stared at her, trying to look 'menacing,' which only made Maya laugh and pinch his cheek.

"You're cute."

For whatever reason, for good or just for assurances that she wouldn't try anything else, when Maya got in the driver's seat for the home stretch, Sam asked if he might sit out front with his sister. She accepted, of course. Nothing would please her more.

That last stretch was the loudest and liveliest, as the radio was cranked up for purposes of singing. Almost on cue, as they rolled into Austin, they were treated with some TXNY. It was the first time Sam had actually heard his sister's music on the radio, and the look of amazement and pride on him… Maya had to pull herself together not to get weepy while she drove.

Even though they weren't moving in for good for a little while longer, their first stop was to the house, where the trailer and the car were unloaded of Sam's belongings. Everything was carried up the stairs, once they'd given him the time to get a look around the place in real life and no longer through a screen.

"There's space for you to store anything you might not have room for up there, and if there's anything you want to put around downstairs, like pictures, games, movies, books, anything, you go for it, yeah?" Maya told him as they finished bringing everything to his green room. It was looking very crowded now, but in time he would unpack and be settled in. "Welcome home, Sammy."

They drove Dora home after this, after a detour for much deserved ice cream. Then it was off to the Hunter Hart house, where the tired travelers were down for the count about as soon as their heads were met with a pillow. They had so much to do in the morning and in the days to come.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	6. Their House of Three

January 6th 2020

_Chapter 6  
Their House of Three_

They took a day off after the drive back from Tucson before going back to the house to start properly unpacking. Lucas had known, just by watching how she worked at it beforehand, that Maya kind of wanted to wait until her brother had arrived to really dive into the boxes. And if he hadn't been sure, then the high energy motivation she now displayed was as good a clue as any. He'd opened his eyes to find her sitting in the bed next to him, sketchpad in her lap, pencil scratching away.

"You're not drawing me sleeping again, are you?" he asked, yawning. Almost without stopping her work, she reached with her other hand to hold up a page lying in front of her. "Huh… Well that's…"

"If you want me to stop, you're going to need to put a damn shirt on when you sleep. I am only a weak human…" This made him snort, and he finally sat up to see what she was doing now.

"I mean, I always kind of love waking up to… inspired artist with bedhead," he declared, setting his chin on her shoulder. "That looks like a floor plan."

"That's because it's a floor plan."

"How do you draw straight lines like that without a ruler?"

"Practice, practice," she smiled. There was her phone next to her, he now saw, with all the measures they had previously taken throughout the house.

"That's the living room," he recognized. Maya nodded. "We need a couch…"

"We need a few other things," she agreed.

"Want to go shopping today?"

"Might as well. We can do a lot of unpacking before anything gets delivered out to the house."

They took off with Sam after breakfast. They didn't tell anyone where they were headed. All it would take would be for any of their parents to hear and then it would turn into some giant endeavor, with opinions they didn't need or want to go and crowd their heads. It would all go much faster if it was just the three of them. Even Sam didn't know that was where they were headed until they'd gotten into the car and driven off from the Hunter Hart house.

"I can get my desk and chair for my room, yeah? Mom gave me a bit to get what I need for my room. "I have to get a bed, too…" He hadn't brought too much in the way of furniture, leaving at least part of his room standing back in Tucson, for when he'd visit.

"Either that or the floor right now," Maya nodded. "I love you, little brother, but I think you're too big to sneak in with us like Wyatt or Eliza." Sam made a noise like 'ha ha, very funny.' Maya turned a smile to Lucas, and he knew what this one meant. She was so very happy to finally have Sam with them.

"So, what's the plan?" Lucas turned to look at the Harts after parking in the mall lot.

"My mom would say to make a list… and a budget," Sam provided.

"Smart woman Abigail," Maya nodded in agreement. She and Lucas had been setting money aside for about a year, with the prospect of moving back to Austin, getting their own place, and providing what would be needed to get everything as they'd want it. That did not have to mean that they'd just blow through the whole of it, especially with how their working situation was still a bit on the 'to be determined' side.

By the time they'd left the car, they knew what points they needed to hit, and they'd gone for a 'divide and conquer' scenario. Even for all that, by the time they were done and sitting in a booth for lunch, it was nearly four hours later and they were spent.

"Do we still need to… with the boxes? I could be okay just sitting and staring at a wall for a while, really, I'm good," Maya hummed. Lucas just lifted his hand as though to say 'your wish, my command,' and she had to smile. "We have to do it anyway, don't we?"

"There's no rule that says we can't unpack sitting down, is there?" Sam offered.

"You know it's that big smart brain of yours that got you in college at fifteen," Maya pointed at him with a nod.

"But first, food," Lucas tapped her arm as he spotted the waiter returning with their order.

"So much food," Sam chimed in.

"All the food," Maya sat back to take in the pizza set before them.

The thing they discovered, upon returning to the house on the lane, was that as exhausted as their shopping excursion had left them, the pull to unpack, to place, to create this space that was to be their home… was stronger. So, they got into it. Sam kind of _had_ to wait, as far as a lot of his room went, what with the lack of most furniture, so he'd joined Maya and Lucas and helped wherever he could.

They had set themselves to those definable tasks they could cross off their list. Up in the attic, they had put the custom desk in its place, now that the walls were good and dry, with days left alone. Dot had set the thing on lockable wheels, making it easier for Maya or anyone to move it to another spot if they so wanted it. Lucas could just imagine her bringing the desk from one side of the attic to the other, as the inspiration would strike. For now, it was set just as he'd imagined, in front of the window looking on to the back of the house, the land beyond, the water in the distance…

"That's so cool," Sam was still mesmerized by the sky light, the window which had been Shawn's idea. Maya came to stand with him, looking up to the blue afternoon sky.

"I know, right?" When he suddenly bolted for the steps out of the attic, she turned to Lucas, wondering as he did where her brother had gone all of a sudden. They could just hear the sound of rummaging somewhere below, like boxes where being moved around, and then Sam was coming back, lugging a large, long case. Lucas moved to help him get it up the ladder and they set it on the ground. "Is that…" Maya just had the time to say before Sam got the case open and she saw it was indeed a telescope.

"Dad gave it to me when I was eleven," he told her, reminded her. He'd told her about it at the time, and she also remembered how he had never used it. Back then, he'd been unsure how to feel about their father, contemplating how he'd left Maya and her mother back in the day. He'd stuffed it in the back of his closet and left it to collect dust.

"I totally forgot you had that," Maya crouched as he popped the case open.

"I did, too, until I started to pack. I don't know why I decided to bring it, maybe just… I didn't want Mom or the others to find it and… get sad, I guess." They were quiet for a beat, until Lucas came and joined them.

"Want to put it together?"

It took a little while. It wasn't a toy by any means. It was kind of beautiful, especially when they'd finished it and it sat there in the middle of the attic, aimed at that window in the gabled roof.

"You know what we need to do?" Maya looked to Lucas and Sam. They turned to her, shaking their heads. "We camp up here, some night when the sky's clear… See what it can do," she set her hand to the telescope. Sam looked at once excited to do just that.

"We can make a stop at the campfire, too," Lucas added, making the entire project even better.

"I know we just had a whole huge pizza not long ago, but now all I can think about is smores," Sam revealed with a nod.

"Well, how could you not," Maya tapped his arm.

They got back to unpacking for a while, deciding that they would have their 'camp in' on their first night being officially moved in, leaving the Hunter Hart house for this house, the Friar Hart house… They set themselves a goal, a target date, and they were going to stick to it.

They called it a day in time to head back and have dinner with Lucas' parents. They had been going there every evening they'd been in town, to balance with their staying with Maya's family. Tonight, they were joined by Pappy Joe and Professor Robinson. Patty was delighted to meet Sam, who had heard of the woman plenty of times, had technically crossed paths with her once or twice before, but never got the chance to speak to her. Now that he did, he could see why his big sister would rave about her.

She was an especially big hit when she discovered that Sam was also an artist and that he had been making comic books on his own for a while. He didn't know what he had expected the woman's reaction to be, but he had especially not expected her to find this a worthy endeavor _or _to go on about how she used to steal all her brother's comics growing up. Both Maya and Lucas had sat there the whole time, finding that her mentor and his grandmother still had plenty for them to learn about, four years on.

By the time they'd gone back to the Hunter Hart house, Sam had spent the rest of the evening bent over his sketchbook, working on a new idea. Looking at him as he sat there, Lucas couldn't help but think how there would be no doubt that he and Maya were related.

"You know, he's barely been here a couple of days and it already feels like he was always around," Maya told Lucas as they were getting ready for bed. The day had been long, and by now there was no denying how deeply they yearned for rest.

"I can see that," Lucas nodded. "_I_ can't wait for us to have everything done, the three of us living up at the house…"

"Yeah," Maya smiled. They were kept in a holding pattern at the moment, having the house but not living in it yet, and that was because of her, and wanting to be here, and that was all fine, it was what she'd wanted and what he'd wanted for her, what they'd both wanted for her, Lucas _and_ Sam. But now, the more they made their impression on the house, made it their own, she knew that the time was coming when they should be there and not here. "Once we're out there, we'll need to get to work on… well…"

"Finding work?" Lucas guessed.

"Yes, that small detail," she smiled. "And then you with school, and _Sam_ with school… And then…" she held up her hand, showing her ring, back on her finger after having spent part of the day on the chain around her neck, with her father's guitar pick, so not to be lost or damaged while working around the house.

"Yes, that big detail," Lucas countered, climbing into bed with her. He started to pull his shirt over his head, then paused for a beat, turning to her.

"Oh, don't you dare," she squinted at him until he grinned and pulled it off. "I can't wait until morning already," she leaned to kiss him before they lay down and turned off the lights.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	7. Their House of Love

**_A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_**

* * *

January 7th 2020

_Chapter 7  
Their House of Love_

One by one, each delivery which brought some of the items they'd bought on that long morning found its place in the house. All the assembly had left the trio feeling like they could turn pro in furniture building, and each of them had two or three scrapes or bruises from an incident or another. But it was all worth it, as the rooms took shape. Sam would disappear off to work on his room whenever they'd arrive, on the assurance from his sister and Lucas that he should absolutely focus on that. He was keeping the door closed the whole time, keeping everything a mystery until he'd be done. Every so often, he would appear with some item or another and ask if he could put it somewhere in the living room, or the kitchen…

"I'd tell him to stop asking for permission, but he'd do it anyway," Maya had told Lucas after the fourth time he'd done so.

"And you worry about him and Dora," Lucas had replied with a shake of the head. "The other night when Dot and Emmett and the kids came over, I swear I watched him contemplate reaching for her hand for a good twenty minutes and he couldn't even do it."

"Oh, I know. He hasn't even worked up the nerve to ask her out yet. He has to know she wants him to do it, right?"

"How long did it take _us_ to speak up?"

"… Right."

As the days dwindled down on their way to their deadline for the camp in and the 'official' move, and as the amount of things they still needed to unpack and put in their place had gotten smaller and smaller, though with a noted exception. Against one wall in their room, Lucas and Maya had left a stack of boxes untouched. They had not been packed and brought from Houston, instead having spent the past four years as boxes in their parents' respective homes. They were the things which, although important enough to hold on to, would have felt superfluous to bring along when they'd left Austin. Truth be told, it had been so long since they had even made those boxes that they didn't remember what was in them, not specifically. They hadn't started on those for that very reason.

But now… Now there was little else for them to do. They were done. What boxes remained were things they had relegated to storage in the basement… and the Austin overflow boxes up in their room.

Before they could get to that, Sam had summoned them to come and check out his completed room. It was still very reminiscent of his room back in Tucson on the whole, though there was a sort of distinct feel to it that said 'I'm in college now, I have to be a bit more serious.' It wasn't as though he had been all wild and unruly before, of course, the kid had been focused and responsible his whole life. Maybe this was just his best interpretation of being a fifteen-year-old college freshman. It suited him.

"Photo door?" Maya smiled, pointing to his closet door. At the top, he'd set the couple of pictures he'd asked for her to print. The first showed everyone at the restaurant, the night before he'd left Tucson, his family, the Lanes, Javi, and Dora. There was another shot, a selfie from the back of the car when Dora had gotten hold of Maya's camera. Dora had that zen little smile of hers; Sam looked like he was discovering new heights in smiling. The third and last image – so far – was of the three of them, standing in front of the house, half a second away from losing control of their serious faces.

"Yeah," Sam nodded.

"Be careful, she's going to want to do the whole 'first day of school' shoot with you," Lucas teased, knowing he wasn't giving Maya any ideas she hadn't already had.

Sam was off to the movies with Dora and Alex that evening, so once he was gone Lucas and Maya had decided to make a night of tackling those boxes up in their room.

"Here," Lucas came back with the bag just delivered and carrying their dinner. Maya was already sitting on the ground, with her first box before herself. It was open just a crack and gave the impression of a kid at Christmas, waiting for the rest of the family to show up so they could open their presents already.

"I'm shaking my head at four-years-ago Maya. The girl did _not_ think ahead when she made these boxes," Maya waved her hand at her stack of boxes, which just had her name on each. "_Yours_ at least sort of say what's inside."

"Maybe she wanted to make this into a surprise for… four-years-later Maya," Lucas suggested.

"Well, I am definitely going to be surprised, because I don't have a single clue," she sighed, drumming her fingers on the box in front of her. Lucas offered the container with her dinner and her expression perked up. "This helps."

"Page one of the Maya Handbook: Fed Maya equals Happy Maya," he 'recited,' sitting across from her. She laughed.

"Yes, it does."

Lucas' first box was marked 'sports, awards,' and that was just what was inside. The photo album had once been just pictures, but in the process of his packing, his mother had insisted that they needed to be preserved. She had bought the album and begged for him to let her take care of it, so of course he'd let her. She had organized everything in chronological order, also including details he couldn't have remembered. She had _not_ gotten her hands on the worn old box where he had stored his medals and trophies, not the little ones anyway. The others, those were on full and permanent display back at his parents' house and there they would remain so long as Melinda Friar drew breath, so she could show her guests and tell them about how talented her Luke was.

Maya's first box, like all her other boxes, may not have been identified, and she may have claimed she didn't remember what was inside them, but once she opened it… All she needed to see was the stuff on top and suddenly it was like a slingshot had tugged her back to the summer of 2021. It had made her gasp with that predicted surprise, and Lucas had looked up.

"What is it?" he asked.

"School stuff, most of it," she reached in and pulled out a thick folder full of papers. Flipping through those, they could both see various old tests and reports and assignments, a splash of corrections and marks in various colors and handwritings on them all. "I was so proud of these, I kept them… probably much longer than I ever needed to." She set them aside, knowing that if she started looking at each one she would end up in a hole she wouldn't escape and she'd get nothing done.

Underneath the folder, she found a tin box that made her smile before she set it behind herself on the ground. At Lucas' look, she told him she would show him later.

"Basket Cases!" she picked up an old cardboard box she'd salvaged from Mr. Matthews' office one day. Inside, she'd put every little thing she thought to keep of her days with the quiz team.

The sorting of the boxes took enough time that, by the time Sam called to say that he was back at the Hunter Hart house, they were still at it. They were so close to being done though, so they'd kept at it until the end. The whole time, Maya had never so much as looked at the tin box, and when they'd picked up everything to either be put on a shelf, or in a drawer, or wherever it might go – sometimes back in their boxes and down to the basement with the rest – she'd taken it and stuck it in her bag.

"I don't get to see?" Lucas asked.

"Not yet," she grinned.

"You're loving this, aren't you?" he smiled.

"Oh, so much."

Before they knew it, their camp in day had arrived. The forecast, as hoped, was for a clear sky that would enable a great view of the stars. The part that involved 'moving' wasn't so hard. They'd packed up everything that had become spread across the Hunter Hart house over their stay there the last few weeks, and after the girls and MJ had been put to bed, they'd said good night to Katy and Shawn, they'd gotten in the car, and they'd gone home.

It was just as they'd left it the last time they'd been here, a couple days before, but somehow the fact that they were here to stay made the whole thing feel different, more weighted.

"Small detail, but we should probably go to the grocery store tomorrow morning," Maya looked to Lucas as they stood in the living room. "All we've got is everything we need for smores. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed, but we're supposed to set an example for the kid here, no?" she tugged her brother close.

"I've got an apple in my bag…" Sam informed her.

"Of course, you do," she tapped his chest with a proud/unsurprised sigh.

After dropping off their bags, they'd grabbed their bag of smores stuff, some blankets, and everything needed to get a fire going, and they made their way to the campfire site. When the fire came to life, Lucas moved to sit next to Maya and leaned to whisper something at her ear. She snorted, failing to keep her reaction hidden. Sam looked at them.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing," Maya promised him. "Trust me, you don't want to know." Whatever her brother decided this meant, he didn't argue. What Lucas _had_ said was that, just now, Sam really gave off this vibe like he'd been raised far away from here, which he had, of course. She'd had some of it herself, when she'd first moved to Texas, though she and Sam had absolutely had different upbringings, leaving them with different 'New York vibes.'

"First time I remember coming out here, I had to be… three or four years old," Lucas told Maya and Sam as they held their marshmallows to the flames once speared. "It was me and my dad and my grandparents," he recalled. "My grandmother kept me on her knees the whole time, kept saying not to get too close to the fire. Then Pappy Joe said he knew how to make sure I wouldn't move, and he told me a story, about the ghosts in the woods. They would come out at night, and the only way to keep them from coming after you was to keep the fire going, because they didn't like it. And if I touched anything, well then a ghost might come and go in me and get away with my soul."

Maya had heard the tale, years ago, but it didn't stop her laughing right along with her brother.

"How long did it take you to stop believing that?" Sam asked.

"Longer than you'd think," Lucas admitted.

They had somewhere just shy of too many smores before they'd packed it in, putting out the campfire and returning to the house. There, they got changed, and they made their way up to the attic. Everything was already set for them to spend the night 'under the stars.' Maya nodded for Sam to go ahead and look through the telescope's view. It had been his gift, so it was only fair that he got to use it first.

Even after they'd all had a turn, and a few more returns, even as they started to turn in for the night, Maya could see her younger brother resting in his sleeping bag and still looking through the window above, to the night sky and its stars. He looked as though he'd sunk deep in his thoughts, and she'd be willing to bet she knew where he'd landed, who he was thinking about after their time with the telescope.

"I'll go check on the dogs," Lucas told Maya. It was _their_ first night here, too.

"I'll come with," she moved to join him.

It wasn't until he'd made it down the stairs and into the living room that he realized Maya hadn't followed directly. She'd gone off somewhere after coming down from the attic. When she reappeared again, she had the tin box in her hand.

Trix and Lou had perked up at once as Lucas had come down. They might have been asleep, curled up near the front door, there was no way of telling. Now that their people were there, they walked on over.

"No running, okay?" he told them, touching their backs before opening the door. They moved on to the porch, sitting on their hind legs without a fuss. Lucas sat on the front step next to Trix, who lay down over his legs and stared up at him. He shook his head, smiling as he ran his hand along her back. Maya came and sat next to him. "Hey."

"Hey," she bumped his shoulder, looking up to the sky for a moment, enjoying the quiet all around them. "I was so shocked at how quiet it was at night here, when we came from New York, but this is just something else."

"Yeah," he agreed. One look at her made it clear that she very much enjoyed this next level quiet. "Do I get to see what's in there now?" Lucas asked, nodding to the box.

"Curious, curious," Maya nodded. When she popped the cover up, it swung on its hinges, revealing, at first glance, a bunch of little bits of paper, bunched in packs with paper clips. It took him a moment, and the connection that 'hey, that's my handwriting,' to figure out what they were. The top was covered in packs of small notes, passed to her from him, sometimes passed back and forth, with new responses scribbled in.

"Wow…" was all he could say. Sometimes he just missed those times, him and her, one behind the other in class…

Under the notes, there were odd little trinkets, the kinds of things that wouldn't have meant much to anyone except the one who kept them. Some ticket stubs, a couple coasters, dried petals in a small bottle, a couple of paper umbrellas… At the very bottom, there were pictures, inside a flyer he recognized from their senior prom. Some were clearly from her camera, others from a photo booth…

"I was going to bring it to Houston with us, but then I didn't want to risk it, so I stuck it in the boxes to stay. I think I almost came back for it a couple dozen times over the last four years."

And now they were home, him and her. And the box never had to be left behind ever again.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	8. Their Year to Grow

January 8th 2020

_Chapter 8  
Their Year to Grow_

For near as long as they had known each other, Maya had told Sam about the party, every summer with the Babineaux family. The way she'd go on about it, this party must have been right up there with Halloween for the musts of the year, every year. And now, for the first time, he would get to see it for himself. Maya and Lucas both had known the family long enough that they didn't even concern themselves with calling anyone and asking if it would be alright for them to bring someone. Over the years, the guest list had seen more and more of Zay's friends get added to it, and some of those friends, like the two of them, had graduated far enough that they had this privilege as well. They were family.

And if anyone could sniff out 'new blood' on the premises, it was GiGi Babineaux. They couldn't have been through the door more than two minutes, after introducing Sam to Zay's aunt and uncle, before they heard the sound of a motor coming along. A moment later, there was the woman of a hundred and some years, Zay's great grandmother, in her chair. She had resisted it for about as long as could be expected, but finally there had been no way around it.

"A throne for a queen," Zay had declared, the first time she'd come along like this. She'd chastised him for it, but from that point on she seemed much more at ease in her new mode of mobility.

"Can't mistake that face," she declared upon seeing Sam. "You'll be Maya's little brother."

"He stopped being little a couple inches ago," Maya looked up – _looked up_ – to meet her brother's eye. Stature only went so far, a lot of the time, but when he could set aside his quiet demeanor, he embodied that height to its fullest extent. "This is Sam," she made the introduction before turning to her brother once again. "And this is the woman, the myth, the legend, miss Geraldine Babineaux, or as you've heard her mentioned… GiGi." It made the old woman smile that bright smile she'd passed on down to her grandson as she held out her hand to Sam. He moved to shake it at once.

"It's very nice to meet you," Sam told her. "Maya made your cookies for me, after we moved into the house."

"She didn't show you the recipe, did she?" Gigi asked, they knew, without any real scrutiny. She didn't have to worry about her 'recipe keepers' breaking that trust.

"No," Sam shook his head, and there was a sort of unspoken weight to this statement which made GiGi squint at him a bit like he might have more to say. It took some of those inches off of him until he explained. "It's just my mom and I would do this thing when I was growing up, where she'd help me identify ingredients in whatever I ate," he revealed. "I got pretty good at it."

There was a beat of silence, after which GiGi excused herself and requested for Sam to follow her. He looked like he wasn't sure he'd ever be seen again as he turned to his sister. Maya just bit back a laugh and motioned for him to go.

"What do you want to do with his room?" Lucas asked, just loud enough that it made Sam spin around even as he still followed GiGi, and now Maya let that laugh out.

Once Lucas and Maya and Sam had properly moved into the house, the summer felt as though it started rolling faster. Suddenly, weeks had gone by, and the three of them – five when they counted the dogs, of course – had developed into a routine of life of their own. They were getting to know the neighbors more and more, which almost felt like a necessity, living out on their lane, the houses spread out as they were. They had 'their' stores, 'their' restaurants… Most importantly, always, they were no more than twenty or so minutes away from his parents' house or hers, which made visits much more of a thing.

The previous week, Abigail and James and the kids had come down from Tucson to visit, to see Sam and Maya and Lucas and to see the house for themselves. It was sort of striking – in a good way – how much James, and Teddy and Emma, had really just become part of the unit that was their family. The older of the kids especially had needed more time to adjust, starting off as only seeing James to be standing in the place that had once been their father's, or Abigail in the place of the late Mrs. Lane, too. But that time had passed, and the Lanes being part of the group visiting in Austin made perfect sense. Where else would they be?

It had felt good to have them all here, to Sam most of all, of course. Being away from the rest of his family was a lot for him to take. The rest of them had been eighteen at the least when they'd left home, and as hard as that had been, they couldn't imagine doing the same at fifteen. They'd all agreed they would see each other again over the winter break and the holidays.

"Look, look," Lucas tapped Maya's arm as the two of them made their way out into the yard. When she turned, she saw what he'd seen, or _who_ he'd seen, helping to get the barbecue started. She gasped, taking off at a half run until she came at a stop behind the tall, dark-skinned girl, swiftly signing to her boyfriend, crouched but looking back at her. _He_ saw Maya first, and his reaction made his girlfriend turn around.

_"Maya!"_ Kayla's face was a ray of summer sunshine as she caught her friend and bandmate in a tight hug. When they finally pulled back, after Will had gotten up to get his own reunion in, Maya was the one to send her hands into motion.

_"When did you guys get back? I didn't think you would make it today!"_

_"We got an early flight, and we wanted to surprise everyone!"_ Kayla explained with matching giddiness.

_"Wait until Rosa gets here. She's going to be all over you about band practice,"_ Maya laughed.

_"Let her, I can't wait to start either!"_ When Lucas came to join them, the hugs and the greetings started all over again. _"Is your brother here?"_ Kayla turned to Maya.

_"GiGi got a hold of him, no idea where he is now or if we'll ever get him back," _Maya informed her with a smirk.

When Kayla and Will were beckoned to the barbecue again, Lucas and Maya moved off along the yard, greeting various Babineaux family members and guests. Most of them they only ever saw here, but whenever they did so it was as though no time had passed from the previous year's party to the other, except that they'd be a year older, whether or not it showed. This year, of course, the news that the two of them were now back living in Austin _and_ most importantly that they were engaged to be married was big news. They lost count of how many times Maya was asked to show her ring, or how many times the two of them had to recount the tale of the proposal. Then there was the last big question: _when_ were they getting married, what was the date? Each time, all they could saw was that they hadn't decided yet.

"Would have been easier if we'd just gone on the stage to make a speech…" Maya huffed as they 'hid' under their favorite tree for a couple minutes. Lucas raised his arm in the international signal for 'rest your head right here,' which Maya was more than happy to do.

"When we're ready to figure out the when and the how and the what, we will tell them, and that'll be that," Lucas promised. "We don't need to rush into anything for their sake."

"I know, I do," she breathed, turning her head up to look at him with a smile. "For the record, my issue here is only with the quick succession of repeats. Take that away and I'm always happy to tell the story." This made him smile, and he leaned in to kiss her.

"You and me both."

They were still under the tree when Sam reappeared. He was scanning the yard, clearly looking for them. Lucas raised his free arm to signal him and he came dashing over.

"He lives!" Maya intoned, reaching out to him. He crouched and then sat on the grass with them. "Were you sworn to secrecy or can you say what happened in there?"

"No, well, she just sort of… quizzed me. She wanted to see if I could really say what was in her cookies."

"Could you?" Lucas asked. Maya raised a finger, and he caught it, bringing it back down. "I know he can't tell me what they are."

"Just making sure. Big secrets, you know?"

"I got most of them. I thought I had them all, but then I stopped and she had this look, I'm pretty sure I missed one," Sam told them. At this, Maya scooted forward and asked him to whisper them in her ear. Lucas gave a silent look of protest at this, mostly for effect. Maya listened with a smile as Sam listed off the ingredients once again. After he was done, she sat back on the ground, keeping a straight face as her brother stared expectantly at her.

"Oh, I'm not telling," she shook her head.

"Not even if I actually missed one or not?" Sam begged.

"What would be the fun in that?" she shrugged before turning to Lucas. "Want to go in the pool?" she nearly dragged him to his feet, leaving her little brother to sit and contemplate what he might or might not have missed.

"Are you going to go up there today?" Lucas asked, shortly thereafter, as he and Maya floated about. He was pointing over to the 'stage' in the corner of the yard, where previous years had often seen an appearance by TXNY, in the very spot which had seen the band's inception.

"No," Maya sighed. "We still need to figure out where we stand now, with Willow out and Nadine back in, still working on that new instrument situation… And Kayla just got back, so it's not like we all had something planned… And if we go up there, Rosa will want to talk about practice, and I really just want to enjoy today for today, with you and me, and Sam, and everyone, you know?"

"I do," he nodded. "I'm kind of glad we get to just be like this," he admitted.

"Right?" she smiled, lightly splashing him.

"Hey!" Lucas laughed. "Anyway, before we know it the fall semester's going to be starting, for me, and Sam, and Rosa, and Dylan…"

"Just take me with you?" she asked at once. "I'll take studying and assignments and all-nighters over The Nothing I have right now."

"You'll find something," Lucas promised. While his search for a job had eventually yielded a position at a local bookstore and a potential opening at a vet clinic, which left him in a similar position as he'd been back in Houston, Maya was still looking. "In the meantime, your mom did say…"

"I know, and if all else fails, I'll take it, I would just like to get a job on my own merits and not because my mother practically runs the theater now."

"You will," Lucas nodded. He just had that whole unwavering faith thing going, and it was impossible not to smile, and nod, and say that he was right. _I really hope you are…_

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	9. Their Year to Start

January 9th 2020

_Chapter 9  
Their Year to Start_

Maya had it all planned. She was going to surprise Sam and get his first day of school started as memorably as any big sister could. It wasn't as though she'd had any chance to do so up to now.

"Hey, no, come on, where are you going?" Lucas had tugged her back down when she'd moved to get up, making her laugh.

"Bathroom?" she tried for innocence, turning her head around to look at him. He gave her a look of his own, which came off a lot like 'nice try.' "I'm just being nice…" she tried again, with that same little smile.

"I've seen you be 'nice' like that when we'd be having sleepovers at your house," he argued, and she raised her finger to defend herself before he cut her off. "Just don't do anything that leaves a mark?"

"I can't help how Dylan is so accident prone," Maya shook her head, knowing exactly which incident he was referencing.

When Lucas finally sighed and opened his arms out to let her go, Maya grinned, leaned in to kiss him, and dashed off out of their room and down the hall to Sam's door. It was open, and as she looked into the room she found no Sam but a made bed. She frowned, her surprise busted, before making her way down the stairs and into the kitchen…

"Morning," Sam smiled at her, standing at the stove. There was an audience of two nearby, Trix and Lou standing in wait in case any bit of food should tragically fall to the ground near them or be passed to them by a kind hand. Lucas came down a moment later, finding his bride to be was still grumbling just a bit at being 'foiled' by her little brother.

"Look, he's making breakfast," Lucas just gave her a big smile, earning himself a squint. "Thanks, Sam," he turned back to the boy, who nodded and smiled. "I can take over, it's _your_ big day…"

"That's okay," Sam told him. "I'm almost done. Coffee's ready," he pointed to the machine with his spatula. Maya walked into the kitchen proper, dragged her feet just a bit. But then she had come to join her brother, and she wrapped her arms around him, pressing a kiss to his cheek.

"First day today," she smiled at him. "How are you feeling?"

"Changes every minute or two," Sam shrugged.

They could understand that well enough, without any sort of explanation. He had always loved school, and the results spoke for themselves. But for years already he had been 'the kid' in all his classes. It had been a rough transition for him at first, but after that he's stopped being 'the kid' and just been Sam Hart. They'd all grown together, through one grade and another, so his being younger had stopped being a factor. Then he and his family had moved to Tucson his senior year, which could have been a bigger deal than it had turned out to be. With everything that was happening back at home, with his sisters and his brother and his mother dealing with the loss of Kermit, he didn't have time to bother with what people did or didn't think about him.

But now everything was different. No more dark clouds, but also… no more people he knew anywhere, at least at school. Alright, technically speaking he'd have both Dylan and Rosa who, like him, would be starting today, and they'd all be going to the same school, but it was unlikely their paths would be brought to cross all that often on the whole. So he'd be the stranger fifteen-year-old kid among countless 'eighteen and overs.' It was bringing back undesirable flashbacks, but now expanded into this college setting.

"Okay, well, if you ask me, I'm going to be forced to play the big sister card and say they'd be fools not to want to be friends with The Sam Hart. But that's just me," Maya pressed a hand to her heart. "So, let's see what the cowboy has to say," she turned them both toward Lucas. "Don't worry, he's really good at this, watch," she 'whispered.' Lucas bit back a smile before looking to Sam.

"Look, you're just going to have to give it a chance. Go out there, see who's out there in your classes… First day I started back in Houston, I met Bishop, and he's one of my best friends to this day. And _she_ met Franny and Kayla," he nodded to Maya, who gave a firm nod like 'yes, my girls.' "Not saying you'll make close friends today…" Lucas went on, getting a frown from Maya. "_But_ that doesn't mean it won't happen. You just have to let it happen. If they're worth your time, they won't make you do anything you're uncomfortable about." Maya's frown dipped out into approval once again before rising into a realization like she hadn't even considered how badly things could go if they weren't careful.

"See, he's an ace at the speeches," she nodded to her brother, tapping his shoulder. "Okay, let's eat before it's cold or… Hey, hey, Trix, come on, off!"

Soon they would be getting in the car and making their way out into town, picking up Dylan and Rosa from their apartment. They arrived to find, to no one's surprise, an emotional Riley, proud to see them both off to their first days. Rosa looked like she didn't know whether to humor her or to really give in, while Dylan was absolutely getting in on the moment with his girlfriend, who finally remembered she was working later that morning and she needed to get ready.

The backseat now held a trio of starters, and Dylan and Rosa both joined Sam with a look about them like they knew what this day must have felt like for him and they wanted to ensure he'd be fine, like his on-site guardian angels. By the time they were pulling up to the school, he _did_ look a bit more secure in himself, which was reassuring to the pair in the front. Maya resisted the urge to go with him, and instead she stayed in the car with Lucas, watching this new trio march off together.

"Is this what having kids is going to feel like? Watching them go off on their own?" Maya sighed, turning to look to Lucas. He sort of had his own wistful-like look, and though he tried to brush it off it did kind of make her feel better.

"Maybe… probably…" he finally told her.

"Yeah, okay, just checking," she nodded before smiling at him. He smiled back. After that spoken/unspoken false alarm earlier that summer, they'd been left with a whole other sort of aftermath. Whereas the last time, three years ago, they'd been blindsided for how deeply affected they'd been by that negative answer, this time it hadn't felt like that. It just hadn't been the time, and that was alright. All it really did was to reaffirm their convictions for what they saw in their future.

"So, what are you up to today?" Lucas asked as they drove off. He wasn't starting school until the next day, but then today, on what would be a class-less day for him this semester, he would be working at his new job, at the bookstore.

Rosa called it 'the competition,' and Maya called it 'the new bookstore' even though it had existed for decades. Coleman's, back in Houston, was big enough, for being what some might call a 'small' bookstore, but now Lucas would be working for a chain store, and it showed. It was a completely different set up, different vibe. He didn't dislike it, far from, but if he was honest, Lucas would confirm that deep down he missed working with Tracy, and Rosa, and Pete, and the others back in Houston.

"I… could browse your shelves all day…" Maya suggested. "That store just has _so_ many books, you know? And _sketchbooks_, pretty good ones, too. _Or…_ probably just going to keep seeing about anywhere that might be hiring. Not _any_… where, but just… I don't know," she sighed. It was hard for her not to feel her spirits sink just a bit. Even after a decade, her mind knew the path back down those old roads and could navigate with its eyes closed.

"You know what I said to Sam back at the house?" Lucas nudged her leg.

"I know, I know, but it's not the same, is it? I actually _have_ to go up to them and say some variation of 'please like me… and also give me money in exchange for services. Maybe I should have taken the record deal…"

"You didn't want to do that," he reminded her. "Did you really change your mind, or…"

"No, no," she shook her head in honesty. "But it would have made some things a lot easier right now, wouldn't it?" He didn't need to reply, and she wouldn't have wanted him to anyway. "I'll probably go and hang out with my dad and Haley for a while, then I'll see."

He didn't like the thought of leaving her like this. He couldn't fix everything, he knew that. Some things, like this one, Maya just really needed to fix on her own. But it was just in him to want to see her be happy again and to help her get there. It was a quality which had contributed in earning him the nickname of Huckleberry, and he was happy to carry it, for that very reason.

"If you're able to come around that time, I could do with a lunch buddy," he offered when he got out of the car and she moved from the passenger to the driver's seat.

"What about your new work buddies?" she asked, leaning to the open window and looking up at him.

"They're not nearly as cute as you," he replied, and that made her laugh.

"Real smooth there, Huckleberry."

"I've had practice," he told her, leaning down to kiss her.

"Have a good day at work, sell lots of books."

"That's the idea, yeah."

Just as she was driving up to her parents' house, Maya's phone rang and she looked to find it was Abigail back in Tucson, calling over Skype. She smiled as she answered, holding her phone before herself.

"Morning," she waved to her stepmother. She'd pretty much expected this call sooner or later today. She may have been far from him geographically, but this was still Abigail's firstborn going to his first day at college, and she'd want to know how it was going. She also wouldn't want to air out her more fretful mother side and have it make Sam feel awkward. So, Maya was a natural backup option. "Sam was up before both Lucas and me this morning. He made us breakfast," she reported, which made Abigail chuckle.

"That sounds like him," she nodded.

"He was nervous about being 'the kid' and not knowing anyone," Maya continued, and by Abigail's nod it was clear she'd expected as much here. "Lucas did his whole pep talk thing, it seemed to help. We'll know tonight, I guess." She _had_ envisioned him calling her and insisting she come pick him up, but that was more _her _big sister muscles flexing than anything she actually expected Sam to do. He would be fine. She had to believe that, and Abigail, too.

"Alright, well… keep me posted then."

After they hung up, Maya took a moment or two to just shove her concerns over her job – or lack thereof – into a corner where they wouldn't bother anyone, before getting out of the car and going up to the house to find her father and her baby sister and see what they were up to this morning.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	10. Their Year to Search

January 10th 2020

_Chapter 10  
Their Year to Search_

It had been easy up to now not to get overly caught up in any of this for too long. Even after Lucas had started working at the bookstore a couple weeks back, Sam would be with her, they'd be having a blast, getting him acclimated to the city, prepared to start his first semester of college… But now, today, Lucas was at work, Sam was at school, and she was left to herself, to her thoughts… Truth be told, the reason she had gone to see her father and sister after dropping off Lucas at work was that, if she went back to the house on her own, she wouldn't get anywhere. She'd just be going around in circles, contemplating that big question, wondering how long it would take for her to put her studies to use, to actually be a teacher.

She knew these things took time for a lot of people, that it was normal. She'd been lucky with Houston, with Isabel and the restaurant. She'd had Asher and his uncle out here, they'd put her in touch with the chef, and then… she was in. Four years working in that dining room… If not for the distance, she would never have quit that job, but she really had no choice.

Before they'd left for college, she had her work at the diner, that was good, too, but she wasn't looking to go back. Much as she had no doubt she'd have a shot, she knew there were kids in high school, or in college, who'd find a great experience of their own out there, and they should have it. Sam was one of them. He'd been hired on and started working, before Lucas had even started at the bookstore. They hadn't even helped him. He'd worked it out all his own, had his interview and then he'd come home with a job.

"You told me about when you were working there, so I went and asked if they were hiring. When I told them my name, he took one look at me and he knew you were my sister," Sam had explained with a proud smile.

So, the diner was out for her, and her mother's theater. She'd had two jobs in her life, both of them, she didn't deny, in great part thanks to her connection to Asher. From here on out, she kind of needed to make things happen for herself, on her own merits and her achievements.

_Like the band…_

Soon as she'd started thinking about the contract offer, what they'd turned down, it just kept bugging her, like… like every so often she could feel the tips of her fingers tingling, the ghost feeling of guitar chords, a melody just out of earshot, and that feeling in her heart when she'd be on stage. It was like nothing else…

The band wasn't gone, they would keep playing, and she'd feel that rush again, and again… She knew that, just like she knew that they'd made the right call to turn down the offer, for herself and what she wanted from her life, same as the others did. But now she had this thing that was messing with her head, she could only doubt, and wonder. Should she have thought about it longer before saying no? She could have made something she was proud to have followed through.

Her phone chirped and she picked it up to find a message waiting.

_Shawn: You going to stay out there all day or do you want to come and say hi?_

Maya blinked, looking up to find her father watching from the window, Haley perched in his arm, looking out at the world with the curiosity of a one-year-old. So, she got out of the car and jogged up to the door, using her key to let herself in. Shawn was just on the other side, mid reach for the handle.

"Oh, so you do remember how to get in here," he teased.

"Getting back to me, yeah," she squinted at him before turning to her sister, who had gotten very giddy at the sight of her. "Hey, you!" she beamed, reaching out for the youngest Hunter and pulling her into her arms. If she could stay like this, with her 4H Haley burrowing her curly head at her shoulder with happy little squeals…

"Got Sam off to school?" Shawn asked, taking this opportunity to see to the burst of toys across the living room floor. Between the twins, MJ, and even Haley, he would call it the 'morning tornado,' the time between the kids' waking up and their departure for school, and pre-school, after which there'd be this layer of objects spread across the floors both upstairs and downstairs. To see him going around, crouching and rising over and over again, his arms getting more and more loaded, you would think Shawn Hunter saw this as his favorite pastime.

"Yeah," Maya told him, all the while keeping eye contact with her sister, doing a light sort of dance with her.

"Did you give him the first day of school treatment?" her father asked.

"What's that tone there, _Pops_?" she turned to him with a raised eyebrow.

"Oh, you know, your mom told me about _your_ first day of school, and how _that_ went…" When she just kept looking at him, her face bent into an expression of confusion, he blinked. "You don't remember?"

"Well, my father had just left us not long before, so, you know, it was a weird time," she admitted, hugging Haley a little closer. The girl was curled to her now, looking like she'd fall asleep if they stayed this way. "What'd she tell you?"

"That you didn't want to go," Shawn chuckled.

"Yeah, sounds about right," Maya conceded.

"Do you remember why?" he asked. She didn't. "He promised he'd take you?" he carefully reminded her. It came back to her at once, not all of it, but… yeah… There'd been a time where she _had_ been looking forward to the start of school, more so when her father had laid out that first morning to her and made it sound like it would be even greater than her wildest expectation. But then he'd left, and after that… Well, it came down to Katy to fix it, and she was fighting an uphill battle, a very steep one.

"You're going to feel like a million million bucks…" she spoke, recited, the words seeming to fall out from the space Shawn had opened in her memories. He nodded at this. Those were the words her mother had told her, words she'd repeated to him in sharing the story. "She got me ready that morning, and… the dress was new… the shoes… I wore those until I outgrew them, maybe longer… Loved those shoes… She did my hair, two braids," she pointed to either side of her head.

"It still wasn't enough," Shawn told her, like he could sense the memory train was meeting trouble to go forward.

"I thought it meant he was coming back, that she was doing all that to get me ready for when he showed up, but… he wasn't going to come, it… it was just me and her." She looked back to Shawn, bowed her head. "Yeah…" Apparently, all these years her mother had never understood what was behind her monster of a tantrum.

She'd gone back to her room, tried to barricade herself in by stacking anything and everything she could lift or pull into place in front of the door, and then at one point she'd turned around and there was her mother, standing in her room. Maya had been sure, just for a moment, that her mother had to be a witch, or an alien, because how else could she have found her way… And then she'd seen the open window. She had gone out to the fire escape and climbed in.

"She said _she_ would take me to school. And she was going to stay out there as long as I needed her to, so I told her I wanted her to stay all day. So, she did that. All I had to do was go and look out the window and there she'd be. Every time, she'd try and make me laugh. She's very dramatic, you know?"

"Who, Katy?" Shawn looked 'shocked.'

"I think if she had a trunk of costumes she couldn't have been funnier. Sometimes she's actually such a natural at it…" Maya smiled. "She make you laugh, too, Hales?" Haley giggled. "Runs in the family," Maya gave her little sister's cheek a smooch and received a thin-armed hug around her head for it. "Ooh, okay, okay…" she laughed.

After a while, she'd gotten the girl to go to sleep for real, and she'd taken her up to her room, sitting by her crib, watching her sleep. Her siblings had no idea how much they had changed her, all of them, and how much she cherished that change, every day. And her parents… There were no words for all they'd done for her. Was that why she didn't want to tell them about her worries, the job thing? She didn't want to let them down.

She'd stayed at the house a while longer, had lunch with both her parents, as her mother came home from work to eat, and then she'd gotten back in the car and made her way to the university.

When Sam came out from his third and last class of the day, he found he had a visitor waiting for him, with iced coffee and cupcakes. He was surprised, but also thrilled to see her.

"Alright, I couldn't wait any longer," Maya declared, holding up the cup to him. "Am I the creepy sister now?"

"No," Sam laughed as she got up and they walked along.

"So, come on, how was it?"

"Good, I think."

"You think?"

"We didn't really do anything yet," Sam pointed out. Maya nodded. She remembered those first days, too. "One of my professors kept looking at me, like she either wanted to make sure I got by okay or she was surprised by me being there. And then there's one who didn't show up today, but his assistant told us about the syllabus and all that."

"Wow," Maya shook her head.

"Yeah. But the third one, she was my favorite so far." Now she needed to hear this. Sam told her about that class, which had been the one he'd just come from.

He didn't mention whether he'd talked much to any of his classmates, and Maya didn't ask if he did. It didn't have to happen just like that, and she wasn't going to make him think that it did and that he was doing it wrong if he didn't already have a whole group of friends on his heels… It wasn't lost on her that, if some words were substituted here, in this thought, then she might have benefited from taking her own advice for herself.

"You want to eat somewhere out here tonight?" Maya asked Sam as they got into the car. "Chubbie's maybe? Maybe Dora would like to join us…" she trailed off innocently. He may not have had any friends at school yet, but he had Dora, and she was worth ten of any one of them, a hundred even. _A million million…_

"Yeah," Sam hid his smile in a sip from his straw. "Can we go spy on Lucas at the bookstore?"

"Oh! Yes, yes we _can_ do that," she tapped his arm like she'd never been so proud to call him her brother. "Let's see if we can stump the great bookseller…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	11. Their Year to Drive

January 11th 2020

_Chapter 11  
Their Year to Drive_

"Are you holding on to me like that in case I do anything to mark _your_ first day, Dockleberry? I'm not complaining, don't get me wrong. If that's what it takes, I can have surprises lined up every day…"

Lucas smiled, pressing one and two and three kisses to Maya's shoulder before she turned about to face him and she returned the favor in bringing some kisses of her own to his lips. The house was so much more quiet in the morning than anywhere else they'd lived, it seemed. To Maya especially, he knew, compared to her mornings back in New York… It wasn't just about sound, it was… a spirit of stillness in the air… Waking up to that, and to one another, always got to feel like they'd found a private island all to themselves… plus one brother and two dogs, but still.

"If we keep this up… I'm going to be late… on my first day…" he pointed out.

"I'll write you a note," she smiled with mischief in her eyes. "Dear Principal…"

"Don't have a principal…"

"Please excuse Lucas Friar's tardiness this morning, for reasons of…"

"Pretty sure that'll get me expelled…"

After relinquishing any possibility of getting him 'in trouble' with his new school, they had gone downstairs. Once again, Sam was proving himself a challenger to Maya's Early Bird trophy. There he was, in the kitchen, making their breakfast, passing bits of this and that to the thankful dogs…

"It's going to make it so much harder for me to surprise you at school, but don't think I won't find a way," Maya told Lucas as she saw him off to the car, stopping on the porch.

"Don't doubt it one second," Lucas laughed.

"Yeah, well, you come right home when you're done," she 'pleaded.'

"Or you'll come and get me?" he teased, as though to suggest maybe he'd do just that.

"Go on, try me, Friar," she pointed at him, then smiled, holding up her hand in a genuine send off. _I love you, have a great day…_

They were looking into getting a second car. Especially now, with him taking the one they had to get to school, it left Maya and Sam both to the mercy of a bus with few passages and spotty ones at that. He'd considered leaving the car to them, leaving _him_ to the public transport option, but then Maya had shut this down, rightly pointing out that he had the most distance to travel and needed the reliability of something that wasn't a poorly followed schedule.

As he drove up and out of their lane, he thought about his fiancée. He wasn't blind, to her feelings and her moods more than anyone's. He knew how her job search was stressing her out. It had always been one of those things with her. As strong as she was, as driven and smart as she was, there was a threshold in her head, and if any situation should come along and cross it, then she would find herself in that sort of dark pit, struggling and struggling to get out. It had happened before, he'd seen it. Years ago, when she'd been preparing to take that advance placement test at school… She may have been a singer, a great headliner, stage and all, but situations like this made her feel seen in a whole other way, and she couldn't sing her way out of those.

Just as he knew to recognize these turns in her, he also had come to know what he could or should do. And unfortunately what it boiled down to was that he couldn't exactly help her, not entirely, sometimes not at all. She was going to do that on her own, and all he could really do was stand by her, be the supportive one he had been and would always be. Still, the last couple days, with him working, and now going to school, he'd hated to leave her behind, to return and see the added weight of another day of no developments.

He had to make himself stop going down that road in his mind, for the hours to come… as much as possible. If he kept going, he was likely to miss the turn on the road and keep on going right off back to Houston, the way he so often had in recent years.

Arriving at the university, maybe for having seen Sam through his worries over his first day, Lucas wondered how many of his old classmates he would meet out here. It wasn't as though they all carried over here, that wasn't exactly what it had been shaped to be, but there would definitely be some of them, there had to be, and if not, then he would be starting from zero, much like his young roommate. Well, actually he'd be starting at one.

"There he is!" the familiar voice of Bishop Nicholas greeted him as he walked into the building. And there _he_ was, still so very tall and impressive to behold, looking like a mix between Hagrid from Harry Potter and the Rock. Though he'd been born out here, he'd spent most of his life in France, and it still showed in his voice. On the whole, Lucas couldn't have been happier to see him.

"Hey," he grinned, meeting his friend's hand in something between a shake and a bump. "Been here long?"

"Walked in not two minutes ago," Bishop revealed. He still lived out in Houston, with his girlfriend and Maya's former co-worker, Leona, which left the two of them to come from two opposite directions or else they would have carpooled.

"See anyone we know?"

"I think I spotted Simon Shin back in the parking lot, but I lost track of him."

"Got him," Lucas tapped his arm before nodding across the hall to a guy now walking to meet them.

"Hey, guys, good to see you," he shook both their hands, as usual. That was always his way, and it was strangely endearing. They'd known him all the last four years as someone so meticulous, precise, but without any kind of detachment. He was a kind soul, likely to be found spending hours calmly coaxing a scared animal out of hiding. "How was your summer?"

"Leona and I went to visit my family, travelled a couple of weeks, came home," Bishop declared, sounding to Lucas like he was just trying to finish giving out his answer and be done with it. This was shown true enough when he then turned to him like 'now you.'

"Well," he laughed. "My girlfriend and I got engaged," he revealed, to Simon's immediate delight.

"Congratulations, Lucas! When is the wedding?" Before he could answer, a new voice asked…

"You're getting married?" The boys turned to find two girls from their previous school.

The one who'd spoken was Josie Brandt, tagged by her friend Zelda Carter. For the first year or so where they'd known her, she and her group of friends had been 'affectionately' nicknamed Voldemort and the Death Eaters, and she had been noted for making a very unsubtle play for Lucas, who had tried and tried to let her down easy to no avail. This had led to a slightly awkward encounter. It turned out she was a huge TXNY fan. When she'd realized this oft mentioned girlfriend of his was their singer… Well, she'd changed her tune just a bit.

In the last three years, Lucas would say that Josie had gotten a bit easier to endure. He didn't see himself hanging out with her outside of school, but if she approached him to chat he wouldn't get that 'oh, here we go' dread. She had detached herself from some of that old group, and now that it was just her and Zelda as a tag team, they were what Bishop call 'clumsily friendly.'

"Uh, yeah," Lucas nodded to the girls. "We haven't set a date yet," he told them, answering Simon's question at the same time.

"That's great!" Zelda smiled. She was just, on the whole, of average height. But standing next to Josie, who had a head on most of the other girls in their class and some of the guys, too, she looked properly tiny. She was also the architect of Josie's 'reform,' as far as the others were concerned. They used to think that Josie didn't deserve her, but maybe it was that she'd needed her and earned the rest later.

"Do we all get to go?" Josie asked with a flash of that toothy smile of hers. Zelda gave her a look. "What, we're like his people," Josie shrugged, gesturing toward Lucas.

"You know what," he cleared his throat. "When we do get around to setting down a date, I… I'll let you guys know, and we'll go from there."

"Works for me," Josie nodded, looping arms with Zelda. "See you boys in class," she told the three of them before walking off with her friend.

"We're for sure on the invites list, right?" Bishop tipped his head forward once the girls were gone. Lucas laughed.

"Yeah," he promised, to him and Simon both.

Walking into class, as he followed the guys to find a seat, Lucas started to feel something. It was like… all this time, he'd known where he wanted to be, what he wanted to do, and it meant coming here. There had been a time in his life, after his suspension from school, where he'd been made to feel that he didn't have the… temperament, the ability, the… the right… to become what he wanted to become. _And here I am…_ He hadn't known how much a part of him had kept clinging to that old feeling, not until now, when it went away. He couldn't see what his face looked like in that moment, but he had a feeling that Maya would take one look at him and ask if he was crying.

He took out his phone, snapped a picture of himself, and he sent it off to Maya. It took half a minute for her to reply.

_Maya: What's got you crying, Doc?  
__Lucas: I'm here.  
__Maya: Damn right you are!_

This was followed by a picture of her, giving that outpouring of confidence the visual to go with the words. It made him chuckle. He responded with a simple _366_, three digits and still for them it meant much more. _I love you, seven days a week, 365 days a year, 366 on leap years…_ Always, past, present, and future.

_Maya: Hug a puppy?_

She'd made the same request from him four years before, on his other first day, and the call back went and bound that smile to his face for the rest of the day.

_Lucas: I'm starting to get requests for wedding invites.  
__Maya: Who?  
__Lucas: Bishop, Simon Shin.  
__Maya: Of course.  
__Lucas: Josie and Zelda…  
__Maya: You know what, why not?  
__Lucas: They'll be so pleased ;)  
__Maya: Five bucks I make her cry before the bouquet toss.  
__Lucas: Dedicate a song to her and she'll pass out.  
__Maya: Oh, tempting!_

"Hey, show time," Bishop tapped his arm, and Lucas looked up to find a woman had walked in and gone to set her bag on the front desk.

_Lucas: Prof's here, gotta go.  
__Maya: You're not related to this one, are you?  
__Lucas: Pretty sure I'm fresh out of secret relatives. Putting my phone away now.  
__Maya: Oh, shoot, you forgot your apple! 366!_

The phone was put away, laptop taken out, opened up. Lucas took a breath. _Day one…_ He couldn't wait to get home that night, to have stories to tell.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	12. Their Year to Yearn

January 12th 2020

_Chapter 12  
Their Year to Yearn_

Maya had not gone to her parents' house today. It would have been easy, like escaping, but that wasn't what she was going to do today. Today, she was determined, and one way or another she would have taken steps forward, or a single step at all, by the time Lucas came home.

After Lucas and Sam had gone on their way, Maya had taken the dogs out for a walk, the better to clear her head before doing… whatever she was going to have to do to get the ball rolling on this day. When they came back in, Trix and Lou went shooting for their favorite spot. Back in Houston, that had been the landing in the stairs. Here, they had adopted, after much deliberation and days of getting to know the house, the floor beneath the kitchen windows. If they stood up there, they could just see the land out far ahead. Well, Trix could see it. Lucas had set a small bench beneath the window. Lou would climb on top and she'd be good to go.

"No, yeah, you're totally welcome, that was a great walk… Okay…" Maya sighed. So… What to do first?

Climbing upstairs, she went and got her laptop from hers and Lucas' room and brought it down into the living room. She sat on the couch, her own tiny motivation parade going on in her head as she started to hit all those usual suspects, seeking new listings she could apply to. It was as tedious as one might expect, and it didn't take long that it started getting her foot on the twitchy side. After a while, it really got to feel like she was running around in circles more than anything.

When Lucas had texted her, she'd been all too easily convinced to put her search aside and talk to him instead. That picture, him with that smile all over his face, it was the best thing she'd seen all day. Her respite was short lived, as soon enough he had to let her go because his class was going to start. She picked up her computer and set it on her lap again, pinching the bridge of her nose as she looked forward to another bit of browsing. Before she could even start, her phone rang. The laptop was set aside again.

"Hey, telemarketer guy, today is your lucky day…" she mumbled, pulling out her phone. It wasn't a telemarketer though. No, it was so, _so_ much better. "Why, if it isn't Miss Shayla Blake," Maya beamed as the girl's face appeared on her screen.

The twelve-year-old had been so broken up at the discovery that her idol and mentor was leaving Houston, but Maya had promised her that, even though she was moving back to Austin, they would remain everything they'd been before the move. She'd kept that promise. They'd talked or written almost every day, and Shae had come to visit a couple times since they'd moved into the house.

"When are you starting school again?" Maya asked.

"Monday," Shae replied.

"What are you doing until then, just hanging out at home?" The girl nodded. "Well, that's no fun… Maybe I'll drive up, tomorrow, day after, sometime. Weren't you talking my ear off about wanting to go see that movie again, like two, three times in a row? I know your dad's probably not interested, but me, I'm just the girl for the job."

"Okay!" Shae grinned, showing off those new braces of hers.

"Did you want to ask me something?" Maya smiled back.

"I want to audition for the school musical whenever they announce it this year," Shae revealed, and Maya could just see that little ball of excitement in her, same as she'd get at the prospect of something big and new she wanted to tackle.

"Yeah? That sounds great! Any idea which one it'll be?"

"No, they usually say it at the start of the school year."

"Okay, so what do you need from me?"

"Can you help me pick a song to audition?"

"Pick it, practice it, whatever you want. Anything else?"

"Well…" Shae hesitated. Maya fixed her with a look, as best she could, from across phone screens. "I can't… I don't know how… how to dance?"

"And you want me to show you some moves?" she tried not to laugh. She _had_ seen Shae 'dance.' Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. "I am at your service, Miss Shayla."

After they'd hung up, Maya had sat there on the couch for a few seconds before finally making up her mind. She jogged up the stairs, pulled the trap from the attic and climbed inside. The telescope was as good as fixed to the ground, hadn't been moved from the moment they'd put it together. Whenever she'd come into the attic, Maya would tap it in greeting.

She sat down at her desk, pulled sketchbook and pencils from the top drawer at her side. She tied up her hair with the band around her wrist. Whatever ideas were playing pinball with her brain right now, she needed to get them out, wouldn't get anywhere until she did.

For near on two hours, she filled one page and another with images, with words… She couldn't say for sure what it was that she was trying to tell herself, but it felt like a lot of puzzle pieces that begged to be put together. Leaning back in her chair to stretch, she would look through the gable window, to the sky growing cloudy like it was about to rain. She kind of wished it would. Sitting up here, the sound of raindrops on the windows… It only came third after seeing the stars or watching the sun rise.

She thought about Shae, heard her voice in her head, that beautiful, clear voice… With the right song, she would practically declare herself worthy of any and all roles but a lead one most of all if they had any sense. Of course the dance part was going to be trickier, but they had time to get her ready before it became an issue. All they had to do…

Maya sat back up, stared down at the page open in front of her, flipped through all those she'd filled in the last couple of hours.

"Oh…"

She came down from the attic, shut the trap, and bolted down to grab her phone and… And she had no car. _Really need to do something about that…_

"What do you need?" Shawn asked when he picked up her call.

"How do you do that?" Maya asked back.

"Dad skills, I have them."

"Fine, can you come pick me up? I need to see a woman about a thing."

Shawn came and picked her up, with Haley napping in the back. When he found out where she wanted to go, Maya could see curiosity in his eyes, but she wasn't going to get into it with him. Anyway, she would need the length of the car ride to figure out what she'd say when they arrived.

Her mother had been working ten years at the theater now. It was hard to look at her and see the waitress she'd once been. Maya imagined that old Katy as little more than a memory in the back of her mind now. In her place, there was the woman who had come up over the years, until she was essentially just under the big boss up there, and that was good. That was who Maya wanted to talk to, not her mother.

"Maya?" Katy blinked when she saw her daughter coming down the hall in the back of the theater, where the offices were. "What are you doing here, is everything okay?"

"Yeah, great. Is Mrs. Hughes in? Can I speak with her?"

"Siobhan? Uh, she should be, let me check… What do you need her for?"

"Long story, I'll tell you after, I promise."

At sixty, Siobhan Hughes had been running this theater for almost forty years. She'd taken over from her father, and the next generation looked ready to step in, with her daughter Matilda having worked here fifteen years already, half her lifetime taking her from coat check to where she was now, in charge of finances. But Siobhan… This was the architect of Maya's life. She'd been the one to take a chance on Katy Hart ten years ago, to look at the woman who'd been a waitress and a failed actress and little more and decide she was worth it. If she'd said no, then Maya and her mother would never have left New York, and that… that was a frightening thought.

"There she is…" Siobhan smiled, rising from her desk to come and greet Maya, kissing one cheek and then the other. The woman had known her since she was thirteen years old, and on the right people, watching someone grow into adulthood had a way of fostering a sort of familial, nurturing bond. Siobhan was no exception. Sometimes, it really felt like she saw her as her sixth kid. Today, she needed her to forget all that, to see her as someone with a business proposal.

At no time had she given herself the space to doubt what she was about to do. She'd literally had this idea… not an hour ago… Everything she had to offer, she'd pieced it together in the time it took to get from her house to the theater. But it was one of those things, the kind where she felt so sure about what her goal that the road in between felt like it was just there, waiting for her to run across. So, she sat across from Siobhan Hughes and she laid out her idea, every bit she had prepared and a few more she'd thought of even as she was sharing the rest. The whole time, Mrs. Hughes listened to her, let her speak and just listened.

"So… that's it," Maya finally breathed out, feeling just a bit flushed. "I'm not expecting anything here, really, just your… honest opinion. And if it doesn't work out, well… I'll understand."

"Will you?" Siobhan asked, with that small smirk of hers, tucked at the side of her mouth.

"Yes… sort of… mostly," Maya admitted, which made the woman laugh.

"Well, you've certainly given me a lot to think about. Will you give me a day or two to properly consider it?"

"Of course," Maya nodded.

"Excellent," Siobhan stood up and Maya did the same. They shook hands across the desk. When she'd come back to her side again, she was the woman who'd watched her grow again. "Go on, now, show me that ring." Maya laughed, obliging her.

"Sorry I didn't come sooner…"

"No, I understand, I do. I'm only glad you finally did."

Stepping out of the office, she found her way back to her mother's space. Katy looked like she'd been eagerly waiting for her, wondering what she'd been up to and discussing it with Shawn as he sat there with Haley asleep in his arms.

"You going to leave us hanging?" Katy asked.

"No," Maya smiled, shutting the door and sitting with them now.

She laid out her idea – in less detail this time around – to her parents. As they listened, they both looked as surprised as they looked just… proud.

"But I thought you didn't…" her mother started.

"I know, but this is different."

"What did she say?" her father asked.

"She'll think about it and she'll let me know."

Shawn had driven her back home afterward. He'd invited her and the guys to come over for dinner that night, but she'd turned him down. She kind of wanted that evening to be just her and Lucas and Sam. She'd wanted to take steps, and she'd taken strides. She couldn't wait to tell them everything.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	13. Their Year to Hope

January 13th 2020

_Chapter 13  
Their Year to Hope_

"I can get in an hour or two before class tomorrow, we can figure see about that project for Lynch," Lucas told Bishop and Simon as they left their last class on that first day.

"We can ride in together," Bishop turned to Simon, who agreed at once.

"See you guys tomorrow," Lucas nodded to them before heading to his car.

It would be seven or so by the time he made it back home, and he'd written to Maya, told her that she and Sam should go on and eat, not wanting them to have to wait on him. Her response had been 'yeah, okay,' but Lucas was fairly certain that the underlying message here was 'in your dreams, Huckleberry.' Sam would probably have had his dinner by the time he made it, but she was absolutely going to wait for him. So he wrote back, asking if she wanted him to pick up anything.

_Maya: Take your pick!_

With his quick detour, it was closer to seven thirty by the time he drove up the lane and reached the house. He could see Sam sitting on the porch chairs, using one as a foot rest, textbook open in his lap and a pack of sticky notes gripped in hand. He was deeply concentrated enough it took until Lucas was standing on the porch with him and saying hello for him to jump and turn his head up.

"Hey!" he dropped his sticky notes in the book and closed it. "Sorry, I just…"

"Did you have dinner yet?" Lucas smiled.

"I had a sandwich when I got home," Sam replied.

"Yeah, okay, come on," Lucas held up the bag, glad he'd gone for the bigger order after all, and motioned for the door. "Where's your sister?"

"Where do you think?" Sam chuckled, pushing the chairs back in their place before following Lucas inside. "I'll set the table."

"Thanks," Lucas passed him the takeout, set his school bag down, and started on his way up to the second floor, already seeing the attic trap was open. Like brother, like sister, he walked in and came to stand behind Maya before she realized he was there. The only difference was that she didn't startle; she recognized him without looking. Swivelling her chair around, her face lit up when she saw him, which made _his_ face do much the same, especially when he saw she had paint on her cheek. "New style?" he laughed, pointing to his face and then to hers.

"You know I can rock this," she gave a humble shrug as she got up to greet him with a kiss. "Look at that, now we match," Maya chuckled, pointing to his face, where a bit of the still fresh paint had transferred on to his cheek.

"We usually do," he held up his arm, the birds and the clock on display. She held up her own arm at this, showing her own tattoos with a smile. "What are you working on?" he asked, peering over her shoulder.

"Tell you about it later, I'm starving and I want to hear about today," she grabbed his arm and led him out of the attic. She tapped the telescope on the way out.

She was in a good mood, the kind he had seen enough to know something had to have changed since this morning. He really wanted to know what that something was, but she was going to make him wait until the right time, he knew _that_, too.

"Woah…" Sam paused when they walked into the kitchen. "Do I want to know what that's about?" he pointed to the paint on their faces.

"I'm more curious about what _you_ think it is right now," Maya gave her brother a curious look. Sam cleared his throat and shook his head before indicating that he'd set out dishes and containers and they were good to sit and eat, so they did, once the paint had been cleaned off from faces.

Much as he'd insisted for them to go on without them, Lucas couldn't deny he was glad they were all here now, having dinner together, that he could share this great first day of his with the woman he loved and the boy who was already a brother to him, not 'through' Maya but thanks to her, really. He hadn't been sure how Sam felt in that regard. Then, a few days back, he'd been at work, at the bookstore, when he'd heard someone nearby saying that they were looking for their brother. He'd turned around, and there was Sam, standing next to one of his co-workers, Maeve, with her hand coming down from pointing over at him. It really had meant so much to him to hear it and know it.

"So…" Maya looked at him with clear anticipation. She had been waiting to hear about his day, and in particular it felt to him like ever since… whatever it was that had changed for her today… had happened, she was even more motivated to find out how it had all gone for him.

He told them both as much as he could, without going into the actual class material, though there hadn't necessarily been too much of it on their first day. Beyond that, there were his old classmates, the ones who had carried over from one school to the other. That had been his first curiosity going in today. So far, he'd counted eight, himself included. He'd had a pretty solid relationship with all of them – a bit less as far as Josie went, naturally – so it felt wonderful to have them here, shaving off a bit of the unknown.

It hadn't been long that they'd all learned of his engagement, which had led to a mass lunch, all eight of them together. Along with him and Bishop and Simon, Josie and Zelda, they had Tay Wilkins, and Mari Diaz, and Sue Ann Taylor. Maya knew them all, to varying degrees, from the past four years, and now they were three more to add to the wedding guest list.

Before they could actually get to lunch, of course, they had classes to get through. That morning, there'd been two. Lucas hadn't been sure what it would be like. He'd imagined it, way more times than he'd care to count, to be in this place where everyone was more or less after the same thing he was. He'd had some of that back in Houston, of course, but that had all been much more of a precursor, hadn't it? From minors to majors… and now he'd just entered the majors.

He'd had four classes today but three professors, all of them women. One of them, Professor Haggerty, had taught both his first and fourth classes, with Professors Lynch and Lindgren in between. So far, he couldn't say he saw himself having any issues with any of them. They had all been the kind of teacher you'd want to be standing at the front of a class in their own ways. Josie had jokingly referred to them as 'the mother, the maiden, and the crone,' and though he wouldn't see himself repeating as much, he had to admit the reference wasn't entirely unfounded. Professor Haggerty did have something very motherly to her, fierce when she had to be, warm and attentive on the whole. And then Professor Lynch, their 'maiden,' was in fact on her second year of teaching, no more than a handful of years older than the rest of them. As for the 'crone,' well, Professor Lindgren had been with the university longer than Lynch had been alive. She had this vibe to her somewhere between a wood witch and the pigeon lady in Home Alone 2. You only had to know her the time of a lecture to want to follow her anywhere.

"I'm really happy for you, that it went well today. I can see it in your face," Maya told Lucas as they were clearing up the table later on, having released Sam off to the reading he'd been doing outside earlier.

"I could say the same for you," Lucas pointed out. "Something happened, didn't it?"

"Possibly…"

"Maya, please?" he shook his head, at once amused and anxious to hear what she had to say.

"Dishes first," she insisted.

"Isn't that what little brothers are for?" Lucas joked, making her laugh.

"He's upstairs, doing his homework, and that's good. Let him focus, get scrubbing." He looked at her, keeping her eye as he made a show of rolling up invisible sleeves and moving to the sink. Maya laughed and moved to help him.

Minutes later, they made their way upstairs and into the attic. Maya tapped the telescope before pointing to the ground under the gable window. They'd put down a good and fluffy carpet there, and they had a few camp chairs folded in the corner, for stargazing purposes. Lucas sat right on the carpet, as Maya moved to get something from her desk and coming to join him. In the weeks since they'd moved in, he'd lost count of how many times any one of them had sat here, looking up or not, Maya most of all, Sam a close second.

"I had… an idea," Maya breathed, the slightest tremor in her voice, showing excitement for the thing she was about to share. "I couldn't take looking through job listings again and again…"

"I've seen you do it, you almost growled once," Lucas commented, making her laugh.

"_Anyway…_ Shae called." This made him smile. "By the way, I'm going to go and visit her in Houston before she starts school. The reason she called me though is that she wants to audition for her school's musical this year. She wants _me_ to help her get ready, you know, find a song, rehearse it, all that, and then she wants a bit of help with her dancing…"

"A bit?" he asked, trying not to sound rude for being aware of what she was working with.

"However much of it she needs," Maya replied, not knowing whether to smack him or laugh and ended up somewhere in the middle. "Anyway…" she started again, "I came back up here, and I just… I needed to get something out, wasn't sure what, and then I got it."

"I could not get any readier to hear this," Lucas gave her hands a quick squeeze.

"Okay, okay," she laughed, took another breath. "I went to see Siobhan Hughes." Going by the surprise on his face, she could tell he had never expected _this_.

"What happened to you not wanting to get a job through connections again?"

"I know, I know, and that's not what this is, or… Let's say maybe… 5% max of connection, I can't help that she's known me almost half my life. But this wasn't me asking for a job… well, kinda… except this is more like I created my own post. I guess I made her a kind of business proposal."

"Woah, okay…" Lucas blinked.

"I want to create a sort of… workshop, or class… attached to the theater. The space is there, and there's plenty of time where there's no performances or rehearsals going on, so why not use it? I can call it… Stage Ready… Whatever they need, no age limit, voice, dance, diction... We get a few people together, maybe some guest speakers from time to time, and a showcase a couple times a year, maybe even get them in one of the theater's productions…" She breathed in before she ended up right out of air in her lungs. "I swear I spent the whole time I was talking to Siobhan just squeezing my toes into little balls in my shoes to keep myself from going all speed talker on her like I did just now, I'm just so…"

She didn't get to say what she was 'just so,' as she was cut off by Lucas leaning in to kiss her. He had his own words for what she was 'just so' though.

"… amazing," he shook his head, grasping her hands again, pulling them near his heart. "What did Siobhan say?"

"She's going to think about it, and then she'll call me back. All I gotta do is not to freak out over the next however many days it'll be before she does call."

"You'll be alright," he nodded confidently.

"Do I still have to look at the listings?" she whispered with a mock frown.

"You earned a break, take it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	14. Their Year to Breathe

_**A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!**_

* * *

January 14th 2020

_Chapter 14  
Their Year to Breathe_

Maya had gone up to Houston the very next day. She wanted to keep her promise to Shae, and she knew that when Siobhan would call her back, with good news or bad, she might have to cancel on her young friend, and she didn't want that. She doubted she'd be hearing back from her mother's boss before the day after that, so it worked for everyone.

As promised, they had gone and seen Shae's new favorite movie a whole three times in a row. Candy was acquired, in quantities fitting of the amount of time they'd be in that movie theater. It made for a very giddy sort of day, and Shae's happiness did not let up for a minute, which in turn made Maya happy, too.

"You sure you had time to digest everything before you go and give me some of those dance moves?" Maya asked as she followed Shae up to her house after the movies. The girl looked at her and Maya gave her a short, demonstrative sort of shimmy.

"I don't think the sugar's going to be my biggest problem," Shae sighed, pulling her house key from her pocket.

"Which will be…"

"My feet… my arms… everything in between…" she declared dejectedly.

"Oh, good, so your head's not on the list, give them a bit of this," Maya made her head 'dance,' which pulled a smile out of the girl. "You can do this, okay? You don't have to become the world's best dancer, but you can still learn enough to get by."

"How long is _that_ going to take?" Shae asked. She wanted to believe her, Maya could see it, but it seemed impossible to her, which made it hard to be particularly optimistic. Maya knew how that felt, all too well.

"More than one day," she admitted. "_But_, hey, even if I can't be here every day, I know someone else who might be able to help, locally."

One call and an hour later, there was the doorbell, and Maya and Shae had been joined by Sophie Zvolensky. She was all for helping Shae 'unlock her inner dancer,' whenever her schedule permitted, which by her count would be three times a week. Maya had gone back to Austin that night, feeling like they had really done something. As a bonus, the whole thing had given her loads more ideas for her to bring to Siobhan… if she said yes… oh, she hoped that she said yes…

X

_Five days later_

Lucas worked three days a week at the bookstore, Saturdays through Mondays. The rest of the week was all for school, no work evenings, which would have been sort of difficult anyway, with the time he tended to get back into Austin every night, Tuesday through Friday. He'd only had one full week of class so far, but after that first one, he could already tell he would spend his Mondays at work with this eager feeling in him to kick off another school week the following day.

This wasn't to say that he didn't enjoy his work at the bookstore. It was a different vibe from Coleman's, more space, more products, more people, customers and employees both. He was still learning names in some places, but at least on his floor he had a good team going. There were always four of them each day, though in total he had five co-workers up on the third floor with him. Saturdays and Sundays brought Aarti and Mona, while Mondays had Tanner and Julia in their place, and then there'd be Maeve, on all three of his days. Maybe for that, he was closest to her out of the lot.

She kind of reminded him of Rosa, of all people, which might have facilitated things in his befriending her from day one of working here. It wasn't necessarily because of personality, although he could see them getting along. No, she reminded him of Rosa because how she looked. The raven hair, the glasses, even something in the shape of her face, features… The first time Maya had met Maeve, she'd told him that Maeve was like a taller, more Irish version of Rosa.

On their second day working together, they'd realized they had gone to the same schools all the way through high school, although with a five year gap between them. Then he'd told her he'd been on the basketball team and she'd chuckled, asking him which Shelbys he'd played with, which made him laugh.

"Started with Nate, finished with Scott. My fiancée played with Julianne," he counted off.

"_I_ played with Kate," Maeve had turned a smile his way. Lucas didn't know her as much as the younger ones, though he knew she was the next oldest after Nate, second in line of the lot of them, preceded only by Matt Shelby.

"You were on the team, too?"

"Nope," she'd kept on smiling, bursting out laughing when he'd figured out what she meant.

"Nate told me once how his sister and her friend got in trouble their senior year for ditching the class on their trip to Australia…" he'd recalled, and Maeve's face had just read 'guilty as charged.'

"Long story," was all she'd volunteer.

So far, he'd decided that the best way to describe Maeve would be 'wild card,' because you really could not predict what she'd do. Oh, she took her job seriously, and you could not find someone more apt for it. But then if you were looking for someone to keep you on your toes on long days and slow hours, she was your woman. She wasn't above… well, a lot of things… nothing disrespectful though.

Today, as they hit the lull in late afternoon before the home stretch to closing, he couldn't go around the floor without spotting Maeve dancing about, letting the music over the store speakers be her choreograph. _Okay, definitely just _looks_ like Rosa…_

"Hey, isn't that your girl?"

He turned to where Tanner stood near the escalators, in the midst of rearranging a display table. Lucas moved to join him, the only other guy in either his weekend or Monday quartets. He pointed, and Lucas looked below just as Maya started making her way up to the third floor.

"Yeah, that's her," Lucas confirmed with a curious smile. She'd spotted him standing there as the escalator rolled on up, and as soon as she got off she approached him with a face that said 'I am a customer now, totally random.' "Afternoon, miss," he smiled. "Can I help you find anything today?"

"I think you might, yeah."

"Any genre in particular?"

"Whichever one you keep behind those doors," Maya pointed to the back.

"Yes, of course," Lucas led her there, turning to face her after the doors had swung shut. "What's up?" he asked, guessing she hadn't come looking for a book, or just to see the back of the store. The way her whole demeanor shifted as soon as they were alone was a solid indicator, too.

"I swear, I was going to wait until you got back, but you know how I get when impatience creeps in…"

"A lot of baked goods, usually," he shrugged. He couldn't complain when _that_ happened, although one of these days he had a feeling he would get home and all the furniture would have been rearranged.

"I got the job!" she just went right for it, her face splitting into a grin.

"What?" he blurted out before snatching her up into a hug that made her laugh. "She said yes?" he asked when he'd set her back down.

Maya gave him a quick rundown of how it had happened. Siobhan had called her, just after lunch, and asked if she could come to the theater at three. When she'd shown up, the woman had brought her into one of the unoccupied offices so they could talk. There, she had told Maya that she'd thought about her plan, discussed it with the rest of the team. They'd gone over a lot of things, and what they'd come to was this: They would give her through the end of the year to set everything in motion, with a target start for January. This was her project and it was going to stay that way, which meant she was in charge, yes, but also that she would either soar or crash along with it. But Siobhan had said that she'd known her long enough to have faith in her to take flight.

"She says I can start next week. And that's _my_ office now, I have an _office_," she half-whispered the word, like it was too wild to imagine. "I'm going to need a picture of you and a frame."

"That can be arranged," Lucas smiled.

"Do I get to pick the wardrobe?"

"So long as there _is_ wardrobe," he gave her a knowing look.

"I really need to be careful with the wording…" she shook her head. He loved when she was giddy like this. He looked around to make sure no one was coming before stealing a quick kiss.

"Wait downstairs, I'll meet you in two minutes?"

He went and found Maeve, asked if she and the others could cover the last few hours and closing for him, explaining that he needed to go. She didn't need more of an explanation. Maeve wished him a good week and said goodbye until the following Saturday, and as promised Lucas met Maya down on the main floor two minutes after they'd left the back room and split.

"When's Sam getting out of class?" he asked as they got in his car.

"Uh…" she looked at the time. "If we go now, we should arrive more or less when he gets out."

"Perfect."

As it turned out, they made excellent time, so they ended up waiting outside his last class.

"Who else knows?" Lucas asked Maya as they waited. "Your mom?"

"Not even," she shook her head. "She was out this afternoon, check-ups with MJ and Haley. She'll be home by now."

"Right, okay," he took out his phone and started to type out a text. When Maya tried to lean in and see what he was doing, he turned the screen away so she couldn't see.

"Hey!" she protested weakly.

"Watch for Sam," he gestured toward the door.

"But…"

"I am writing to some people to see if they are free tonight and if they can meet us at an undisclosed-to-you location. Good?" he asked with a smile before getting back to his typing.

"I can work with that," Maya smiled back.

When Sam came out of class, he didn't see his sister or his future brother-in-law right away, though they saw him. He was talking to a pair of students who'd also come from the class just ended. Looking at the guy and the girl, both Maya and Lucas would have been willing to put money on their being twins. They looked to be freshmen, like Sam, although in their case with the ages usually fitting someone who'd finished high school last year and was now starting college.

"Well, look who made friends," Maya smiled a proud sisterly smile.

Sam had waved them off before he ever spotted his welcoming committee waiting for him. He finally looked up and they waved back at him.

"What are you guys doing here?" he asked, jogging over.

"Came to pick you up, of course. Totally not spying on you and your new friends," Maya smirked.

"You busy tonight?" Lucas asked Sam.

"I'm fifteen in a new city where I don't go to school with any other kids my age. If I'm going to be anywhere that's not with you, I kind of have to tell you first," Sam pointed out.

"Oh, he's good," Maya laughed. "Want to be busy tonight?" she asked her brother. "You can invite Dora," she added, turning to Lucas. "He can invite Dora?" she asked.

"Yeah," Lucas confirmed.

"Invite her where?" Sam asked, failing to appear cool at the mention of his crush's name.

On the ride home, Maya had filled her brother in on her offer to Siobhan and how she'd accepted it, which meant she now worked at the theater, or she would, as of the following week. Sam loved the idea for her Stage Ready class, and he gained several points with his sister for congratulating her on her not having to shout at the job listings anymore.

"I wasn't… shouting…" she played coy.

As they'd arrived at the house, Lucas had informed the Harts that they had reservations for seven o'clock and they should aim for semi-formal. Sam headed upstairs, saying that if he hurried and got changed quick enough, he might have time to get one of his readings done.

"I fully support this!" Maya called after him before pivoting on her heels to face Lucas again. "_Semi_-formal?"

"It's your night, I can go full formal for you," he whispered. She nodded with a grin.

Taking her out to dinner, inviting the others, it had been a no brainer. Her job search issues had brought her down, but then to find that job… She hadn't just found it, she'd literally created it for herself. There was potential in the project for it to become something that would grow and grow, could last on beyond her and just help others reach their dreams. It was kind of perfect.

"Hey, we should have movie nights again," he suggested as they headed upstairs to get changed. "It's been way too long since we've had you and me and Zay and Nadine and Asher and Dylan and Riley… And now there's more of us…"

"You had me at movie nights," Maya stopped so suddenly on her way up that he nearly ran into her. "Sorry," she laughed. "Okay, so I've been thinking, since I left the theater earlier, I'm going to need a couple weeks to get everything started, with the office, and… the actual job… We might not get to have band practice before all that, so… We could have our first practice in two weeks, and after _that…_"

"Movie night," Lucas filled in with a smile. She nodded.

"You guys are still not changed?" Sam appeared at the top of the stairs, changed for dinner and carrying his textbook under his arm. Lucas and Maya stepped to the side so he could pass them by and go sit in the living room.

"You want to walk to the restaurant, Genius?" Maya reached to ruffle his hair, which Sam just barely dodged, reaching anyhow, in case she'd moved anything out of place. "Ask. Her. Out."

"Go. Change," Sam imitated her. Maya turned back to Lucas.

"I'm so glad he's here," she smiled as they continued on to their room.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	15. Their Tradition For Progress

January 15th 2020

_Chapter 15  
Their Tradition For Progress_

Every year, every semester they had spent either in Austin or in Houston had had a tendency to have a few days to kick things off slowly before, sooner or later, they'd hit their stride. And when that happened, the days and the weeks would feel as though they started to go by faster and faster. Now, with the two of them back in Austin, the stride had indeed been hit, and it didn't matter that only one of them was in school. It worked for other things, too, like… well, work.

On the one side, there was Lucas, driving out to school four days a week. Little by little, his group out there was growing stronger, more defined. It wasn't even exactly the same as it had been in the beginning, those eight of them who'd known each other back in Houston. Tay and Mari had sort of migrated into another group, detaching from the rest of them, which was more than alright. They were still friends, better known than a lot of their classmates. And then, last week, Sue Ann had just stopped coming to class. It had taken a few days for them to learn that there'd been a situation in her family which forced her to withdraw for the foreseeable future.

The rest of them were still holding together, and it hadn't been long that they'd picked up a couple new faces, soon to make up Lucas' carpool, as they both lived in Austin, too. There was Robbie, who'd just moved from San Antonio to go to this school. He was as tall as Bishop, maybe even taller by an inch, though _he_ was ridiculously lean compared to the French transplant, which had gotten him the nickname Stretch for most of his high school days, ever since he'd shot up in height at thirteen. And then there was Ramona, who took a while just as Lucas did to remember they had been in school together before. Only, she was his age, which was to say that they would have graduated together if he hadn't been held back by his suspension. They were even now, as her taking a year off after high school had put them on the same track as him. The two of them were a packaged deal, Robbie and Ramona. Like Zay and Nadine, they had just been married the previous summer.

They'd worked out a system, the three of them, wherein they'd trade out driving weeks. One week, Lucas would pick up his two classmates and drive them all to school, and the other week it would be the other way around, with either Robbie or Ramona taking the morning drives and the other taking those in the evening.

His classes were going great, too. Much as he'd applied himself back in Houston, much as he'd learned there and then working in the clinic with his aunt, he knew he'd only been scratching the surface on a lot of things. But here he was doing much more. Here, he was digging deep, past the surface and finding the core within. In a way, he guessed it helped that he was far from home while he was at the university. He would arrive in the morning, and whenever he wouldn't be in classes, or breaking for lunch, he would spend most of his time at the library. His professors were starting to notice him, pick him out as one of their more applied students.

It would get him thinking about his clinic work again, particularly about trying to get a similar set up out in Austin. His schedule was kind of on heavy lock, between school and the bookstore and what time he had at home with Maya and Sam, so he didn't know where he would manage to fit that in, but he knew he wanted to find a way. Maybe in January, when his schedule would change with the new semester…

These thoughts in particular had come about following the visit of an unexpected guest lecturer, in the form of his uncle.

Professor Hank Hillard had walked in, the previous Friday, essentially subbing for Professor Lindgren. The old woman, as it turned out, had been _his _professor and Tanya's both, back in the day, when they had been the Robbie and Ramona of their time. Ever since he'd started teaching, back in Houston, Lindgren had had him come for these lectures once or twice a semester.

It had been like a couple blasts from the past at the same time. On the one hand, it had taken him right back to that first day when the man had walked in, looking so much like Pappy Joe that it had left Lucas to distraction for most of the period, until he'd realized this man was his father's cousin, Pappy Joe's nephew by his estranged and now late sister. Then, on the other hand, he was now familiar to more than him. Bishop and Simon and the others, they all knew him, of course, and they'd all sat up and smiled when they'd seen him. Josie had waved, and he'd waved back.

"You could have said you were coming," Lucas had smiled as he and his uncle shook hands at the end of the period.

"Yeah, but the look on your face," Hank shrugged. "It's not the same without you in my class, you know?"

"You just need to come here more often," Lucas nodded, getting him a bit of that Pappy Joe laugh from the man.

"Maybe I do."

While Lucas had spent the last two weeks finding his stride with his new school, Maya had been the doing the same with her new job. Technically she'd only started for real on that second week, but even on the first she had been getting ready to start. She had gotten her new office set up soon enough. Her father had come along one day and they'd done it all, moving the furniture in the room the way she wanted it. She had one small window and she wanted to take advantage of it as much as she'd take advantage of the rest of her wall space. As personal touches went, the two most important ones were the frame picture Lucas had given her for her desk, as promised, and then a plant which had been her parents' gift, sort of an office warming. She had started referring to it as '_Fern_ando.'

It wasn't all about the office. That was merely a space, even if it was kind of an important space, what with it belonging to her. When she'd shown up on her first official day, she'd found a name plaque had been added on the door, much as there was on the other office doors. Hers read _Maya Hart – Stage Ready coordinator._ She wasn't ashamed to say she had taken a ridiculous amount of pictures of herself standing next to the thing, pointing up at it like 'oh would you look at this, that's my name!'

She had spent most of that week leading up to her starting at the theater to ensure she had a solid plan of action, to get her project off the ground and prove to Siobhan that she'd been right to take a chance on her. She'd never done anything like this, she realized that. There were plenty of small nuances she would probably have to pick up on the way. If she let herself fall by the way of feelings of inadequacy, she knew it would be a very rough hill to climb to get back to solid ground, so she'd adopted a different tactic. She was going to remain honest with herself.

She had taken a very big chance in putting herself in this position, in presenting her idea to Siobhan Hughes. But she'd done that, and she'd gotten the job, so now she had to make it all count. She didn't know what she was doing, not from the business side of it, and she lacked a lot of the contacts that might expedite a lot of what she had to do. That was okay, that was _normal._ Now, she just needed to find solutions to all these 'problems,' whether it meant research or counsel.

One of her sources, some might call unexpected, was Melinda Friar. She wasn't a businesswoman, not in the strictest sense, no. But if there was anyone who knew how to know people, to organize events, in Maya's book her future mother-in-law was queen. And when she'd been asked for advice, Lucas' mother had looked like she might cry for the privilege of it. She'd then gone on to her own mother, who had worked at the theater for a decade now. On that front, Maya quickly realized she'd already known more than she believed she did. She'd met many people over the years who either worked at or for the theater, and all her mother had to do was to remind her and Maya would feel those memories grow fresher all over again.

By the time she'd actually started at the theater, Maya was happy to say that she had a good idea of what needed to happen first. She'd met with both Siobhan and her daughter, Matilda, presenting her initial ideas, leading to her getting approval to start getting her team together. It wouldn't be a very big team, definitely not in the beginning. Most of it would be about getting hold of people who would be able to lead one section or another of the program, with the voice, the dance… and she could hire herself an assistant.

"I could do it," Sam had said at once when she told him.

"You have school," Maya had reminded him. "That's kind of the whole reason you're in Austin, isn't it?"

"Sure, but…"

"You know I will always be happy for your help in anything, but in this case I'll need someone full time, okay?"

"Yeah, I get that," Sam had nodded, though she could tell he was sort of disappointed anyway.

That same issue came up with the rest of her friends, too. She'd thought of Rosa, but she was also in school, Dylan, too, even Dora. And then the ones who didn't have school already had jobs going, and she was pretty sure they would be getting paid more if they stayed where they were. Anyway, everything sort of hinged on her project being successful, and if that didn't happen then they might regret giving up another job for a failure. So, she'd need to hire someone else, a stranger.

She'd found her person in a woman called Lily Florescu. She was older than Maya by a dozen years, which would make people assume the roles of coordinator and assistant went the other way from what they actually were. But Lily was a sweetheart, and all she wanted was to assist Maya in whatever way she needed her to do it. She had been a stay-at-home mom for several years and was only now getting back into the work force 'because it was time,' she'd say, though Maya had a feeling there was more to it.

All through that first week, the biggest accomplishments they could say they had reached were to set themselves some kind of schedule, with target dates. By one date they needed to have their team assembled. By another they needed to get out an actual curriculum to Siobhan for approval, and a budget… Maya was not looking forward to this, but Lily assured her she could help there, and the look on her face suggested that she might have been some math wiz in school.

A date to start registration. And a schedule for January 2026 classes… Those were the other goals. Now it wasn't all so overwhelming. They had checkpoints, and all they had to do was to reach and cross off each one. Maya wasn't scared… They could do this, _she_ could do this.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	16. Their Tradition For Anticipation

January 16th 2020

_Chapter 16  
Their Tradition For Anticipation_

"Hey, what was that guy's name? It was like… sophomore year? You told me he'd come to see one of the plays and he'd ended up backstage looking for someone to blame for how the actors spoke their lines?" Maya asked, poking her head into her mother's office. Katy looked up at once, as though her daughter had just dredged up a memory she would have rather never recalled. Maya winced apologetically.

"Vince something…"

"Campbell?"

"Yeah, that's it."

"Damn it…" Maya groaned, walking into the office proper.

"Why?"

"You know how when someone's being all know-it-all about something someone would say 'well who put you in charge?' Turns out, Mr. Campbell is kind of up there with the elocution crowd… Not that there's a crowd, it's just… well, you know what I mean." Katy motioned for her to sit and Maya gladly did so. "You know, I still don't know what I'm supposed to call you in here," she admitted sheepishly.

"What do you mean?" Katy laughed.

"Just that it might be weird for me to call you Mom around the theater… Not weird for me, just… everyone else. What does Matilda call _her_ mother?"

"Siobhan," Katy shrugged.

"Yeah, see, I don't think I'm 'there' with calling _you_ Katy to your face… Is that…"

"I get it, don't worry," her mother laughed. "Even I couldn't call my mama by her name, and I was a very… stubbornly independent girl." Maya slowly nodded.

"So what's it going to be? 'Ma'am?'" she smirked. "Sounds kind of mom-ish…"

"Don't push it," Katy pointed at her though she was resisting a chuckle.

"And all the same letters as 'mama.'"

"I _will_ toss you out of here." Maya held up her hands in 'surrender.' "Call me what you want to call me, okay? Just… not that one… What are you going to do about Mr. Campbell?"

"I don't know," Maya groaned, getting up again. "Waiting to hear back from other people, hopefully one of them will bite."

"Good luck!" Katy called after her as she made her way back to her office. Lily had gone out to pick up lunch for the both of them so she was on her own for a while. She'd been fine to go along with her, but then there's been a call, so she'd stuck back to answer and Lily had gone on ahead.

Sitting back in her desk chair, Maya's eyes would keep travelling about the space. It was a decent-sized office, really, roughly the same as her mother's, just a bit smaller than Professor Robinson's back in Houston… and it was hers. There were still moments, just like this one, where she thought she must have been dreaming. But then it couldn't be a dream, she wouldn't let it. Even though they were still months from holding their first classes and all she was doing at the moment was about making those classes exist at all… she loved it, all of it.

All those days she'd been waiting to hear back from Siobhan, she'd been terrified she was about to make a huge mistake, that she would fall flat on her face as soon as she got to this part, but no… far from it, she was legitimately thriving. She tended to gauge her excitement these days by watching the smile on Lucas' face whenever she'd tell him about her day. It was reflex in him that seeing her happy made him happy, and the levels always corresponded, the higher the stronger.

As though her thinking of him had summoned him, her phone rang and she pulled it from the desk in front of her.

"Miss Hart's office?" she answered with a smile. Her voice was in no way an imitation of her actual assistant and emanated instead from some kind of old time sort of movie.

"Is she in?" Lucas asked, and there was that smile in his voice, too.

"Hold, please, sir, I will see," she told him before switching gear and manufacturing some kind of 'hold' music for a few seconds.

"Ah, my favorite song…" he sighed, nearly making her break character before finally making a 'beep!' sound and returning to her own voice.

"Hey, there, hope I didn't keep you waiting too long."

"Oh, it's alright, I had some music."

"So long as you weren't bored. Everything on track for tonight?" Maya asked, checking the time as though there weren't still some hours before either of them would be headed home.

"I'm going to be late," he revealed, which was likely the reason for his call in the first place. "Ramona has to see one of the professors and she's still going to be teaching one of her classes when we get out of our last one. There's no other time for the two of them to meet before the end of the day." And this week it was her and Robbie at the wheel, so he had to wait. Then again, even if he had been up there with his car he would have waited for his friends; he wasn't the type to ditch people just because he had plans, movie night or no.

"Well…" Maya looked to her computer, her ongoing list for the day involving several phone calls, some of them likely to be long, others likely to require multiple attempts… It was like this day was working overtime to make her anxious for tonight. "That shouldn't be a problem," she made a disgusted face at the laptop. "Just have them drop you off here, we can drive home together."

They were all anxious for that night, and how could they not? For the girls in the band, it was a return after an extended break. They hadn't performed together in over three months, not since Zay and Nadine's wedding. Between all the moves, the new jobs and new schools, they just hadn't been in a place where they could genuinely feel as though all five of them presently in the band were able to justify fitting practice into their schedules, much less any kind of performance.

Then there was also Nadine, who was learning to play a whole other instrument, to substitute for the drums she used to play, now in the hands of Kayla Banks. She hadn't told any of her bandmates just what she'd been up to just yet. The only one who knew, far as they could tell, had to be Zay, but he was guarding that secret with the pride of 'husbandly duties.' He wouldn't even tell Lucas. The best friend and best man cards were evidently worthless against that wedding band.

After the band's practice, of course, there would be movie night, and it was starting to feel as though they might need to get a bigger screen than the one they had. Lucas had been trying to keep count, and so far the list included: himself, Maya, and Sam, then Zay and Nadine, Riley and Dylan, Rosa, Dora, Kayla and Will, Rebecca – with her new boyfriend, who they would be meeting for the first time…

After that, there were those driving in from Houston, namely Sophie and Chiara, Asher and Ray, and Willow and Lion, Bishop and Leona, and Franny and the girls from Weaver Kings… And if that wasn't enough, there were the newbies. It wasn't like they'd meant to turn this into a party, but then in the weeks since they'd started school, or work, they'd made new friends, hadn't they? Sooner or later, the subject of movie night would land on the table, and those three magic words would be given over freely: You should come.

Those words had thus rallied Maeve from the bookstore, Simon Shin, Robbie and Ramona, and – to spare himself a headache – Josie and Zelda. They also brought Sam's new friends from school, fraternal (though very nearly identical) twins Josiah and Deanna Schmidt. All they'd heard about them so far was that they were seventeen, as close as Sam was likely to find anyone of his age, and they had grown up all around the world, following their parents wherever their mother had been deployed, until finally college had gotten them off that train.

If he wasn't missing anyone – and he genuinely didn't see who else they could have – then that made thirty-three. There would be thirty-three people in their house, packed in the living room. Thirty-three people who would require feeding… Dinner was easy enough, everyone would pitch in, they'd order pizza, but then movies meant snacks, so they'd told everyone to bring something if possible. Past experiences told him some wouldn't bring anything and others would bring too much, so in the end it would balance out. At least they had no immediate neighbors, right?

"Are you really sure you want all these people to know where we live?" Maya had asked him the night before as they'd been getting ready for bed.

"I like how you're not naming names but we both know who you mean," he'd shaken his head with a chuckle.

"Can you blame me?" she'd shrugged, pulling her hair into lazy bun.

"It'll be fine," he'd promised.

"Yeah, well, I'm going to keep my eye on You Know Who," she'd nodded, giving him a pointed glare. "And I realize that that's literally a Voldemort thing, which is fitting even if she's not as bad as she was before, but you get what I'm saying."

"Like she won't be stuck to your heel all night as it is," he'd laughed, looping his arms around her.

"Talk like that, it's a wonder you ever make a sale," she'd shaken her head at him, like he wouldn't notice her smirk.

To be sure, the group was very excited at the prospect of coming over for movie night. They hadn't decided _what_ they'd watch, which was bound to be quite the process with so many of them there that night, but they'd just have to accept whatever won the vote. Lucas had put Bishop in charge of driving Simon, Josie, and Zelda. It was his best shot that no one would go rogue and think that this was the kind of thing where you could pass the word on and, next thing you knew, there were a hundred people at your house. This way, no one had an address to give to anyone.

"Lucas, are there going to be children there tonight?" Josie had asked him when they'd gone into their last class of the day.

"No," Lucas shook his head.

"Didn't you say that Maya's little brother was living with you?"

"Yeah, but he's fifteen, he's not a kid… He's in college." They hadn't known that part, and he felt some pride for Sam for how surprised they'd all looked.

They were lucky to be finishing out this day and this week in Professor Lindgren's class. She kept them all as captivated as ever, and in due time they were dismissed and sent off to their weekends. As the group split off, Bishop and his passengers off to his car and Lucas and Robbie with Ramona to her professor's office, Lucas caught Bishop's eye with a thankful tip of the head. _Thanks for this_ it said, and maybe a bit of _Good luck with her…_

Not so long after, back at the theater, as she swayed back and forth in her chair, stuck on hold with her last call of the day, Maya received confirmation that Lucas was on his way back. She'd been getting other messages like this from other groups, and that all meant exactly one thing: their long awaited Friday would be upon them in no time… If this guy could just pick up the phone already… Sitting back forward, Maya tugged her notepad closer with the help of her pen, which she clicked open before starting to doodle what soon got to looking like a melody.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	17. Their Tradition For Music

January 17th 2020

_Chapter 17  
Their Tradition For Music_

After hitting a brick wall with her last call, Maya had called it a day, grabbing her things and starting slowly on her way out. She had time to make a few stops, loading up for the night, before Lucas and his friends would get here.

_Maya: How much chocolate does it take to feed over thirty people for like five hours?  
__Rosa: You're done?  
__Maya: Yup! Waiting for Lucas.  
__Riley: 100!  
__Maya: That is not a unit, Ri!  
__Kayla: I'm at your house. No one's here yet.  
__Kayla: I have a lot of popcorn.  
__Nadine: On my way!  
__Rosa: Can't you come now?  
__Riley: Just get a whole bunch!  
__Maya: I told Lucas to meet me here.  
__Rosa: Yeah, but if you come now, we get to practice longer before they all get there!  
__Rosa: Please?  
__Rosa: PLEASE?  
__Nadine: She's not wrong.  
__Kayla: The sooner someone with a key gets here… I should have gone to the bathroom.  
__Maya: Look under the bottom porch step.  
__Maya: Alright, I'll text Lucas and let him know. TXNY assemble!  
__Kayla: Found it!_

By the time Maya had equipped them for what was to be the great Chocopolypse of 2025 and made her way back home, she found the rest of the band had arrived to join Kayla. The four of them were in the kitchen, sorting through their various offerings for movie night.

"That is so much candy…" Maya blinked. When they turned to her, she could see they'd been sampling this thing and that.

"If there's a lot left, you could be sorted out for Halloween," Rosa teased.

"I don't see a lot of kids making it out here," Maya pointed out, realizing it for herself at the same time. There were only a handful of kids in the immediate area. She wondered what they did when the day rolled around…

_"Are you going to have a party here?"_ Kayla asked. The parties in Houston had been some of their favorite days. The last one had been far from what they would have wanted, with a storm keeping the guests to a slim minimum, and of all of them it seemed a near evident choice for Maya and Lucas to be the ones to host here as well.

"That's the idea, yeah," Maya spoke and signed.

"Practice?" Riley looked around to the bandmates.

"In a minute, I need help getting all that chocolate out of the car."

With the chocolate brought into the kitchen, they made their way into the basement. Maya coaxed the dogs to accompany them, not trusting them to behave with a mountain of sweet treats to tempt them into curiosity. As they'd started for the stairs, Nadine had grabbed a case waiting by the door. The shape and size made quick work of solving the mystery of her choice of new instrument.

"It'll work out with everything else, right?" she asked, hopeful but uncertain as she unclipped and opened the violin case. "It was just the most straightforward option I could think of. I took lessons when I was little, same as my sisters, except I gave it up when I was ten. Hadn't picked one up for over a decade, wasn't sure how it would go and it _was_ rough in the beginning, but I think I've got the handle of it now."

They were able to judge for themselves as she took hold of her instrument and went on to play something for them. When she finished and looked at them, Rosa was the one to summarize what they were all thinking.

"Just how pissed were your parents when you stopped playing? Did your teacher cry?" It made Nadine laugh.

"Think it'll work? I know that Willow played violin on some of the songs, but that was _some_…"

"Hey, we'll make it work," Maya assured her.

"Yeah, we're not giving _that_ up," Riley chimed in. The others nodded in agreement, which made Nadine laugh and nod. She was relieved, they could see it.

Maya knew how much this meant to her, being back in the band, and with her being unable to resume her old post as the drummer… For as long as she'd known her, Nadine had been all about knowing where her lane was. She'd given up things when she knew she wouldn't be able to devote herself to them enough to be a hundred percent in. The one time she'd tempted fate was when Maya had convinced her to stay on the basketball team when she'd been thinking of quitting. And here, if she couldn't give a proper kind of contribution to the rest of the band, then she didn't want to risk bringing them down for her sake.

"So I know we haven't started yet, but I sort of maybe have a gig for us?" Rosa revealed as they were all moving to join Nadine in getting hold of their instruments. They looked at her.

_"A gig?"_ Kayla asked, like she'd caught it off Rosa's lips but wanted to be sure.

"Yeah, uh, a girl in one of my classes, she's involved with this charity, and they're having a fundraiser. She asked if we'd perform," she explained. "It's in two weeks, she needs to know by Monday."

"I'm available," Riley raised her hand.

"Me, too," Nadine nodded.

_"I'm in," _Kayla signed.

"Alright, then, two weeks," Maya pressed her hands together. Rosa grinned, bouncing on her heels. "I might actually have a new song for us to debut there," Maya went on to reveal. "Still coming together, but I should have something for us to start working out in a few days. With some violin," she tossed a smile Nadine's way.

"This is something we started doing when we were in Houston and we'd have practice," Riley told their returned bandmate. "We'd start our sessions just playing around for a while. Someone would start us out and the rest would follow. You should start this one," she declared, looking around to see that the others were in agreement.

"Right, I can do that," Nadine smiled, thinking for a moment before pulling her violin into place. "Jump in when you know it," she told Maya, Riley, and Rosa, while also catching Kayla's eye and telegraphing what they'd get to understand was 'look at my foot.'

As she played, she kept the rhythm with it, which Kayla saw and figured out. She started to play, the two instruments lining up into a sound which soon drew in guitar, and bass, and keys, and soon voices. When the song was nearing its end, Rosa picked up the thread by directing them on to a new song, and the others soon followed. They kept up this chain through a third, fourth, and fifth song before pausing, with the exhilaration of finally playing music together again.

Maya had wanted very much for the basement to be ready for them, for the moment when they'd be doing… well, exactly what they were doing now. When she and Lucas had been working to get the house ready, before they truly moved in, she'd insisted on making this her project, and he'd supported it, keeping out of it unless she needed him to step in, which she never ended up needing. Their music room down in the basement in Houston had been a very important place, to the whole band, but she couldn't help being particularly aware of her own attachment to it.

She would remember so many moments in that place, big and small. Rosa's opening up with them, singing that song she'd learned from her father. All of them working on Christmas videos. Helping Shae. She vividly recalled the night of Halloween, nearly four years ago now, when she'd first believed she was pregnant, and there'd been the fiasco with not being able to look at those tests all night, and Lucas having to drive Joseph home when he'd shown up at the party… She'd ended up down there, in the basement, with Willow, and they'd passed some time by playing their instruments.

After four years out there, the place had been bursting with memories, and she'd inherited some of them, objects and memorabilia which now adorned _this_ room. They had some additional benefits in that the room here was both bigger and further away from any neighbors who might take issue with the noise. They'd been lucky enough with who they had as neighbors back in Houston, but they didn't have to worry about any of that here, and they planned to take advantage of it.

"So, should we try and work out what we'll do for that fundraiser first?" Nadine asked, once their warm-up medley had ended and they'd paused to get some water.

"Yeah, definitely," Maya nodded. "Especially if we need to make any adjustments to the track to account for the violin."

Grabbing a pad and marker, Maya sat on the ground and started putting down a few titles, almost like a framework, spaced out over the page. They always started out this way, and it would be for her to do it because by now she'd been the one to write and compose the majority of their songs, and even the ones penned by Isadora were most familiar to her than the others. Once that frame was done, they would start and fill the list in. In this case, each new title was carefully considered, and each one that might need an 'update' was marked with an asterisk. By the time they were done, they had four of those, along with a couple where she'd put in a question mark, which was to say that they sort of thought they wouldn't need to change anything but they still preferred to confirm with a trial run.

"Is that your new song?" Rosa asked, pointing to the space she'd left blank in between brackets.

"Doesn't have a title yet, but what I've got of it so far tells me this is the spot for it," Maya nodded. Rosa gave her a look, with a tilt of her head toward Nadine, and she understood _that_ easily enough. They all had crossed a moment where Maya had penned a song specifically geared to them, to put them in the spotlight. Rosa herself had been the first to get the treatment, but since then they'd all had one, Riley, Kayla, Willow… Now Nadine was back, so shouldn't she get hers? "Not yet," Maya whispered.

She wasn't going to start something and then shift it on to Nadine, it would feel too much like re-gifting. No, when she'd done the others' songs, it had always been theirs, right from the moment the first words or the first bit of melody came to her. This one had just been born of restlessness over hours of phone calls at work.

They'd still been in the middle of testing out those question marked songs when a light started to flash on the wall near the basement door. As they were all facing in that direction as they played and sang, they all saw it and stopped one by one.

"What's that?" Riley asked.

"My warning system," Maya laughed. It was the first chance she'd gotten to test it out. "Basically if it's flashing it means 'hey you're playing really loud so you can't hear it but someone just rang the doorbell so maybe go up there and see who it is.' Except, you know, without all those words," she explained as she pulled her guitar strap from around her neck, set the instrument down, and went dashing up the stairs with the dogs at her heels.

She heard the bell this time, and she hurried to the door to see who it was. She could only spot one person, a girl, from what she saw. Dark hair, tall… She'd only met her a couple times but that was definitely…

"Maeve, hi! Welcome! Please, come in," she smiled as she opened the door to Lucas' new friend from work, who accepted this invitation. She had a bag in either hand, and both seemed loaded with packs of red vines. "Woman after my own heart," Maya nodded.

"Am I early?" Maeve asked, noticing the complete lack of people, but also the presence of curious dogs. She crouched and was received by Trix and Lou, who clearly decided they liked this stranger.

"Depends on how you look at it. Band practice is still going on, you can sit in if you want."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	18. Their Tradition For Friends

January 18th 2020

_Chapter 18  
Their Tradition For Friends_

Almost as soon as Maeve had arrived, it was like the floodgates were opening and the others started to arrive. Maya had barely managed to get the woman into the basement, to introduce her to Riley, Rosa, Kayla, and Nadine. They were still caught in a funny sort of moment, where they'd finally been able to put Maeve and Rosa side by side and found that they could sort of see what Lucas meant about the resemblance, when the bell rang again. This time, while the light did flash as before, the lack of music being played had made it unnecessary for them to know someone else had arrived.

"Hold that thought," Maya told the others, sprinting back up the stairs again. "Hey, hey! Trix, Lou, don't go there," she clapped her hands together, finding the dogs had not gone into the kitchen _yet_ but, having been left upstairs after Maeve's arrival, they were clearly curious about what they could smell. "Look, people!" Maya pointed to the door, and now the dogs came bounding after her. "Yeah, that's right, come on, oh, there's more than one this time!"

There were four of them, and the only thing Maya could think was that she didn't see how all of those four had come together in this manner. This was soon explained.

"I was driving past the bus stop when the bus went by. When I saw him, I stopped and picked them up," Will explained, indicating Zay, and then the other two, Dylan and Dora.

"We were supposed to come up with Nadine and Riley, but we needed to make a stop on the way," Zay started to explain.

"And they wanted to come here to practice already, so they left with the car," Dylan went on. "So we took the bus, and that's where we ran into Dora." Now that she thought about it, Maya realized it wasn't really _that_ odd that they would be together, coincidence or not. She might not have seen them together that often, but Zay, having been Lucas' best friend since they were little kids, would have had to have known Dora for years, too, even if his being off in Boston the last four years would also mean that they wouldn't have seen much of each other in a long while.

"Is Sam here yet?" Dora asked as she and the guys walked in and Maya moved to shut the door.

"Not yet, he… uh…" she blinked, spotting a car coming up the lane. "Actually, I think that's him now…" she pointed, just as the dogs shot past her. They _loved_ their Sammy boy.

"I'll get them!" Dora headed after them. Maya turned to the guys, smirking in the moment she realized that, discounting herself and Lucas, they were all the other 'band guys.' Kayla's boyfriend, Riley's boyfriend, Nadine's husband… She also noticed now the bags they were all lugging.

"Did _anyone_ bring like vegetables or something?" she shook her head, seeing what they'd brought.

"There's a lot of us," Zay shrugged in response.

"I would have thought you'd be the responsible one here, my sweater vested friend," she smirked, tapping Will's arm.

"I brought chips… Potato _and_ corn," he declared like 'see, vegetables' before smiling.

"Yeah, I'm instigating a jogging break between movies," she squinted at him, sending them off to find the girls in the basement before moving to encounter their new _new _arrivals_._

The dogs looked as though they didn't know what to do with themselves anymore, discovering more new people, and they'd only met three so far. Right now, they were acclimating to the Schmidt twins, Sam's new friends, Josiah and Deanna. It was probably just as well that they had something to occupy them in the moment. They'd never been here before, and at the moment their friend was busy showing something from his bag to Dora. Lucas' cousin looked excited by what she saw at least… _One of these days I really am going to have to nudge you two if you won't both tell each other how you feel…_ It was almost painful now.

"Hey, Sammy?" Maya called to her brother, who blinked and turned to look at her. She turned her eyes toward the pair with the dogs. _Going to introduce us?_ Dora took the bags from him and he came forward.

"Guys, hey, this is my sister, Maya," Sam told the twins. "The one I told you about, this is her house… obviously…" he frowned to himself.

"_Our_ house," Maya corrected with a smile before moving toward the newcomers. The boy set Trix back down on the grass and held out his hand. Maya gave it a shake.

"Hi, I'm Josiah," he nodded.

"Deanna," his sister held her hand up in a small wave, still holding Lou.

What little she knew of them, through Sam, other than the fact that they'd been living in several countries, following their mother's deployments, was that the two of them had always been very close, which she supposed was only natural, under the circumstances. She had seen her own twin sisters grow so attached to one another over the six years of their lives so far, and she could only imagine what it might have been like for them if they were taken from place to place, always having to start over. If they'd depended on one another a lot before, then it would be an even tighter bond now. They'd also shared countless interests, from books and movies and games, to sports, and now to careers, as they both studied in the same program, with the prospect of going into business together in the future. Fraternal as they were, they could have been grown of the same egg.

They'd barely made it into the house that Dora pointed out another car coming, sending Maya to once again step out of the house and see who it would be. Who it was, in this case, was Rebecca Fitz and her new boyfriend, Jax. After the discovery of her breakup with Joey Garcia back in New York, and the circumstances behind it, they hadn't been so surprised when she started to talk about this guy who worked with her at the restaurant which had brought her back to Austin to live over the summer. Maybe after how her relationship had been left stagnating for so long, when she'd gone and met this new person, who actually made her feel something again, it gave her the push she needed, to lean into what was a whirlwind of a romance. They hadn't met him yet, but everything they'd heard of him said that he was a real good guy, and now that she saw him, saw the way he and Rebecca were together… Yeah, she could see it. He would fit right in.

"Aren't you coming?" Rebecca asked, as she and Jax carried their bags toward the house.

"I'm going to stay out here, I'm sure there's going to be another…" Maya pointed over her shoulder.

"There's another car," Jax pointed past her.

"See?" Maya smiled to Rebecca before looking to see who it was. For a second, seeing Bishop's car, she thought Lucas was arriving, but then she remembered. "Oh, boy…" she sighed. "Go on, you can show him around," she told Rebecca before moving back in wait of the next group.

Maya had run into plenty of Lucas' old classmates from Houston over the years, some of them popping up at the house from time to time, mostly at parties, Halloween or otherwise, or at the university here and there, the café, the library, outside classrooms… She was familiar enough with Simon Shin that she welcomed him with a hug, same as she did with Bishop. The girls on the other hand… She'd never actually spoken to either of them, and she really didn't know how this would go, especially with the blonde standing next to the car, staring at her like she was trying to keep it together. She and her friend finally came up after the guys had had their turns saying hello.

"Hey, Josie and Zelda, yeah?" she spoke first. "I'm Maya…" Josie was speechless, which, going from the look her friend was giving, was out of the ordinary.

"It's nice to meet you," Zelda finally spoke for them. "Lucas talks about you all the time."

"Please, go on in, a bunch of the others have arrived already, I'm just waiting for the next car so I can direct them," Maya gestured to the now six cars parked nearby. By her count, there would be ten by the time everyone was here. It worked in their favor that they did have space, if they were careful about it.

After Lucas' classmates had gone inside, she really wished he would finally arrive. When she saw one, and then two, and then three cars coming along like they were trailing after each other, and she recognized them all, she had to resolve herself to his arriving last. That was alright though, because those three cars were all arriving right out of Houston, carrying a great many of her dearest friends.

Feeling very much like she should have borrowed Kayla's drumsticks to direct them, she had seen the three cars finally come to a stop before spilling out their passengers. From the first came Franny and the girls of Weaver Kings, Lily, Catriona, and Victoria. The second was Sophie's car, bringing along her wife, Chiara, and the newest transplants into Houston, Asher and Ray. The third brought along two former co-workers and a former bandmate, as Leona emerged, followed by Willow and Lion.

It was impossible to decide where to go first, and the next thing she knew Maya was stuck in the middle of a pile up of a hug, with new arms coming and going on every side and too many voices for her to sort out except to know that every single one of them was excited to see her. All she could do was pick out words, and the ones she retained were 'candy,' 'chocolate,' 'movie,' 'practice,' 'drive,' 'house,' and… 'baby?'

"Woah, woah, time out, hey!" she called over all of them. "Someone said 'baby,' who said…"

"Who do you think?" Willow laughed, hand in the air.

"Are you serious? Again?" Maya blinked, looking at her and then Lion. Already they had Zola, who was somehow already two and a half, and then Sekani, who wouldn't be turning one until November.

"Last one though," Lion shook his head, making a snipping motion with his fingers that made Asher and Ray cringe, while some of the girls laughed.

The way they all went up to the house with the bags of treats they'd brought along, Maya kept thinking they were prepping to service the whole of Austin's trick or treaters in a few weeks' time. Mostly though, what she thought about most was that there were now thirty people in or around her house, and none of them was Lucas. He would be next though. All that were missing were his local classmates and him. He'd texted her when they'd finally left school, and barring any heavy traffic, they couldn't be too far away…

Finally, she spotted the car coming up the lane and she breathed out, moving to point the way toward their parking spot. At least she knew these two by now. More than once, Robbie and Ramona had stayed around for dinner after dropping off Lucas, just as she and Sam had been beckoned to join them for dinner whenever Lucas dropped them off at their place.

"Last ones?" Lucas guessed as he climbed out of the car and was greeted by a very welcoming kiss from his fiancée.

"I haven't even gone in there yet and it's stressing me out," Maya admitted. "I don't know why, I mean we've had parties with _way_ more people… Then again, so far, none of them had been you," she beamed up at him. Lucas laughed.

"Well, I'm here now. So, how was practice?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	19. Their Tradition For Movies

January 19th 2020

_Chapter 19  
Their Tradition For Movies_

"No, you heard me right," Lucas chuckled, even as he scanned through the list he'd made before calling the pizza place. "Sure, that'll be fine. Yeah. Great, thanks, Marco. Say hi to your mom. Bye."

"You look like you just defused a bomb or something," Sam declared, standing nearby as he'd hung up with his former classmate. Lucas held up the order list as though to say 'didn't I?' Just reaching some kind of agreement among the thirty-three of them about what they wanted and what they'd need to order had made him see how much the bigger the group was, the harder it was to get a straightforward answer. Add to this what one might call 'disruptors,' who would put ideas forward which suddenly sent them back to the beginning, or would simply not budge and insist on getting certain toppings even if it meant they would be the only ones who ate it… It was a good thing at least that Marco and his parents – who ran the pizzeria – were good about facilitating these requests.

"How's it looking back there?" Lucas asked, nodding back to the living room, where he could hear the drone of many voices talking at once.

"They're picking movies," Sam sighed.

"Is that why you came out here?" Lucas guessed, reading a flash of being overwhelmed off his brother.

"Yeah…"

"Help me with the coolers?" Lucas pointed to the basement door. Sam followed at once, a relieved smile on his face. They'd had to borrow a few, from his parents, and Maya's, and the Matthews… There were several bags of ice in the basement freezer, which Lucas and Sam now emptied in each cooler before grabbing the cans and bottles from the fridge and settling them in the ice.

"Drivers and Minors cooler?" Sam guessed, pointing to one of them. Lucas nodded. "Any of them staying overnight?"

"Maybe…" They hadn't stocked on sleeping bags or anything, but they could always make things work. "Junior said he'd come and pick up Dora whenever we're done out here." Looking up after he said this, Lucas just smirked, seeing the tail end of the thought which had just flitted across Sam's face. He stood up straight now.

"Don't even say it," he pointed to Lucas.

"Wasn't going to," he laughed, hoisting up the first of the filled coolers and heading up the stairs.

Back in the living room, Maya had finally submitted fully to the madness and climbed to stand on top of the coffee table to get high ground in conducting this movie search. By now, she was not above giving some of the debaters some pointed looks like 'I _know_ you're better than this.' The shame act didn't solve so much, and she instantly wished they would have sorted out the movie selection before tonight. She was also trying not to let herself get caught up in her own head, where the spotlight was on whether her inability to corral a group of their friends, some of them as close to her as family, signalled she might have been in over her head with running Stage Ready. As soon as she'd given the thought any leg room though, the 'bouncer' in her head swept in like 'get over yourself, Hart, you've got this.'

"Hey, hey! _Hey!_" she shouted, pulling in every bit of her power to project her voice. It worked, bringing silence over the room, broken only by the barking of confusion from the dogs. They quickly calmed, in the arms of Zelda and Ramona, even as Maya spotted Lucas and Sam popping up from the basement with a cooler each. "Thank you," she breathed, taking a moment to enjoy the quiet before starting again. "Here's the plan. I'm calling out the titles I heard the most, and you all pick one. Whatever two have the most votes, we watch those. Do we have a deal?"

There was a bit of grumbling in places, but finally they were on board. The choices were offered and the votes cast, and by the time the last of the coolers was brought up and opened for the picking, they had their movies.

"Thank you for your cooperation," Maya breathed, bowing her arms like the final flourish of the conductor before hopping off the coffee table. Catching Lucas' eye from across the room, and his signing of 'I love you so much,' she was all smiles again.

They'd had countless movie nights over the years, but this was without a doubt the most chaotic one they'd had. It was really just halfway between a quiet night with friends and a party. A lot of these people had never met before, which led to a lot of conversations between people they'd never known in the same circles. Some of them had not met but they had still heard about one or the other, through Maya or Lucas or both of them. It kept them entertained until the pizza would arrive, just as it kept them from taking a dive into the hoard of candy and other snacks reserved for the movie portion of this movie night.

"Who's that girl over there, the blonde? She keeps staring at us," Rosa asked Maya, coming to join her where she sat with Willow and Nadine. Maya didn't even have to look.

"That'll be Josie," Maya quietly replied, like she feared her voice might carry and reach the girl presently rummaging through one of the coolers.

"Oh… Right," Rosa looked back again, and Maya and Nadine both simultaneously reached for their band mate and pulled her to sit with them.

"Be cool, be cool," Maya told her. Willow swallowed back a giggle at this, looking luminously happy to be among this group again.

"She's not that bad," she insisted, getting a look from the other three. "She's not, okay, it's just… she's like a social sponge. You get her with the right people long enough, she'll be fine, it just takes her a while. Keep feeding her the good, it might stick one of these days." There was a pause at this, like they couldn't have heard right. It sounded like she actually knew her.

"How do you…" Rosa started to ask.

"She lived across the street from my grandparents' when we were growing up," Willow revealed. "They'd babysit her all the time, then I did, too, when I was old enough. We sort of lost touch when I moved out and got my own place, but we'd still talk whenever we ran into each other back around my grandparents' and her folks' homes. I'm the one who told her about TXNY in the first place."

"This is wild…" Nadine had to laugh.

"I had no idea," Maya blinked. "I mean she never said…" Surely, if she'd told Lucas about this connection he would have passed it on.

"I'm not surprised," Willow shrugged. "I told you, she's not that bad." Maya could get that now. Everything she knew of this girl, it would seem like she'd be letting people know left and right that she'd known one of the girls from TXNY since they were little, that they'd grown together, like the greatest ticket to raise her own social standing. Instead, she had been holding on to it like something precious and all hers. She cared that much about Willow.

"But we never met her. Your wedding, birthdays and baptisms…"

"She was at the wedding," Willow nodded. "Just bring in the hair, loosen the posture, shrink the heels…" It took a moment but… yeah… she _had_ seen her there. _Josephine…_ It was like they were two completely different people, the truth and the disguise. She couldn't say what made her so insistent on favoring the lie, but maybe there really was more to her than what she tried to make the world believe.

Dylan and Asher had volunteered to go out and watch for the pizza delivery, knowing that there would be a lot and that there would be no space for that car to get anywhere near the house. The money had been collected from everyone, split evenly, and finally there was a shout from outside, alerting them that dinner was arriving.

"I swear we never had this much food at any of the parties," Maya blinked as she watched Dylan and Asher bring in two stacks of pizza boxes.

"At least they're taking turns," Lucas noted as they watched everyone sort of line up, grabbing a plate and napkin – already paired – before pulling one or two slices from the various boxes and finding a place to sit around the living room. "Maybe you scared them into behaving," he smirked.

"If I ever get to use my degree, I'll get to do it again… minus the scaring," she smiled to herself, more so as he kissed the top of her head.

"I know you will."

Once everyone had gotten their helping of pizza – or started on their salad, as some had ordered one – they were finally able to put the 'movie' back into movie night, with their first title being the one which had landed in second place over the vote. As much as there had been arguing earlier, everyone seemed to get into it, settling the house into something like peace.

They couldn't have asked for a better end to the week. Pizza, and drinks, and candy, and friends, and movies… If it wasn't so much work to put together, they would do it every week.

Lucas and Maya had managed to retain their usual spot on the couch, in no small part thanks to Sam knowingly playing seat saver for them as soon as everyone had started to go and get seated. This in turn had led to his finding a spot thanks to Dora, who had ensured to keep space at her side on the floor.

_"Do you think they realize how close they're sitting?" _Maya would casually sign to Lucas, nodding to the pair on the ground, shoulder to shoulder like it was the most natural thing in the world.

_"I'm not going to tell them,"_ Lucas replied with an innocent look before taking a bite of his pizza slice. By the time the plates were gone, Maya was leaning to his shoulder as he had his arm around her. It was a questionable split as to what they paid most attention to, the movie or their guests.

They really couldn't have asked for anything better than this. Alright, if they were being in any way nitpicky, they might say that it _could_ get better, because they did have other people out there, people they would have loved to have here on this night. Some of them, like Farkle and Isadora, were simply too far away, while some, like others of Lucas' cousins, like Joseph Hillard or Junior and Alex Cassidy, who would have been here if not for conflicts of schedule. But absences aside, they _had_ pulled together thirty of their closest friends and family, and that was massive and wonderful. There were some here they were getting used to have nearby again, and some they were having to get used not to see so often anymore, which made their presence here tonight important on different but equally valuable levels.

The candy and the snacks had been broken into somewhere in that first movie, after they'd finished laying waste to the pizza boxes, and already by the end of that first movie they started to believe maybe they _wouldn't_ have leftovers for Halloween after all.

As soon as credits rolled, it was off to the races, as several of them sped off to use the bathroom. The girls were directed upstairs, the guys to the basement, leaving the group out of Houston to reminisce on old Halloween parties.

"They're going to miss the end credit scenes!" Zay protested, shaking his head in despair.

"So, hit pause," Nadine smirked at her husband before getting up to join the line up the stairs.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	20. Their Tradition For Always

January 20th 2020

_Chapter 20  
Their Tradition For Always_

With how they were left to wait between the movies, either waiting to get into or having returned from the bathroom upstairs or below, the sitting arrangements had been jumbled around in places by the time the second movie started.

Most notably - maybe because they couldn't help being aware of her presence - Josie had ended up sitting next to Willow and Lion. It seemed that at some point while they had been queued up for their turn upstairs, Josie had discovered that her former neighbor was expecting her third child. The news, the great news, yes, could have no other effect but to make someone happy when it was attached to someone you cared about, and since she had heard it, she had been keeping near to the mother to be, which was more than fine by Willow herself.

"You're kidding," Lucas had reacted, when Maya had pulled him into the kitchen and told him about the connection they had been unaware of. Maya had shushed him, so not to have anyone hear them.

"I know! If I hadn't heard it from Willow I would have thought it was a joke."

"Was she at the wedding?" he'd frowned, trying to recall.

"Yeah, she... Hang on," she pulled her phone from her pocket, opening her photos and searching the folder marked Willow & Lion. She had everything here, everything relating to the two of them, their children... Scrolling back, she'd come across the wedding pictures, and within those, she was almost sure she had to have one where... "Here, see?" she'd pointed. He had taken the phone from her, zoomed in the image, and even looking at it this way he had trouble believing this meek looking girl was his classmate with the fish hook smile, prowling for guys to catch back in the day. "That was that girl..." he tried to remember her name, which came back to him even as Maya slowly drew it out for him.

"Josephine," she'd nodded. Even as they had gone back to the living room, he was kind of gobsmacked, and he had to will himself not to stare to smaller couch where his classmate sat with Willow and Lion. He could see as well as Maya did, just sitting and talking with her old friend, she looked different. It was subtle, but they could kind of see it better now, the bridge between Josie and Josephine.

With the start of the second movie, their top choice, the evening progressed smoothly into more of everything, from the snacks and the drinks but mostly to chatter and laughter, instigated by Zay and Dylan's drinking game throughout the movie. Their currency involved gummy worms, pretzels, and root beer, agreeing that the way things were headed, they would be passed out within five minutes otherwise. Soon, others were joining in, which only made things sillier.

When the movie was over, they knew it wouldn't be long before people started to clear out. Those who had to drive back to Houston especially would have a long drive ahead of them, so they could only thank them for coming and send them on their way.

"You guys are coming up to see us in a couple weeks, remember that," Sophie told Maya as they walked toward her car.

"Yes, Officer," Maya teased with a grin, making her redheaded friend laugh before hugging her.

"It's just not the same without you guys, you know that?" Sophie spoke at her ear.

"I can say the same out here," Maya nodded.

Behind them, Asher and Ray were telling Lucas about how they had found a couple of things accidentally left on the closet shelf of the room that had once been his and Maya's and now belonged to the two of them guys. Much as they had expected Sophie and Chiara to take the room, the largest of the four in the Houston house, they had ended up keeping their same room, the second largest. It was just the space they had created for themselves, together, and they hadn't been willing to part with it just yet. So, they had given their temporary/potentially semi-permanent new roommates the recently vacated room.

"Anything interesting?" Lucas asked, curious. Ray chuckled, while Asher leaned to whisper to his old friend, who blinked. "Yeah, can you just hold on to those until we drop by?" he scratched at his ear, trying to play it cool.

"You got it," Asher tapped his arm.

They said their goodbyes to Franny and the Weaver Kings girls. With the rest of them back here now, and those four off in Houston, Franny had gotten much closer to the Australian trio. She was very close to Catriona King especially, of course, with the two of them dating still, but she had taken it one step further in essentially becoming their manager. Lily had asked her to do it, admitting herself that she didn't feel at ease with that side of trying to get their group out there, while Franny showed herself to have the drive for it. The rest came naturally.

"Isabel sends her regards," Leona told Maya as they were hugging next to Bishop's car. "I think she misses having you and Lion back at the restaurant almost as much as I do."

"Troubles with the new hires?" Maya smirked.

"They're alright," Leona shrugged, and even in that little voice of hers she couldn't hide the undertone there. Maya tried very hard not to feel happiness at the thought that she was missed, and only succeeded for the fact that she missed all of them just as much, if not more.

"See you guys on Tuesday, yeah?" Lucas told Bishop and Simon as they waited for the last of their group to come and join them to they could head back.

"I don't know why I keep forgetting you don't have class on Mondays," Bishop nodded.

"Thank you for inviting me," Simon told Lucas.

"Yeah, anytime," Lucas smiled. "Next time, there won't be thirty-odd people around, might be good, you know?" Simon was all for it, same as Bishop.

"You go on ahead," Josie had finally appeared, Zelda at her side. "We got another ride," she gestured back to where Willow and Lion were chatting with Maya near their car.

"Alright, see you then," Bishop didn't have to be told twice, and he got in the car along with Leona and Simon, and they were soon off.

"Did you guys have fun tonight?" Lucas asked, as he walked with the two girls toward the other car. As far as he knew, Josie wasn't aware that they now knew her 'secret,' but he still couldn't help but see her differently now that he knew there was more to this story than what she'd shown so far. It wasn't that he had treated her badly before, but she hadn't inspired much in the way of openness and friendliness, and now…

"I might not eat candy again for days…" Zelda hummed, which easily doubled for 'yes, very much.'

"You have a beautiful home," Josie declared. "You must be very happy here."

"Yeah, we are," he smiled. "You guys are welcome anytime," he went on, and he genuinely meant it. Josie looked sort of surprised at this, but also, if possible, humbled, as though she never expected this to be the case if it wasn't in the midst of a big gathering where the invitation was almost courtesy. She might have been more surprised at receiving that open invitation than he was at giving it.

"Cool… Okay…" she simply said before following Zelda off to Willow and Lion's car.

With the last of their Houston contingent off on its way home, they had trimmed down from a loaded thirty-three to a still sizable eighteen. Rebecca and her boyfriend soon took off, giving a lift home to Dylan, Riley, and Rosa, and then Will and Kayla followed right after, taking them down to eleven, most of them being some of their newest acquaintances. Maya, Lucas, and Sam were joined in cleaning up by Dora, and Zay and Nadine, and Maeve, and Josiah and Deanna, and Robbie and Ramona.

"You guys can go, really," Lucas told his classmates and his co-worker. "We've got this."

"It's alright, we want to help," Robbie told him, pulling his shoulder-length mass of electric blue hair into a short ponytail on top of his head. It was always such a curious contrast to the rest of his style, favoring dress shirts and ties, and suspenders on top, but then on him, the whole thing together just worked. "Plus, it might be good for us to digest some more before hitting the road," he went on, looking to his wife, who definitely looked to be regretting some of her choices that night.

"Is that one of yours?" Maeve asked, joining Maya in flattening the pizza boxes for recycling.

"Huh?"

"The song you're humming," Maeve clarified.

"Oh… Yeah, sort of. It will be, if I finish it," she explained.

"You should. It sounds great so far," Maeve informed her, making Maya laugh.

"Thanks. One thing's for sure, once I start, it's hard for my brain to let it go, so…"

"Yeah, I get that, too. Except it's just that I think of a song and then I can't stop hearing it in my head all day. I've had that one you guys were playing in the basement earlier just on loop all night. It's really catchy, I'll have to look it up when I get home."

"I can send them to you if you want," Maya told Lucas' co-worker, finding herself once again thinking of the resemblance with Rosa. With how the night had revealed a connection between Willow and Josie, she half expected to discover the two of them were actually related, but for all she knew of them both, she was secure enough in the likelihood that this was a purely coincidental resemblance.

When Maeve had gone on home, and Robbie and Ramona not far behind, Zay and Nadine had offered to drive Dora home, only to have Maya and Lucas presented with a request from their young charge. Sam had been talking with his friends and wanted to know if the three of them might be able to stay the night, for a sleepover.

"Uh, if it's alright with your parents, sure?" Maya told Dora and the twins, turning to Lucas to confirm at the same time that he was also on board.

"Fine by me, yeah," he nodded.

While Maya had seen Zay and Nadine off to their car, Lucas had stood by to talk with his uncle Emmett and confirm they were okay keeping Dora overnight, before doing the same with Josiah and Deanna's aunt. They had moved in with her upon getting into college out here. The plan was for them to spend a year there with her before they'd go ahead and get a place of their own. When all parties had been informed and said yes, Sam had gone ahead and taken care to get his friends settled in. Lucas agreed to have it so that Josiah would spend the night in Sam's room, while Dora and Deanna would be settled into the third/unoccupied bedroom. Maya would lend the girls something to change into for the night.

"So…" she breathed with the relief of twenty-some less voices buzzing through the house as she came back down the stairs.

"Did _you_ have fun tonight?" Lucas smiled, putting his arms around his fiancée.

"Oh, yeah," she smiled back. "But do you know what I'm thinking right now?"

"It's a shame that there's four kids in this house right now?" he guessed, making her laugh.

"Maybe that… a little…" she agreed. "I'm also thinking that I'm not _that_ tired… and beyond all expectations, I could go for more candy…"

"Movie night: overtime round?" Lucas nodded to the couch.

"Yes, so much…" she bowed her head, bursting in giggles as he lifted her up and carried her back to their spot.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	21. Their Tradition For Them

**_A/N: The newest chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_**

* * *

January 21st 2020

_Chapter 21  
Their Tradition For Them_

With just him and her curled up on the couch together, a movie on the screen, late on a Friday night at home, it was very easy to forget about anyone else being around and just enjoy this moment they were having together. Lucas wouldn't be thinking about how he had to work in the morning, and Maya wouldn't be thinking about what she wanted to get done on her first official weekend off now that she was out of school and had a regular Monday to Friday job. The only things that concerned them now, well… Maya was thinking about whether it would be possible for her to reach the bag of M&M's on the coffee table without having to disrupt her position at the moment, so precisely comfortable as she was, surrounded by her fiancé's arms. Lucas thought about how he could not find any other instance able to make him as contented as he was now while exerting so little effort. Here was this person, held close to him, alive with warmth and breath, and so familiar to him after all these years that it was really all he needed, him and her like this.

A turn of the head, eyes meeting, would be all the spark they'd need to forget all about that movie. She'd looked up at him, and he'd smiled, kissed her forehead, and then _she'd_ smiled, crooking her finger to make him come closer. He'd kissed her properly, once, and she'd turned her head about, the better to do it again, and then again some more, and given all of a minute or two more they may well have gone so much further.

"Hey, guys?" Sam's voice was heard, along with steps on the stairs, and the world came back in the blink of an eye. Maya and Lucas pulled apart and sat up, trying to play it cool, especially when they saw Sam and his friends were all up there, looking down at them.

"What up…" Maya casually coughed, sneaking a look back to Lucas, who was giving a similar performance.

"Can we go to the campfire?" Sam asked, while Dora and the twins all looked like they were trying not to laugh behind him.

"Have you, uh… have you ever lit a fire?" Lucas asked, grasping on to responsibility like a lifeline.

"Our mother taught us," Deanna raised her hand while her brother nodded.

"Right, okay. I'll just go with you just in case, yeah?" Lucas turned to Maya with a tip of the head.

"Let's go," she agreed, running a hand through her hair to mask a long sigh.

They soon took off, six humans, two dogs, blankets and other supplies in hand, walking from the house and down the winding path toward the campfire site. As they went, leading the way hand in hand, Maya and Lucas could hear Sam and Dora talking to Josiah and Deanna, sharing the idea they had been turning over in their heads for weeks already, to bring a bit more to the site. As Dora had been working more and more with her mother, learning from her and improving her own wood working skills, she had been teamed up with Sam so he might draw plans for some campfire chairs they might then build together.

"We should go back to the house after the fire's lit," Lucas whispered to Maya as they walked, keeping an eye on the dogs weaving along ahead of them.

"Liking this plan so far," she whispered back, raising a smirk toward him.

"Not for that," he laughed, more so when she made a pitifully disappointed sound. "I was just thinking that it might be a good time for the junior crafters back there to make a move."

"Might be, except what about the others?" Maya nodded. Lucas turned his head, looking to the quartet following them.

"I don't know, they're not blind, maybe they'll be thinking the same thing," he whispered, looking back to her again.

"Yeah, that won't be obvious at all," Maya snorted. She didn't need to look at him to know he'd be giving her a look that boiled down to something like 'well, you have a better idea.' "So long as you and I get to go back to that couch, I'm willing to try anything," she finally settled, and he brought her hand up so he could kiss it.

They reached the site, where they watched the Schmidt twins demonstrate they did indeed know perfectly well how to get the fire going securely and with ease. So, on that note, Maya and Lucas bowed out, leaving the friends to their time by the fire. Even as they were walking back toward the house they could catch the sound of voices and laughter in the distance as the four of them sat around the dancing flames. Trix and Lou had chosen to return to the house, too, following behind their favorite humans.

"So, are we…" Maya asked, pointing to the television, where their movie remained on pause. It wasn't as though they had paid much attention after a while, as they had become entirely more interested in one another.

"We could," Lucas nodded, moving to sit in his spot as she followed and sat, turned sideways to face him, one leg bent in, the other dangling off the couch. "We could also just let it play and keep ignoring it like we did before…"

"Keep going," she nodded with an overly intrigued face he couldn't keep from grinning at.

"I'd also be happy to hear about your day," he shrugged. It had been one of those small pleasures about living together, especially now, with it being just the two of them and Sam, and with their lives seeming so different from one another's now that they weren't in school together anymore. They would get to come home and hear from the other about what they had done, how their day had gone. They hadn't really been able to do that today, with all their friends being here, and now that they had the chance to stop, to breathe and just talk…

"Right, day first, then we ignore the movie," she waved dismissively toward the screen. He nodded in agreement. "Well, _my_ day…" she reflected, thinking back to what had come _before_ the campfire, and the movies, the food, the friends, before band practice… "A lot of phone calls," she hummed, like that old headache was trying to reclaim its hold on her. "Like a _lot_. Percentage on good to bad is still being reviewed."

"But it's coming together?" Lucas asked. She'd only been at it a week, officially, but he knew her enough that was enough for the likes of her to make miracles happen.

"Getting there, yeah," she told him, showing that confidence was indeed alive and well. "Far from being done though, I mean this is… I've never done anything this massive before, and I don't want to miss any steps along the way and have the whole thing just crash on me. Just getting a team together, getting the right people, convincing them to back me up on this…" she motioned to indicate how huge her head was starting to feel, for all the things she had to juggle.

"You've got two days off now," he reminded her, lightly prodding at her bent knee. "You get to clear your head, go back in on Monday and just…" he swooped his hand in an arc like a bird taking off in flight. He could just see her thinking 'either that or crash and burn' without saying it. He reached over, hooking his finger under her chin, leaning in to kiss her. 'You got this,' it said, and she just smiled, returning the favor.

"Started writing a new song…" she revealed, soon after. "Back at the theater, when I was waiting to leave."

"You did?" he smiled, curious.

"Just parts of it so far, but I should have it almost set by next practice."

"Can I hear it?"

"You hang out with dogs too much, the puppy eyes are strong," she laughed, waving her hand his way.

"That's just my face," he shrugged, pulling another chuckle out of her.

"True," she agreed. "Come on," she stood and got a hold of his hand so he'd follow.

They went on down to the basement, where Maya pointed for Lucas to sit on the drum stool, which he did, casually prodding one of the cymbals and causing waves of sound, while she picked up her guitar and set the strap over her shoulder. When she cleared her throat, he pulled his hands back in his lap and looked up attentively, making her smile.

"It's not a lot yet," she insisted.

"That's fine. I like seeing the progress," he told her.

"Right, okay," she smiled, taking a breath as she called up the new melody in her mind.

It wasn't hard. Whenever she would get that feeling, starting her on the path of those new songs, the notes and the words would just roll ceaselessly in her head until she got them out and formed them into something cohesive. Some could all fall through in one go, some could take weeks… Those were an exercise in not losing her mind, but when they were done… They could be some of her favorites. Not all of them even ended up being performed with the band, but they existed, and she would just keep telling herself that their time would come when it was right.

She played her little bit of a song for him. She didn't have much for words just yet, and she'd just sort of half sing the ones she had, here and there. It was the first time she actually played it, after having thought about it in her office, and told the girls about it, and as she might have hoped it did seem to send her fingers flying over that guitar, expanding on what she had, like a bridge had been built and she could now travel on the next stretch of road.

"And… yeah… that's what I got," Maya breathed in when she was done, grabbing a pad and paper and scribbling down the new parts after swinging her guitar around and out of the way.

"How bored were you at work?" Lucas stood from the stool. "That was great!"

"I wasn't _bored_," she shrugged. "Mostly just… all phoned out… and wanting to get home already…"

"So your brain went to its happy place?" he suggested.

"Something like that," she agreed, finishing with her notes and putting those and the instrument back in their place. "How long do we wait before we get them to come back here?" she wondered, thinking of Sam and the others. She didn't even know what time it was anymore, and by the way he pulled out his phone and checked, neither did he.

"An hour?" he suggested.

"Sounds good," she nodded once she'd seen the time, too. "Now… a very important use of this time…" she sidled up to him, tracing the collar of his shirt for a moment before turning her eyes up to meet his. "How was _your_ day?" she smiled.

"Good… Long, but the good kind," he declared, smiling back as he locked his arms around her in a slow sway like a dance without music. "I try not to play favorites _but_…"

"No, please, give out the medals," she incited with a smirk.

"Glad as I was to have everyone out here like that, this part right here is really just raking up all the points."

"That's just my face," she called back his earlier reply.

"Among other things," he wholeheartedly agreed, earning himself a collar tug and a kiss to make the world fade away.

Airing on the side of responsibility, they had gone back to the couch and their long abandoned movie, the better to remain aware of the time so they might go and get Sam and the others back from the campfire. When the agreed hour had elapsed, they'd slipped their shoes back on and started on the path, only to cross with the four friends making their way back together. As they would soon establish, it might have been that they would have had to go all the way to bring them back if not for the fact that Dora had dozed off and the others had decided it was time that they went back to the house.

"You okay there?" Lucas asked Sam with a smile. The boy was getting taller these days, but he was still on the leaner side, and as he walked with the sleeping Dora draped over his back like a cape, they couldn't say for sure if he would be able to make it all the way to the house like that, especially when they added stairs to the equation. The twins had helped him pick her up, and though Josiah had offered to do it, Sam had insisted he was fine. He did the same here again.

"Yeah, no problem," he nodded, his glasses one good tip down his nose away from falling off his face. Maya reached over and pushed them back up. "Thanks," Sam breathed, clearly straining even if he wouldn't admit it. Dora, for her part, had to be sound asleep to not be awakened at any time by her being jostled along like this.

They made it back to the house, like a procession or like a group off to bury a body depending on how you looked at it. When they'd gotten to the steps, Lucas had finally made the call to liberate Sam of his cousin so he could carry her upstairs in one piece. Sam, now separated from his load, stood outside for a beat, catching his breath.

"Look at you, prince charming," Maya grinned, giving her little brother a pat on the back that made him cough. "Yeah, okay, come on, we'll get you some water."

Once they'd gotten everyone squared away for the night and left them to get to sleep, both Maya and Lucas were just ready to turn in themselves. The day had really been a loaded one, by the time it had ended.

"I'm exhausted and I don't know if I can actually sleep…" Maya sighed as her head touched the pillow and she stared at the ceiling. "Do you think, just maybe, this is all that chocolate… and candy…"

"I'm not pointing fingers here, but hey…" Lucas turned to her after turning off the light. She turned as well, scooting closer until her head was on his shoulder and he could close his arms around her. "No spoon tonight?" he smiled.

"Nope. This is the cure to insomnia right here, you just watch…" she hummed.

"Hey, I trust you."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	22. Their Haunting in October

January 22nd 2020

_Chapter 22  
Their Haunting in October_

It felt as though the month had gone by them in a flash. Sure, they'd all been kept busy by any number of things in their lives, but then it was like they'd just turned around and all of a sudden Halloween was coming, which meant Maya had a party to plan… and Lucas had an anniversary to plan.

"What are we going to do after the wedding?" he'd asked out of the blue one day. Maya had looked at him, eyebrow raised in curiosity as to what he was actually referring to. "I mean with the anniversary," he'd laughed. "Are we going to have two anniversaries? November 1st and… whenever we end up getting married?"

"Why not?" she'd smiled. "We have to celebrate that new one, definitely, but I also don't know what I'd do if I didn't have that day after Halloween to look forward to…" she'd innocently declared, like she didn't know exactly the effect she'd have on him for that.

"Then I guess we'll just have to have two anniversaries," he'd smiled. "Am I going to be planning that one, too, or…"

"Let's focus on actually getting ourselves wed before whatever we'll do a year after that."

Of the many things they'd all had to focus on, all those things which made time slip by in a rush, the first had been the performance for the fundraiser. Maya had finished the new song, as predicted, over the weekend, and it had been an easy decision for the band to get it ready in time for the fundraiser. They'd taken it a step further, setting things up so that the song would then be available for purchase, with all the funds accumulated being added as contribution to the organization.

The days leading up to the show had also seen Maya finally decide to go forward on that second car. One evening, Lucas had come to get her from the theater at the end of the day, and as they'd been making their way home she'd been left to think about the upcoming gig, and any other gig that may have followed in the future. Back in Houston, they had transported their instruments whenever needed by virtue of Tracy Coleman's truck, which they'd borrow at need. And before, when it had been Maya and Riley and Nadine – and sometimes Isadora – back here in Austin, they had alternated getting rides from one parent or another with a sizable vehicle.

But they weren't kids anymore, and they really needed to be self-sufficient as they went forward with the band. They'd definitely committed to that when they'd turned down the record deal. And right now none of them who had cars had anything that would accommodate drums, a keyboard, a guitar, a bass, and a violin, and five girls to boot. If she could solve two problems in one go…

So, she was now the proud owner of a cherry red minivan. She'd named it Sparkles.

"Okay…" Lucas had blinked when she'd told him this, a big old grin on her face. "Why?"

"Hell if I know, but that's the first thing I thought of and I like it."

"Sparkles it is," he could only nod.

It had been a life changer. Gigs aside, the whole reason they'd wanted it was because they needed it. They loved their house, but it was far enough out of the way to make things complicated once he took off with the car, as they'd already established. And now that Maya had her job at the theater, and now that said job regularly required her to go from place to place to talk to people, to make purchases… She'd always been deeply at ease with public transport, but it just wasn't enough anymore.

"Can I try it?" Sam had asked when he'd seen the minivan. They'd been discussing giving him driving lessons on and off for a few weeks. He had never so much as gotten behind the wheel before. He might have tried it already, if not that he had been so focused on his impending move from Arizona to Texas, but now he was going to be sixteen before long, and it was definitely becoming more of a thing.

"Maybe start with something smaller," Maya had nodded to Lucas' car, parked next to Sparkles.

"You, me, next weekend," Lucas had vowed, extending his hand to the boy to shake on the deal. Sam clasped his hand, gladly. "I'm going to be strict," he warned, which Maya was sure was the same thing Mr. Friar had told _him_ when he'd had his first lessons, though at the same time she could see very well how this may have tied back to him and her and that accident years ago.

The following Saturday, Lucas and Sam had taken off together, using those early morning hours before Lucas was due at the bookstore for the day. As was getting to be habit, whenever she'd be alone at home, she'd ended up spending the start of her day off up in the attic, sitting at her desk. She'd been fairly engrossed in her work, but as tended to be the case in the quiet of the lane, she heard the sounds when the car came back and she walked across the attic floor to stand at the front window and look below. She'd just made it in time to see her brother walking back toward the house, and the mood could definitely be described as 'frustrated.' Lucas had looked up then, like he knew she'd be there. He'd made a gesture which didn't have to be sign language for her to interpret as 'that didn't go so well.'

"Hey, Sammy!" she'd called down the open trap door as she heard him coming up to the second floor. The response had been the sound of a door shutting, down the hall.

Both Maya and Lucas had been uncertain as to what this would mean for the future of Sam's desire for lessons. But then, the next morning, they'd come downstairs to find breakfast was ready, leaving their 'in-house chef' to wait for them while reading through the driver's manual Lucas had gotten him from the store a week before. He was as good as reset to the mood he'd been in the previous morning, eager to get started. So, they'd gone out again. It had been better. Just barely, but the improvement was enough to warrant optimism.

They had been going through this as often as they could manage, and though the progress wasn't so quick to come as they might have wanted it, Sam wasn't giving up. Maya would relay the tales of her brother's adventures in driving back to his mother, out in Tucson, for which Abigail was so very grateful.

Lucas had been enjoying these lessons with his brother. It was something he could easily see himself doing if he'd had a little brother before, or a little sister, which he now did, and so many of them, between the Harts and the Hunters. But having Sam living with them had set them with the opportunity, and he had taken it. He had watched Sam have ups and downs as he experimented with this thing that was brand new to him. He had regretted the failures much less than he'd championed the small victories. He would get there in the end, and that was what mattered.

They had a routine now, day to day, the three of them at the house. It more or less had to be that they would have him and his schedule, either at university or at work, leading a lot of how they ended up doing things. This went in particular to those four days where he'd be off at the university, and to the time he'd end up back home each day. They'd been committed to having dinner together, even if it meant eating later on some nights than on others. They made a thing of it, and it made them all happy for their own reasons.

Then on the days where Lucas was working at the bookstore, the routine was very different. There would be the weekends, where Maya wasn't working and Sam wasn't in school, and the brother and sister would get to spend time together. Part of that time would be devoted to chores and errands, yes, but also any other thing they might have felt like doing, which was one of the great highlights for the siblings who had not grown up together. Maya had always loved bringing her siblings to her favorite museums whenever they'd be in Texas with her, and it would be great. Now, when it was just her and Sam, it felt different, a brand new experience they both enjoyed greatly. Other times, of course, Sam would be off with his friends, Maya with her own, with her family, with the Friars, too…

On those weekend days like on Mondays, Lucas would be home at a more regular hour, or at least he would finish at a regular hour. A lot of those dinners would be at one's parents' house or the other's, or at Zay and Nadine's, at the apartment with Riley, Dylan, and Rosa… Sometimes _they'd_ be the hosts…

And Mondays may have become a bit of a standout in that, because they were both working, not too far from one another, Lucas would head off on his lunch hour, pick up an order on the way, and end up at the theater, where he and Maya would eat together in her office. Whether or not they managed to go out on a date from time to time, they could always count on their standing Monday lunch date.

"Do you ever just stop and look around sometimes?" Maya asked him one morning, when he moved and she knew he was awake. He made a curious sound in reply, sending his breath to tickle at the back of her neck and make her laugh. She turned around so she could see his face.

"Hey…" he smiled sleepily. "What am I looking around for?"

"Just… Looking, and seeing… It feels like we got engaged like a minute ago, but it's been months now, and we've been living here for a while, too. Do you ever stop and think 'it's all happening…'"

"I do, sometimes," he confirmed, and she smiled, leaning in to kiss him. He'd wrapped his arms closer around her, keeping her close, making her laugh into the kiss. _And I never want to stop seeing it all._

Now, here they were. Midway through October… Lucas came home from work on Saturday to find Maya standing near the mailbox, looking toward the house in what felt like great concentration. The dogs were resting at her feet, though they sat up when his car came rolling up, tails wagging in excitement. That was what finally broke Maya's concentration, and she looked at Trix and Lou before turning and spotting him coming even as he slowed to a stop next to her.

"What are you doing out here?" he asked as she came and leaned against the open window with a smile.

"Halloween ground work," she informed him, showing the sketchpad she'd had locked in her arms. Now he could see a faint sort of outline of the house, with the door, and the windows, the porch… Over this and across the grounds leading up to the house she'd started to put in a number standing decorations, and hanging decorations… "If we're going to make a statement that we're here… Hey!" she stood back up now, seeing Sam walking up from the direction of the bus stop.

When he just kept going past his sister and the car and right on to the house, Maya looked back to Lucas, who shrugged. He didn't have any more idea what that was about than she did, though he was as concerned as she was. He looked upset. Lucas gave her a nod, telling her to go on ahead and after her brother while he drove up to park. The dogs chased after Maya, who caught up to Sam as he was climbing the stairs.

"Hey, are you okay?" she touched his arm. He stalled, looking at her but not looking at her. "Okay, not okay… What's up?"

"You were right, okay?" he sighed. "I should have asked her…"

"Dora?" Maya guessed, like it could have been anybody else.

"She's been going out with a guy from her school. She's got a boyfriend now."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	23. Their Haunting in Austin

January 23rd 2020

_Chapter 23  
Their Haunting in Austin_

Lucas had actually spent much of the day – when there had been the odd lull on his floor at the bookstore – scribbling down ideas of his own for their Halloween party, their first in Austin. That party may have been firmly in Maya's territory, as it had been for years, while _he_ had claim on their anniversary plans, but that didn't mean he couldn't contribute with the odd idea. He had sort of suspected that she'd been standing out there doing exactly what she'd been doing, as the whole reason he'd been writing ideas down was that he'd figured she'd start thinking about all this before long. He'd been looking forward to sharing those ideas with her tonight.

"What's up with him?" he asked, walking into the house to find Maya sitting in the stairs, looking overall discouraged.

"Girl troubles…" she hummed.

"Oh?" Lucas hesitated. It could only have to do with…

"Dora has a boyfriend now… and it's not him," Maya revealed.

"Wait, what?" he blinked, needing to make a sort of detour in his mind as his first thought was 'Dora? A boyfriend?' as though he hadn't been trying to coax his cousin and Maya's brother together for weeks. Something about it being some other person he didn't know made it feel like his cousin was that little kid who'd run into his arms whenever they'd see each other instead of the sixteen-year-old girl who'd been helping him fix up the house most of last year. After that, his second and immediate thought went out to Sam, who was going to be hurting right about now.

"That's about all I know right now," Maya shrugged. "I just… I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do," she admitted sheepishly. "Never went through anything like that," she quietly pointed out, with a small smile to him, though this was immediately followed by a muffled groan as she felt like a slightly horrible human being for slipping in a sweet beat with her fiancé while her little brother was experiencing something his young heart and mind couldn't cope with.

"Want me to go talk to him?" Lucas pointed up the stairs.

"No, no, I'll do it, I just… ugh…" she shook out her arms after standing. "Can you go call in a pizza or something though? I had dinner started, but this feels more like a couch dinner night. Small exceptions for reasons of teenage heartbreak."

"Consider it done," he tapped her hand on the banister on his way to the kitchen.

Reaching the top of the stairs, she could faintly hear music coming from Sam's room. The door was closed. Maya stared at it, at the end of the hall, and she couldn't make herself go.

"Pull it together already," she muttered to herself, foot tip-tapping where she stood considering her options. Why was this unnerving her like this? She had played attentive ear to more than one friend's romantic woes. Sure, this was her kid brother, but it wasn't like they hadn't had to weather out much worse things, was it? This one though… there was more wiggle room on whether he could or couldn't have done anything to prevent this, so it wasn't as though he'd been completely helpless…

"Go," a whisper called from below, and she looked over the rail to find Lucas staring up at her.

"Okay, okay," she waved him off before heading toward Sam's door. Leaving no room for escape, she gave a light knock. "Hey, Sam, can I come in?" Waiting felt so long, though it was all of three or four seconds before a mumbled but audible 'yeah' allowed her to open the door.

He was laid out on his bed, shoes and all, staring at the ceiling but really staring into nothing. The source of the music was his phone, sitting next to him on the covers, like he'd only made that much effort after coming in here. Maybe it was easier than to have his thoughts be all that he could hear. Without a word, Maya worked one shoe and then the other off her brother's feet and set them on the ground, to no resistance. After removing her own and moving his phone to the nightstand, she sat and then lay down at his side. For a little while neither of them said anything or did anything. They just stared at the ceiling and listened to the music.

After a couple minutes had gone by, she'd turned on her side, propping her head up in her hand. Sam turned his head to look at her. It was all up to him whether he wanted to talk or not.

"They've been going out for a month," he finally spoke. "She'd been trying to tell me, she said, but she wanted to make sure it was for real, and then when it was…" He let out a breath. "I should have said something before…"

"Hey, I know we teased you about that a bit, I'm so sorry, Sammy. You weren't ready, it's not your fault," Maya gave his arm a squeeze.

"I guess it's normal this would have happened," Sam went on. "We go to totally different schools, so she gets to see _him_ all day, all week. They've known each other since like pre-school, and I'm just… me…"

"Don't say it like that," Maya frowned at him before resettling to put her arms around him. "I'd think you were a great guy even if you weren't my brother and I didn't love your silly butt." She took comfort in the fact that her comment had actually managed to pull a small smile out of him. They could work with that. "I know you never told Dora how you felt about her, but I think we both have a pretty good idea of what those feelings are, so I guess what it comes down to is… There's nothing you can do about this, because if you did then you wouldn't be the guy I know you are. The guy I know… I think he cares more about whether Dora's happy than whether it's with him or someone else."

"I do…" he sighed after a few seconds of silence.

"Yeah, you do," Maya set her head in the crook of his shoulder. She waited a bit before going on, though she knew she had to say it. "You're not going to want to hear it right now, but there's a chance Dora and this guy…"

"Adam," Sam provided.

"It might be they'll be together for a little while, or a long while, or for good. Whatever you do from here on out, I wouldn't want you to close yourself off to anything or anyone, on the hope that maybe they'll break up and you'll get another shot. Do you get what I'm saying?"

"I do…" he quietly replied. "I know."

"I'm not telling you to jump at the first person who looks your way. Just don't let this eat you up."

"I won't," Sam promised, whether or not he could say his heart was in it yet.

"Are you hungry?" He shrugged. "Lucas is ordering pizza," she informed him. "If he's done it right, which he will… it's kind of his thing… there'll be some of those toppings you love, and I might actually eat them. You'll get to see me make faces, so that'll be something."

"Yeah, okay," Sam spoke distantly.

"Want to help me work on the Halloween set up for the party and the trick or treaters?"

"Sure."

"Love you, Sammy…" After having remained mostly immobile since she'd come in, he tipped his head to rest against hers now, reaching his hand up hold on to her arm.

"Love you, too," he replied, making his big sister smile tremulously. "For the record, if anyone's a silly butt in this family, it's you."

"Oh, excuse me," she gasped, turning her hug from a comforting hold to a big squoosh which went and dislodged a laugh from the boy trapped in her arms. She knew this wasn't a total fix, and he would know it, too, but right here, this felt like Sam and her both acknowledging to one another that as rough as this would be… some days more than others… he was going to pull through.

When she came down the stairs a few minutes later, Maya found Lucas waiting for her, sitting on the lowermost steps. She went down until she could sit next to him.

"Well?" he asked.

"Do you know a boy in Dora's year called Adam?"

"If it's who I'm thinking about, yeah," Lucas confirmed. "Pretty sure his sister was on their school's basketball team when we were playing. Carly Anders?" It had been a few years now, but you stared at the same names on the backs of jerseys long enough and they had a way of sticking with you.

"Oh, yeah…" she blinked.

"Wait, Dora's going out with Adam Anders?" Lucas looked at her.

"Looks that way," Maya could only shrug. "Unless there's some other Adam in her class. Sam said they'd been in school together since the beginning."

"The kid used to go around with a baggie of Cheerios like a flower girl at a wedding," Lucas recalled, miming the tossing gesture, and Maya had to slap her hand over her mouth to stifle the burst of laughter this brought on.

"Please tell Sam all about that," she finally said once she could speak coherently, though even then, the thought of her brother back in his room made her sigh and lean back against the steps. "It was all going so well, wasn't it?"

"Hey," he nudged her foot with his own. "He'll be okay."

"I hope so… I want to be all confident and say he'll get past this, no problem, except…"

"Except he's your little brother," Lucas nodded.

"I can't even be upset at anyone, the whole thing just happened, no ill will, nothing like that. I just don't want him to have to feel sad like that… ever…"

"The curse of the big sister," Lucas lightly teased. Maya pointed her finger at him. _Don't you dare, Huckleberry._ "Pizza's on its way," he let her know. "Half without the Sam Special."

"And?"

"And the fries, and the desserts. No salads tonight… It's that kind of day," he looked back at her and found her smiling.

"Nailed it. Now, what movie perfectly encapsulates the mood we're going for here?"

"For Sam?" Lucas considered this for a moment. "I know I've heard him say, word for word, 'there's no bad time for Goonies,' but maybe it'd be too obvious this time."

"True, true," she agreed. It had been one of their father's favorite movies growing up, and he had managed to pass that love on to each and every one of his children, though to Sam most of all. He could recite the thing top to bottom, without visual aids. "I think in this case we might have to go with something he's never seen, something that will grab his attention and won't let go."

"Right, let's see," Lucas pulled out his phone, and the two of them sat there, browsing through options for a few minutes, until they heard steps behind them and turned to find Sam had come from his room to join them.

"Hey, dork," Maya smiled as she stood up. "Pizza will be here soon. We were just looking for a movie…"

"I texted Dora," Sam cut in, and Maya tried not to look nervous.

"Oh?" she blinked. "What'd you say?"

"I told her how we were going to be working on the Halloween party. I asked her if she wanted to come, a-and I told her she should ask and see if Adam wants to come, too." Maya looked to Lucas, still sitting there. By the time he had come to stand as well, she had climbed the two steps to reach her brother and pulled him into a hug.

"You're a good one, Sam Hart," she whispered at his ear. "Don't forget it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	24. Their Haunting in the Aisles

January 24th 2020

_Chapter 24  
Their Haunting in the Aisles_

"Mona is running late, can you cover her section?"

Lucas looked up from the computer and found Maeve standing next to the client he was in the process of assisting.

"Sure, no problem," he told her. She turned back to look at him again as she walked away, which told him she had seen something in his face and she would ask about it as soon as she got the chance. This turned out to be roughly four minutes later, after he'd sent the man off with a stack of books for his three daughters, none of them twins, who all had their birthdays in the span of a week in early November. He was still looking through the stacks, couldn't help it. A lot of the time, he'd still feel like there was more he could have suggested to one client or another after they'd gone.

"Hey," he felt a double tap on his shoulders and he turned around to see Maeve had rejoined him. "You look like you've got something going on in there," she pointed to his head. "The longer you keep it in there, it's just going to get bigger and bigger until it knocks everything else out of the way, and that's how people walk into columns," she gestured around their floor now. "We have a lot of those, and I've seen it happen… way too much times… may have experienced it personally once or twice. Protect your nose and talk?"

"I won't walk into the columns," he promised with a chuckle. "They _are_ a menace though," he agreed.

"Lucas…" she insisted.

Of course there _was_ something on his mind, but it wasn't really his to tell, was it? After what he and Maya had discovered the night before when Sam had come home, he _had_ been thinking about the whole Sam and Dora situation. He really felt so bad for Sam, though on the whole he and – in vast, vast majority – Maya had helped him get to a place where he could be mostly okay, and Dora… He hadn't even known that his cousin had been seeing the Anders kid, so he really didn't know the context of anything where _she_ was concerned. What it all came down to was that, for the time being, everything that could be done by him had already been done, and now, much as a part of him didn't want to, he had to let it go and just let those two sort things out for themselves.

"Halloween," he told Maeve, hoping to throw her off the scent. "Maya and I are having a party at our house, same as we used to back when we lived in Houston. You are invited," he declared, in a very 'this goes without saying' tone. "I need to check with Aarti and Mona, and Tanner and Julia tomorrow, to see if they're interested… and available."

"Costumes?" Maeve straightened up, and Lucas laughed. Of course she would be a Halloween fiend, too.

"Of course."

"Theme?"

"Uh, might be one, might not. I'll have to get back to you on that."

"Can I make a suggestion," Maeve raised her hand, index extended. "I do love a good zombie apocalypse."

"I think we had one of those before," Lucas smirked.

"Yeah, well, those undead suckers do tend to come back," she shrugged before spotting a woman with the all too familiar 'I need a person' look and hurrying off to assist her.

_Lucas: Party theme?_

_Maya: Need one of those._

_Lucas: Maeve wants a zombie apocalypse._

_Maya: A classic…_

_Maya: Let's do it!_

_Lucas: Great, I'll let her know._

_Maya: Braaaaains…_

He put his phone back in his pocket, trying not to let his face show too much of the smile he was feeling. Maeve was relatively fine with them using their phones for personal things while on the clock, but that was a sort of thing that said 'I trust you, so don't overdo it.' He also knew it could all come down to a customer making a comment to the wrong person, so he only ever used it for absolutely valid reasons. Halloween, in their household, absolutely counted as valid. Halloween had made everything happen for them, a whole eight years ago this year.

Every year that went by, he would get this beat of 'I can't believe it's already been this long.' He still remembered it, all of it. Her as the vampire Serafina, the Crimson Menace, him as the unfortunate victim of a beheading, thanks to her makeup magic… They had this picture somewhere at home, with him standing there and looking just a bit unhinged, his severed neck on display. Maya stood just sort of next to him but turned to face him, long hair down her back, with her hand – with those sharp looking fake long nails – poised just below his throat with appropriate menace, while her face was turned to the camera with a gaze so hypnotic as to fit her character of the night. If he had seen her for the first time that night, he would have been… well, as captivated as he'd been, having known her two years at that point.

If he ever had trouble believing it had been so long, he only had to look at that picture. He'd been sixteen, her fifteen… They really had been that small. It wasn't lost to him, in a fleeting thought, how his cousin was the age he'd been, and her brother was the age she'd been, almost like the universe trying to tell them something. _Or maybe it's not… not anymore…_

They'd burst out laughing, him and Maya, almost as soon as the picture had been taken. Looking at it now, he would look at those two little goofs, thinking about how they had no idea, neither of them, how their lives would be altered within hours of that picture. There would be a hunt for candy wrappers, and an almost kiss, and in the morning, after a lot of consultations with friends, as they'd walk off to school together on the first day of November, she would kiss him, sealing their fates.

Now they were living together, in their own house, they were engaged to be married… So much had changed over these eight years, but what stayed the same was that whether it was this year, or last year, or next year, or the one after that, or ten, twenty, thirty years from now, they would have this feeling in them that said it was only the beginning.

"What's that?" He looked up to find Aarti casually peering at the notepad where he'd been scribbling some passing ideas.

"Just some options for my fiancée and I on our anniversary," he told her, unsure whether this was the right time or place for what could easily be a long conversation, especially with Aarti. She was in her senior year in high school and a romantic to rival even the likes of Sophie 'let me fly you across the country to get your girl back' Zvolensky. Hers was an appreciation which involved knowing her way up and down the whole of the romance section like she might have written several of the books herself. Most times, she'd have one of them – her own copy or borrowed – in hand or peeking out the top of her work vest's pocket.

"Oh!" she gasped, eyes widening and more or less proving his point. She'd heard the word 'anniversary' and she was a goner. "How long?"

"Eight years," Lucas told her. "Junior year." _But we'd loved each other long before then._ "We were engaged over the summer." Aarti looked like all she wanted in that moment was to hear the whole of his and Maya's story. Once again, he was 'rescued' by the coming of a customer. The girl sped off, leaving Lucas once again to his notes.

"Hey," a voice pulled him out of his brainstorming. Looking around, he discovered Mona crouched at his side, looking through the cabinet there and rising again with a pair of books bound together with an elastic, a piece of paper also showing the name of the customer who'd had them put aside.

"You made it," Lucas nodded in greeting.

"Yeah," she sighed, running a hand over her shaved head. "Had to drive my roommate to an appointment. Thanks for covering for me."

"No problem. It's been pretty quiet."

"I see that," Mona nodded to his notes.

"Yeah, I should go around," he scanned the floor for a moment, sticking his notes in his vest pocket. "Hey, Halloween party at my house, you in?" he asked as he went around the counter.

"Can I get back to you on that?"

"You know where I work," he nodded with a smile.

He would probably never say this anywhere close to where Rosa might hear him, but he did love working here. It wasn't even about this place over Coleman's or the other way around. He loved both stores for their own qualities. He loved Coleman's for its sort of small/medium sized space, but then he also loved his new store, the breadth of it, and his floor especially. He was getting to know every corner of it pretty well, much as he'd done at his previous store, and he would make discoveries now and again…

Walking along, he would put back items left out of place, direct some customers and help others more thoroughly. All the while, he'd be playing anniversary planner at the back of his mind. It was always this sort of fine balance, at least it was what he got to notice more and more as the years went on. In the beginning, those anniversaries, those big capital D Dates, would feel like he needed to pull these huge surprises, big things to make her see the lengths she inspired him to go or something. It wasn't to say that he didn't do anything big anymore, now that they had been together for near to a decade, far from it. The difference now was simply that he and Maya both had come to a point of knowing between themselves that it wasn't important for them to end up on a boat, or on a private museum tour, or in some fancy restaurant. As they had told each other more than once, the important ingredients of a special Date, anniversary or no, were and would always be him and her. Everything after that was bonus, whether they went for some more simple bonuses or extravagant ones.

What was he going to do this year? It was the first anniversary they would have as being engaged, and as being back living in Austin, in their house… It suggested to him that he wanted to go for something a bit more special than plain. But what kind of special? They were fortunate this year so far as days of the week. Halloween landed on a Friday, their anniversary on a Saturday. He had cashed in a day off for that Saturday in question. Maybe he'd need that Sunday, too…

"What's she doing?" Aarti asked. Lucas turned, noticing her nearby and staring off somewhere with a mildly spooked look on her face. Following her line of sight, he had to smirk when he spotted Maeve casually testing out her zombie walk across the floor. They could see Mona watch her go, laughing as she went on with her shelving.

"Practicing for the apocalypse," Lucas turned to his young co-worker.

"What?" Aarti turned to him like she believed him for a second.

"Halloween," he clarified. "There's going to be a party at my house. You want to come?"

"Oh! I'll have to ask my mother."

"Alright, let me know," Lucas told her. Zombie Maeve caught them looking and gave them a good rattling walk. Aarti gulped.

"Don't like zombies…" she breathed.

"She won't bite," he assured her with a smile.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	25. Their Haunting in the Wings

January 25th 2020

_Chapter 25  
Their Haunting in the Wings_

"Wait, I think this is the wrong classroom…"

"Rosa…"

"Oh, no, wait, there he is, I see him! Oh!"

"What?"

"That was a bit louder than I thought it'd be, everyone looked at the door, I had to duck out of the way a little bit," Rosa whispered.

"He's definitely going to know I sent you now…" Maya sighed, leaning back into her chair as she switched her phone from one ear to the other.

"You're just being a good sister."

"Meddling sister," Maya adjusted. "Look, his class should be over in, I want to say, twenty minutes or so. You have the afternoon off, right? You're not just being nice?"

"Doing some of that, too," Rosa pointed out, the grin clear in her voice. "Normally I have a class this afternoon, it was cancelled ahead of time, the professor's talking at some conference in London. So, clearly, I was supposed to be here today, being a discreet non-discreet shadow friend for your little brother while he recovers from the woes of adolescent romance."

"There will be GiGi cookies delivered to you sometime this week," Maya smiled.

The call ended and she set her phone back on her desk with a small sigh. It felt like she'd been doing that all week. The more they inched toward Halloween, everything just got to feel a bit too… too much.

On the one hand, they were making great progress in their party preparations. They had decided to go for a good old zombie apocalypse, and from there they had a solid enough foundation to build from. It was a good thing she had the likes of Lucas and Sam to keep her from going overboard. If it had been up to her, she might have tried to find a way and 'bury' some zombie friends, only to have them spring forth from the ground to scare unsuspecting guests upon arrival. They had this land now, so why not? Lucas had needed to point out the various reasons 'why not,' all of them very good and obvious if she was honest. Burials aside, they really could use the area surrounding the house, so they'd have to come up with something.

As to the guests, it would be easy enough. It wouldn't be the same as it had been in Houston. For one thing, while two of their trio _were_ still in school at the moment, one of them was fifteen and, while he was getting to be more familiar with his classmates, he wasn't looking to invite anyone beyond his own friends. Then, with Lucas, it was entirely up to his classmates whether they wanted to come or not, but some of them _did_ live off in Houston and other places, and going to _this_ party would likely require them to spend the night in Austin, which would make most of them more likely to hit up any parties more local to their respective homes. He did have _some_ locals of his own though, like Robbie and Ramona, who would definitely be there, and he would have his co-workers. As for Maya, she had put the word out around the theater about her party, though she didn't know how that crowd would mix with the rest. They'd have some of their old friends there, those who lived out here, though for the first time in a near handful of years they would be missing some key faces, likely having their own party, back at the Houston house…

And then there would be costumes. She'd been poking her head in with the hair and makeup people, seeing if she might pick up any new skills. It reminded her how they had been the ones to teach her in the first place, back in the days of that haunted house for August's school, on Halloween night eight years before. This had led to her giving Lucas his infamous severed head makeup, and then on that night, after it had all been over and they'd been picking up those discarded candy wrappers…

They'd been coming up with ideas all week, her and Lucas and Sam… or trying to, at least.

Sam was still upset. He played a good game in showing himself to be dealing with this disappointment over losing his shot with Dora, and on the vast whole he _was_ okay. But there were all those spots where he just wasn't really, _really_ okay. He loved the girl, no point denying it, and now it was like as much as he'd understood he liked her… Seeing her essentially move away from him had made him realize this was more than a crush to him… and he'd blown it. He wanted her to be happy, that much was undeniable, and as far as they'd seen so far she was very happy with Adam Anders. As it turned out, being happy for her did not make him un-unhappy for himself.

And now, every time they talked about the party, Maya suspected, every time she and Lucas and Sam talked about costumes, and group costumes… it was like they were only reminding him of this new group, this new pair, and it was taking some of the heart out of him for the party. If things kept up this way, he'd spend the night holed up in his room, or up in the attic with their father's telescope.

So, yes, she had finally decided to meddle… a little. She'd texted Rosa earlier that day and asked if she might go and hang out with Sam a bit if she was available. It would be better than him wallowing in those feelings too long, wouldn't it?

She spent the better part of the afternoon, her and her assistant working with Matilda Hughes, putting the finishing touches on what they hoped to be the sort of… first flutterings of her theater baby, Stage Ready. It was all actually coming together, and by all accounts they'd be on track to start as scheduled, in January. But they needed to get the word out first, that had always been part of the process, and she'd finally had this idea about where to begin. A sort of… proof of concept… They would offer their services to local schools, many of them with shows in the works, in the run up toward the holidays. They'd be taking their workshops 'on the road,' and if all went according to plan, they'd have registrations rolling.

"Isn't that your brother?" Matilda asked as she, Maya, and Lily, were cutting through the theater on their way back toward her mother's office. Maya stalled at once, looking where Matilda had pointed.

"Yeah…" she blinked. "Be right back," she passed her laptop over to Lily, already reaching to get it from her. As she went out to find Sam, sitting out on the edge of the stage, Maya saw that he wasn't alone.

"He wanted to come here," Rosa told her, like she felt she had failed and needed to apologize. "I didn't know what else to do, so here we are…"

"Right. I'll take it from here," she gave Rosa's arm a squeeze, smiling to her friend and bandmate before approaching her brother. "Good afternoon," she crouched and sat next to Sam. "Did I overstep with Rosa?" she asked, pointing off to the retreating form of her hired shadow.

"What? No, I kind of figured you'd do it eventually, either her or Dylan," he shrugged.

"I'm nothing if not predictable?" Maya offered with a slight cringe. Sam smiled. "Alright, so if you're not here to bust me, what's going on?"

"I just didn't have any other classes today, and I needed to talk to you, so I came. I should have called, you're working…"

"I've been going non-stop since lunch, I'm due a break anyway," she reassured him. "Talk," she nodded, trying not to look too happy at the notion of her little brother seeking out her advice this way. After all this time, it still felt new to her.

"Josiah and Deanna found out about Dora's boyfriend a couple days ago, and how I invited him to the party. They think I should bring someone, too, to… even things out."

"Well, that doesn't exactly sound…" Maya frowned.

"Nothing weird," Sam cut her off, shaking his head. "I think they just feel bad and they want me to just kind of clear my head or something, to see that there's other girls out there. It's like you said, that I shouldn't tie myself down to something that might never happen."

"I did kind of say that, yeah, but don't you think it's too soon?"

"Oh, I know it is," Sam promised, and she let out a breath with a nod. "And I told them that. Except it turned out they weren't just suggesting it out of the blue, they wanted me to talk to this girl…"

"At the university?" Maya cut him off now. As far as she knew, from him, there was no other student his age in his vicinity, so who was this girl?

"Yes and no," Sam explained. "She doesn't go there, but her father's a professor and she hangs around the university to do her homework and wait for him. Deanna's seen her around a lot, that's how she knew about her. They sort of ambushed me and then I ended up having to talk to her."

"_Had_ to?" Maya asked, but then she remembered this was Sam she was talking to, and if he found himself put on the spot he wouldn't just cut and run, he'd feel he had to at least be polite for the unsuspecting girl's sake. "Right, never mind. So, what happened with…"

"Cecilia," Sam filled in. "She's fourteen, going to be fifteen in December. She lost her mom last year. I told her how I lost my dad, and we kind of went from there, talked for a while." Maya felt a strong urge to hug him here, but she resisted and let him finish instead. "I don't want to… to ask her out for a date or anything, I still…"

"I know," Maya promised.

"But she's really lonely. I can see it, I know what it looks like to carry… that…" The loss of a parent… Yeah, she knew how that went, too. "I think I could be a good friend for her. It's not what the twins had in mind, but it could be better, I think, for all of us."

"I think so, too," she smiled. Sam looked out to the empty seats out ahead of them for a beat before turning to her.

"So, I was thinking she might have fun at the Halloween party, and maybe I would invite her."

"Yeah, go for it. Do you have…"

"She gave me her number," he nodded, and she hated that her brain immediately wanted her to tease him for getting a girl's phone number. At least she hadn't said anything out loud. "But what about Dora? If Cecilia's there…"

"Sam… She has a boyfriend. She didn't need to ask you permission for that, and _you_ don't need to either, to invite a friend to a party."

"I know…" He might have known, yeah, but some part of him still clung to the hope that something might change, that they'd had some eleventh hour reprieve.

"Hey, want to stick around until I'm done here tonight? I could use your help as a recent high school student."

"Sure, okay," he shrugged.

"That's the spirit," she tapped his knee and moved to rise, offering her hand to help him up. "If I finish early enough, we can stop by and see the makeup department, we can see what you look like as a zombie."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	26. Their Haunting in Advance

January 26th 2020

_Chapter 26  
Their Haunting in Advance_

"Wakey, wakey, zombie man," Maya whispered at Lucas' ear, prodding his face until he frowned and flinched and opened his eyes to find her staring down at him with a patient smile.

"Brains…" he yawned, making her laugh.

"You want peanut butter on those? Jam?"

"Yeah, why not, I mean if you're at the point where you're eating brains, toppings won't be the worst thing, right?"

"Alright, then let's go. We have a bunch of stuff to do before we leave." Just as she pulled back and he was able to sit up, they heard a startled shout from beyond their room. As soon as Maya's face lit with giggles, Lucas knew…

"You didn't…"

"What, it's Halloween, day of the spooks," she made claw hands. The door swung open to reveal Sam standing there, in his PJs, bed hair up to eleven, holding out a trio of plastic snakes with accusation. "Oh, so that's where those went…" Maya tipped her head.

With all three of them being either in school or working for most of the day, they had decided it would be best for them to get everything started for that night ahead of time. They had seen to the indoor part the night before. It all had ended up looking great by the time they'd gone to bed, but then nighttime did amp up the creepy factor all on its own. Walking down the stairs in sunlight the next morning, it either looked completely fake all of a sudden, or somehow creepier for some reason.

"Maybe we need to put a sign out here while we're gone today," Maya told the guys as they were all three of them in the process of making the porch look like the place had been raided or condemned thanks to their zombie apocalypse.

"Like, what, 'This isn't real, please don't break in?'" Sam asked.

"Or one of those guard dog warning signs," Maya pointed at him.

"Guard dogs?" Lucas laughed, looking to the open front door, where Trix was lying on her back like a stargazer and Lou curiously prodded a toy they'd just gotten her a few days ago.

"Hey, our girls can play rough," Maya valiantly defended.

"Maybe the invaders will have bacon," Sam provided, and his sister tapped his arm like 'yeah, there you go.' Lucas held up a finger before letting his hammer drop on the ground. At once, the dogs scampered up and ran back into the house, barking wildly.

"I mean, they're very loud," Maya gestured after them before jogging off to find them and calm them down. "Better not have made a hole in the porch," she called after Lucas, who looked down along with Sam. There was a dent.

"Not a hole," Sam declared, and the brothers shared a high five before getting back to work.

Lucas had needed to bow out first, getting in his car to make his way to class. Maya and Sam had carried on a while more before they'd had to go, too. Maya dropped her brother off at _his_ school, and then it was off to the theater. It was going to be hard not to spend most of that day mostly looking forward to it being over so they could get on with their evening. It was Halloween, there were decorations everywhere, and people in costumes, and candy… Maya had her 'day costume' going, as it almost went without saying that the theater would see its people going into character mode. And much as she liked to work her whole muse persona, she couldn't wait to 'zombie up.'

Lucas was the first of them to finish that day, so after picking up the contents of a list he and Maya had been building through back and forth texts all day, he drove off to Sam's school. By this time, he would have finished with class, so Lucas went looking for him at his usual spot in the courtyard. There he found his young roommate sitting on a bench with a girl roughly his age. She had short red hair, the kind of red that could only come out of a bottle, and there was a forearm crutch left leaning against the bench.

From what Sam had been telling him and Maya, this had to be his new friend, Cecilia. They were always sort of what people noticed first when they saw her. She called them 'the change I chose and the one I didn't.' Her mother had died in a car accident, but Cecilia had been in the car, too. She'd survived, but no amount of surgeries – of which there had been several – had been able to fix everything.

As he approached them, Lucas could see that Sam was showing Cecilia one of the comics he had drawn up. He would read the dialogue aloud, in character, which made her laugh.

"Hey," Lucas called, and they both looked up. "I didn't keep you waiting too long, did I?"

"No, we just got here," Sam replied, closing the book and replacing it in a folder sticking out of his backpack. "Lucas, this is my friend, Cecilia. Cecilia, this is Lucas, my brother."

"Nice to meet you," Cecilia told Lucas, smiling.

"Yeah, same here," he smiled back. "We've heard a lot about you. Thanks for pitching in with the early show."

"There weren't a lot of houses around ours when I grew up, not much trick or treating either. This sounded like fun, so here I am." Lucas could see at once how the two of them would be such good and instant friends. They were a lot alike, he could tell after having known her for all of a minute.

The three of them left together, getting into the car and driving off home. On the ride over, Lucas was briefed on the plans the two of them had made over several days' conversations. Much as Cecilia could have pulled off a limping walk to rival all others, there were equal chances of her falling without her crutch, and no matter how much they had considered the options, none of them had worked to reasonably integrate her crutch into her costume, because what leg dragging zombie still had the presence of mind to use one of those? So, she was going to play for the other team and be a zombie hunter.

Now at least Lucas knew what Sam's side project had been. He'd been crafting something to cover Cecilia's crutch, make it look like it had been through hell with her instead of being covered with a floral print.

When they arrived at the house, they could see two people sitting on the porch. One Lucas recognized as his cousin from far up the lane, which meant the other could only be Adam Anders. _Well, here goes…_ Both he and Maya had been wondering what would happen when those four would all be in the same place. Sam had never actually met Adam yet, and Lucas wasn't even sure whether Dora knew Cecilia was even a factor. She and Sam may have strictly seen one another as friends, but her presence might go and bring certain things into focus, things which might become problems.

On the whole, it had gone about as well as it could have gone. When it came down to it, you had four kids in this, all of them being just… kind, and caring… Sam and Adam met for the first time, shook hands. Adam thanked Sam for inviting him, and Sam said it was his pleasure. Cecilia and Dora were introduced to one another, and Cecilia expressed how she'd heard a lot about Dora from Sam, while Dora said it was nice to meet her and she was glad to know any friend of Sam's. It was all very civil, but at the same time… He could see through Sam, see how nervous he had been about this moment, for the introduction to his friend as much as for Adam Anders to become a real person he knew. Lucas could see as well as Sam did that Dora's new boyfriend was actually a really good guy, well deserving of the title. On the flipside, Lucas also saw the thing he had both expected and dreaded. He knew his cousin well enough to know, even if she kept a straight face, when something managed to come and rattle her, a little or a lot. And there had been movement.

There was no time to address teenage drama, not now. They needed to finish setting up, and they had to get as much of their costumes on as they could, until Maya would arrive and get them made up the rest of the way.

"Hey, so, how much coaxing do you think it would take for the dogs to let us make them up to look like zombies, too?" Maya had joked with a smile when she'd finally come through the door and found Lucas attempting to keep Lou from eating his frayed pant leg.

"Right now, probably not m-hey!" he yanked his hand back when it nearly fell prey to the dog's teeth. "Everything's strange, so they're already a bit of a nightmare," he joked, squinting at Lou. She only stared up at him, tongue lolling out. "So much drama," he smirked, scratching at her ear before turning to Maya. "Your presence and your services are being requested upstairs," Lucas informed her.

"Work, work, work," she sighed.

"Is there glitter on your face?" he asked.

"Muse magic," she bowed her head. "No worries, I'll be scary and gross in no time. How's it going up there?" she asked now, a look of apprehension in her eyes.

"Fine, I think," Lucas nodded, setting Lou down before moving up to Maya. "Complicated, but mostly just fine. I'd say it could have been worse if it had even been bad."

"Right…" she sighed. "Come on, time to make like zombies and… make more zombies…"

Maya had been giving her brother some tips and tricks in a bit of covert training for him to be her assistant tonight. Now, as they worked their way through everyone's transformation, she was pleased to see he was enjoying himself and doing great work.

"Hey," she'd tapped his shoulder after they'd finished on Cecilia and Lucas. "How do you want to do this, with the others?" Did he want to work on Dora or Adam? Whichever way he went, there would be something to get in the way, wouldn't there?

"I can do hers," Sam shrugged, looking back to his sister after a beat. "If I do his I might end up making him look weird."

"Weirder than a zombie?" Maya intoned, trying not to laugh. "Alright, if you're sure. You know, it's kind of…"

She didn't get to finish her sentence, which might have been a good thing, as Dora and Adam walked in at this moment, ready to be zombies. So, Maya and Sam got to work.

She _would_ have mentioned how this reminded her of that night eight years prior, and she would probably have regretted it, knowing it would only upset him as the comparison inevitably would hit a wall. A fifteen-year-old Hart brought inches apart from and in contact with a sixteen-year-old Friar (Cassidy), complicated feelings in between… Only, the morning after it had been Lucas and her they had become boyfriend and girlfriend. Tomorrow morning, Sam and Dora would still be exactly what they were now.

They'd done what they could to put out the word through the area, so parents would be aware of activities going on at the house, so they might bring their kids around for some trick or treating, with candy, and games, and – of course – zombies…

"Hey, hey, our first people are coming, let's go, let's go!" Maya called out, after spotting some costumed kids and their parents making their way up the lane. Within moments, their little horde was on the march, off to take their places for Halloween part one…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	27. Their Haunting in the Lane

January 27th 2020

_Chapter 27  
Their Haunting in the Lane_

"Did you see how they ran?" When he turned around, Lucas found Missy Sanderson standing there, still laughing. The thirteen-year-old lived up the lane with her parents and grandparents and was getting to be a familiar face around the house. Maya would suggest that the arrival of a boy not much older than her in the neighborhood had only increased the girl's interest in the new people living on the lane. It wasn't as though Lucas couldn't have figured that out for himself. Every time she'd show up and say hello, her voice would barely be able to carry the words 'hi, Sam' without sounding like it had hit turbulence. Today, she was dressed not as a zombie but as what looked to be a character from some show or another that Lucas couldn't pinpoint, like he knew it was a thing, but not which one exactly.

The rule had been set back in the house that, for the most part, they were to remain in character. He saw no reason to break here, and he gave his best lurching zombie in response. Missy just looked at him, smiling. He sighed. She was too familiar with him to be spooked.

"Come on, help me out here," he whispered, so she made a gesture like 'go again.' He did, and she quickly gave a loud scream before running away.

"Zombie fiancé…" a grunt made him turn to find Maya dragging her way toward him. "Death did not do us part…" she declared in her broken zombie voice. It was very hard not to break character at that, especially as her shambling along had made her trip and he'd only managed to catch her for a moment before they'd gone and fallen in a heap together. After that, they just laughed.

"Hey…" he smiled as she tried to push her hair out of her face and he reached to assist. "Happy Spookversary," he told her, renewing her laughter. That was what they called it, of course, because this day was as important to them, in the whole timeline of their relationship. She kissed him.

"Who knew zombies had good breath like that?"

"It's the brains," he casually shrugged.

"Right," she chuckled. "Well, come on, the others are starting to arrive, so we're going to be transitioning into like… part one point five."

"A bit of this, a bit of that," he translated, indicating first the trick or treaters and their parents spread out around them and then the house behind them. Maya nodded. "On it," he resumed his zombie voice and she responded with her own growl.

It was really all she could have hoped for. She'd wanted this to be something special for the kids in the area, the kind of thing they'd look forward to in years to come, and she only had to look around to see they were all enjoying themselves. And beyond all the kids, there was the rest of her merry band of players. For knowing them in their natural state, her brother and Lucas' cousin in particular were putting in some great performances. That was the power of costumes though, wasn't it? They became another person, and that was almost like giving themselves the freedom to step out of their comfort zone.

Sam was suddenly entirely less reserved, while Dora showed an aggressive drive so unlike her usual sort of wood nymph like state. As for the newbies among them that night, they were quickly getting a feel for the two of them.

For having played against Adam's older sister, Maya could say the two of them may have clearly looked to share DNA, but there the comparisons ended. Carly Anders was what Maya could only call the Nadine Zhu of her own school, top of the class, star athlete… Her younger brother was a very sweet and caring kid, enough so that you almost felt bad for recognizing he was… well, not the brightest by any means. If he had not barely scraped by every year, he would never have managed to keep up advancing through the grades with Dora and the other kids their age. He made up for it in other places, naturally. Tonight, for instance… The kid was impressively knowledgeable on all things zombie apocalypse. And he was devoted to remaining 'authentic' through the night. He had been all about making Dora laugh – which he succeeded in doing, to the point where she could hardly breathe – back in the house, but the moment they'd gone out to greet the kids, he was all business, if the business was portraying a 'realistic' zombie.

As for Cecilia, Maya could see what Lucas had meant when he'd told her that the girl reminded him of Sam a lot. It was the kind of resemblance you would have rather they not shared, for the root of it. They were both of them just good kids who'd grown up to be driven, and imaginative, and with a blooming empathy in them… and then they'd gone through that loss. The circumstances were vastly different, one of them carrying the knowledge for so long and the other just blindsided by an accident, but the results were there, weren't they? Maya had become so familiar with her brother's face, with that underlying sort of… gap… left by the things he'd experienced, the things he had felt and still felt, and she saw it in the girl, too. Sam had seen it when he'd met her, he'd told her. _But she's really lonely. I can see it, I know what it looks like to carry… that…_

Maya knew how hard it had been for her brother to let out what he was really feeling after their father had finally passed. She couldn't say for certain what was the state of Cecilia's recovery, but for being so much like Sam that way, she could make guesses. It was bad enough to have lost her mother so suddenly like that, but then all those surgeries, the recovery… The Schmidt twins may have done more for Cecilia than for Sam without knowing it, when they'd nudged their friend in her direction. As far as this night was going, it looked like she was really thriving in her role as zombie hunter, grizzled, and limping, but so very determined to eradicate this plague of the undead. Her favorite part was easily going up to 'rescue' some of the trick or treaters.

"Woah…" Riley had not even managed to stay in character for a second upon arriving with Dylan and Rosa, who were absolutely keeping up _their_ roles. "How did you even do all this?" she asked, indicating the house and the land around it.

"Brains?" Maya sniffed at her, disguising her laugh into a grunt when her best friend of old yelped. She could pulverize hordes in video games, but a live person in front of her was as troubling as one in a movie or on television. "Good, squishy brains," Maya settled for hugging her, which seemed to do the trick. To no one's surprise, Riley was joining the ranks of the humans that night. The theme had been simple enough that way. You can be dressed as whoever you want, but you then have to turn them in either a zombie or a hunter. It was preferable if the base character wasn't already one of those things.

As more and more of their friends arrived and made their way into the house, the activities outside dwindled down and finally ended, leaving them squarely in Halloween, part two: The Party. Here, the zombies were just a bit livelier and coordinated, and more likely to fraternize with the hunters. The music was going strong, as was the dancing. Lucas and Maya had been right at the heart of that for a while before taking a break.

"Hey, I'll be right back," Lucas told her as she made her way to the kitchen to get them something to drink. Finding Adam at the candy bar, he was directed to step outside if he wanted to find his cousin. She'd told her boyfriend to keep enjoying the party while she took a breather.

In fact, she'd walked off as far as the road, sitting cross-legged atop one of the bales of hay they'd gotten hold of for decoration, as somehow they 'needed' some of those for their Halloween apocalypse zone. She had a small plastic case grasped in one of her hands, which confirmed to him she'd taken out her hearing aids, and he approached from not too close, so not to startle her.

"Got too loud in there?" he asked, once she could see his face. Dora nodded. She still looked like a zombie, but she was his cousin again.

"I just needed a break."

"Absolutely," Lucas nodded. For a few seconds, neither of them said a word. Dora turned her eyes back to the sky and the stars. Finally, Lucas tapped her shoulder so she'd look at him. "Are you okay?"

"Yes, I just need a few minutes…" she promised, but he shook his head. That wasn't what he meant. "Oh… Yeah…" she bowed her head, turning the case in her hand over and over again. He tapped her shoulder again, and when she looked up again, he could see tears in the corners of her eyes. "I don't know why I feel like this…" she shook her head. Lucas looked around them, confirming it was just the two of them still.

"I think you do know, whether you like it or not," he looked back to his cousin. It was hard to keep the conversation going when she needed to look at him to know what he was saying and all her head wanted to do was to bow low under the weight of her feelings. So, Lucas sat on the ground in front of the bale, as a sort of compromise. "They're just friends," he pointed out, giving an opening for her to use.

"I know," Dora told him. "That's not… I'm with Adam."

"You are," Lucas nodded.

"I like Adam, I've liked him for years."

"You never told me that," he gave his cousin a small smile.

"That's why they're called _secret_ crushes, okay?" Dora echoed his expression.

"Okay, fair enough."

"When we started going out, I didn't know how it was going to go, but it was kind of great. So we kept going out, and it got even better, _he_ got better, like you think you know someone and then you spend more time with them and they're just…"

"Better."

"Yeah," Dora nodded.

"You didn't tell Sam about him before that," Lucas made a new point, honing in the source of his cousin's troubles. She looked at him and there was just a bit of sadness there. He reached up to dab the tears from her eyes before they could spoil her makeup.

"I like him, too," she spoke quietly.

"I know," he replied with a sympathetic smile.

"I was going to try and see if he… if maybe he'd like me, too, but I don't want to mess things up between us, so I didn't… I didn't say anything, and then Adam… Adam asked me out, and I said yes, and then everything just…" she shook her head, words spilling out, and Lucas was the one to bow his head now. Was it any wonder it had taken Maya and him that long to get together in the beginning? The whole experience could be confusing for the best of them, and while it had worked out in the end for him and her, it had all gotten mixed up when it came to his cousin and Maya's brother, neither of them being in a position to see the whole picture, while Lucas and Maya could see it all too well but also couldn't tip their hands. Whatever would or wouldn't happen between them, it would have to be up to them.

"Is he still your friend?" Lucas asked, once he and his cousin could see eye to eye.

"Yes," she replied, sounding like 'obviously.'

"Do you want him to continue being your friend?" Another obvious yes. "Then you and him are going to have to find a way to make it work."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	28. Their Haunting in the Future

_**A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!**_

* * *

January 28th 2020

_Chapter 28  
Their Haunting in the Future_

While not all guests had lasted as long as some others, the party had lingered well into the early hours, so that by the time that everyone who didn't live here had gone away. And by the time the three of them that _did_ live here had removed sufficient hair and makeup and costumes to once more be human and head to bed, it was easily coming on four in the morning. They had fallen asleep in that way where it felt like you might have passed out more than fallen asleep.

Whether or not it could be called as much, seeing as it was in fact 'a few hours later,' the next morning finally began sometime shortly after ten. It started, as some rare mornings did, with Lucas awakening first. And on those mornings, his favorite use of that time was very simply to playfully attempt to see if Maya was awake yet or not. His techniques ranged anywhere from a kiss behind the ear, to tracing lines along her arm, or her leg… And if he was feeling particularly enamored, as he would undoubtedly be, on the morning of their anniversary…

"Awake… I'm awake…" she spoke, leaning into his touch. "You keep that up and this will be a good morning, yes, it will…"

It was a great morning.

"I don't know what you have planned for today," Maya breathed, fingers laced with his as he kept her close, both of them still at a loss for breath, hearts drumming.

"But you'd be okay with staying here?" he guessed, smiling against her shoulder.

"Inexpensive, a big hit every time, I'm just saying…" she shook her head with a grin.

"We're so lucky your brother doesn't come in unless we say he can," Lucas pointed out, which made her laugh as she turned about.

"Do you really want me to be thinking about my brother right now?" she asked, holding his gaze and drawing what felt like hearts on his chest, just over his actual heart.

"Now that you mention it…" he agreed.

"Good answer," she whispered, kissing him.

"There _is_ something else I would like for you – and me – to be thinking about right now," Lucas declared. Maya looked at him, intrigued. He turned his head to the small box on her night stand, where her engagement ring could be seen. _The wedding…_

"Bold of you to assume I don't think about that every chance I get," she smirked as she turned back to look at him.

"I'm sure you have a massive sketchbook full of ideas," he nodded, trailing his hands along her back.

"Of course," she confirmed.

"But I haven't had the privilege of seeing it, which is just…" he gave a dramatic sigh which got her laughing and got _him_ a few more kisses for his troubles.

"I mean it's mostly just a lot of random doodles, it's not like I've been looking at wedding dresses so much that I've started drawing one for myself or anything…"

"Oh, you so did."

"Oh, I _so_ did. Not that I can _show_ you, because… you know…" she gestured.

"Bad luck, got it," he nodded. "Wait, so are you actually going to…"

"I don't know," she shrugged. "It's one thing for me to draw it, it's a whole other thing to have it made, because I really don't have those kinds of sewing skills, not to mention the materials…"

"Okay, but why couldn't you? What about… What about the theater, don't they have anyone there in… costumes… who could help with that?" The way she looked at him now, it was as though he'd reached up and pulled the little chain on the lightbulb over her head.

"Oh…" she breathed. "Ooh…"

"That's starting to sound like…" he teased her, and she smacked him. "Sorry," he laughed.

"No, don't you apologize, that's actually…" Her gaze was so far away, like she might as well have had her secret wedding sketchbook in front of her, pencils flying… After a few silent beats she shook her head and looked back at him. "I am putting a pin in that," she informed him. "Because if I fall down _that_ rabbit hole right now you will not see me again today. I will just… I'll get back to it tomorrow… Yup…" she nodded to herself.

"The struggle?" he smiled.

"_So_ real, why did you do that now?" she let her head fall back to his chest with a thump. Lucas laughed, locking his arms around her.

"We already knew my timing sucked, look at those Christmas albums."

"Oh, come on!" she cried out, voice muffled and tickling at his skin.

"Sorry, sorry, forget I said anything," he insisted, though he was just laughing out now.

They had finally been coaxed out of bed after Sam had come knocking at their door, asking if he could start breakfast for them. By all accounts, it was nearly lunch time now, but if they had the choice, then breakfast food always, _always_ won, especially if it came from Ma Maggie's. So, before their live-in chef could get anything started, they told him to get ready, and twenty minutes later they were driving off to their favorite restaurant.

After their late breakfast, Sam had left his sister and her fiancé to go and hang out with his friends. He specifically asked if he could sleep at the twins' place that night, which they took as code for 'I know it's your anniversary, and I don't need to know anything else.' Once he was gone, Maya turned to Lucas, curious to know what would come next.

"Alright, well, technically speaking, I planned things out for this morning and tonight, but the part in between's kind of a wild card. I wanted to leave it up to you. Just because I do the planning, it shouldn't have to mean that you don't get to do something _you_ want to do on our an…"

"Can we put Christmas lights on the house?" she cut in at once. He blinked. She grinned.

"Today?" Back in Houston, it had depended on the year exactly when they'd start decorating, but they tended to wait closer to mid-November, or early December… It was the first day of November, the day after Halloween… and their house still looked like the zombie apocalypse had just rode them down. It was going to be a lot of work, just to get them back to what the house was supposed to look like, and after that… "We're going to need help…"

A few phone calls later, they were headed back to the house. Even as they were just starting to pick up and either put away or throw away the elements of their Halloween décor, their helpers arrived, in the form of Zay, Nadine, Riley, Dylan, and Rosa. They made relatively quick work of the whole thing, and just like that they were gone again, leaving just him and her and their continued gratitude for having the likes of them in their lives.

Still, it was nearly five by the time Maya and Lucas ended up outside, staring up at their house and thinking about how they might add lights to it. If they were going to follow through with his plans, they were going to have to go shower and get ready to leave… pretty much right that second. He pointed this out to her, and he could see the debate happening on her face. She didn't want to wreck his plans, but she also kind of wanted to do _this_…

"If we stay here and we get those lights up, will that make you happy?" he asked, requiring only the truth. Maya gave a firm nod. "Then, what else do I need?" he shrugged. "That's kind of all I ever want in life." And there was that smile on her face again, showing him that he was indeed making her very happy in that moment. "Right, so… We're going to need lights, and we're going to need hooks…"

"Hey, first things first," she held up her hand, walking herself to stand face to face with him before very deliberately raising her arms to join her hands at the back of his neck.

"That _is_ the first step," he agreed, linking his hands together to lift her up. After a quick cry of surprise, she laughed and kissed him.

They got in the car and drove off in search of a lot of lights and a lot of hooks. Lucas was very familiar with the dimensions of the house, thanks to all the work he'd done to fix it up before the proposal. He had a good feeling that Maya had a good idea of what she saw the house looking like by the time they were done, and really he trusted her judgement in all this, so while she looked through the aisles and found what she needed, he worked through the few cancellations required to change the outlook of their anniversary evening. It wouldn't be _that_ complicated. He had decided to aim for something somewhere in the middle between elaborate and simple.

The way he saw it, this being their first anniversary back in Austin, it was about finding the sort of… foundation for this and the years to come. They were no longer high school students, or college students living out of home… Alright, well, he was still in school, but even then… They had left home, and they'd had their transition period, and now they were here, in the home where they planned to stay, for years to come, the house where they would be newlyweds, the house where they hoped to be parents someday, raising their family… In time, Maya would be an art teacher, and he would be a veterinarian. This was their life, and _this_ was their first year in it.

Maybe for that, putting up the Christmas lights was actually a perfect symbol. They were starting another tradition, as they'd done the day before, with the trick or treaters, and the party… _Although if we put up the lights on November 1st again next year, maybe we need to rethink just how much work we'll put on the house for Halloween and how much time it'll take to put back to normal._

_Lucas: Hey, I need to ask for a big favor, can you help me out real quick?_

"What do you think? Do we want one of these?" Maya asked and he looked up from his phone even as he slipped it back in his pocket. She was holding up a box with some kind of light projector.

"Uh… Where would we put it?" he asked, coming to get a closer look.

"What were you up to back there?" she curiously asked, smiling.

"Spoilers," he shook his head at her and focused on the box.

"You with your big sleeves full of secrets," Maya 'scolded' him. "Maybe we should wait until next year for this thing," she turned back to the projector. "This is already going to cost a lot…"

"Consider it a redirected anniversary fund," he took the box from her and set it in their basket.

"There's a fund?" she chuckled.

"I've said too much already," he 'gasped.'

"Okay, but really, I still think we should wait. We need room to grow, you know? I'm not aiming to get us on one of those shows with the houses that have so many lights my dad goes 'Can you imagine their electric bill?' every time. _Every_ time."

"Fine," Lucas agreed. "But for the record…"

"The record has been recorded, and it will be acknowledged in due time," she whispered before putting the projector back.

With the car loaded, they were soon on their way back home with a ridiculous amount of lights. Even as they went, Maya was already drawing plans, with notes of how many bulbs they had in each color, the length of the cords… The notebook and pencil had been stashed in the glove compartment years ago, for what he called 'girlfriend creativity emergencies.' It was going to be dark when they even got around to start getting everything up, but they didn't worry. It wouldn't be their first time putting up Christmas lights in the dark, as they'd done back in Houston two years ago.

"Please be careful!" Maya called as she watched Lucas climb up to hang the lights in what they'd both decided to be the most perilous area of the roof. "If you fall and break your neck…"

"I get the picture," he promised. "I'm not planning to make our anniversary _that _memorable."

"Yeah, like 'hey, remember the one where you died? Oh, wait, you can't…'"

He didn't fall, and by the time he came back down and stood with her again, they looked satisfied. They weren't done, and they hadn't turned the lights on yet, but everything they saw looked good so far… And now that they'd finished that part, the rest felt easier, which made it go faster.

"Oh, I really want to turn them on now," Maya breathed, looking so giddy that it made Lucas laugh. "But, well… What's the situation with dinner?" she asked, with as good as a halo over her head.

"Actually…" he pulled his phone from his pocket and turned to look at the road beyond the house. "I think I may have broken my timing curse."

"Wh…" she turned around to see what he was looking at. She didn't recognize the car coming along, or… Wait, no, she did, that was… "Fidelio?" she ran toward the man just getting out of his car, and he was ready for the catch, hugging his former co-worker.

"You be careful now, I might take you back with me," the man laughed.

"Yeah, I've heard," Maya laughed, too. "What are you doing here?"

"Special delivery," he reached into his car and pulled out a couple large bags identified as coming from Isabel's restaurant. "Wasn't about to send anyone else." Maya turned back to look at Lucas, guessing this was what he'd been up to on his phone earlier. "And Isabel says happy anniversary, it's on the house."

"Well, since you literally drove two hours for this, which is… kind of nuts and I love you so much… You deserve a prize." She turned around. "Huckleberry, the lights!" she called, loudly and dramatically.

And the lights came on.

"I tell you… As first ones go, we did pretty well…" Maya declared, as she and Lucas went into the house for dinner shortly after.

"Next year will be even better."

"I can't wait to see it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	29. Their Support of Days

January 29th 2020

_Chapter 29  
Their Support of Days_

"Look, I'm a star!" Both Maya and Lucas turned just in time to spot MJ as he practically leapt into the room, with his newly completed costume on. The boy, who was somehow just a few weeks shy of four years old already, was very motivated at the prospect of being in his pre-school's holiday play, especially as this year's Halloween had cemented his love for costumes. Katy would joke that the new costume was the only way they had managed to get their son to stop trying to put his Spider-man costume back on. Of course, now, they were going to have to see what happened next, because if he tried to wear _this_ one to bed it wouldn't last long, definitely not long enough to make it to the play.

"Woah, what are you doing down here?" Maya 'gasped.' "Aren't you supposed to be in the sky with all the other stars?" Her little brother laughed.

"He probably just took time away from being one of those so he could pursue his ambition in life… Jumping around on a stage and singing along with a bunch of little kids," Lucas suggested, giving his best impression of a three-year-old's version of dancing, and _that_ got Maya laughing along with MJ.

"I'm going to have nightmares about this," she whispered to Lucas while the star went shooting off to show its sparkly self around to somebody else.

"We're going to be in a play, too!" Nellie called out from where she, Gracie, and Sam were playing a board game together. The six-year-old twins loved him very much, and they had adopted him as their big brother, because they really wanted another one of those, to go along with their Lukey one…

"I used to love doing those," Sam smiled.

"They're going to dress us the same again, right?" Gracie asked. Even as they grew (and grew, and grew, did it never stop?), the Hunter twins were very much who they had always been to one another. They were much more aware of the world and of their own self than they may have been as toddlers, but they continued to be Maya's sunny sister and her Mouse Mouse respectively. By the looks on both their faces following the question though, the others guessed neither one of them was looking forward to being put in identical costumes. They didn't even like being dressed alike in normal times, only wanting it on special occasions, for which the school play apparently didn't count.

"They won't if I have anything to say about it," Shawn promised his girls, and the smiles on their faces said it all: if their daddy said he'd fix it, it was as good as fixed.

November had been tiptoeing its way along, running by them almost without their noticing. Now they were just days from December and everything was moving right along for everyone. Both Maya and Lucas had been sort of on standby, ready to step in at any time and provide relief to the boy about to experience his first semester's end, with projects and finals stacked up around him. They could hardly believe it was even coming to this already. Had he really been living out here with them for that long?

Sam wasn't showing himself to be nearly as stressed as they were assuming he might be. It was easy to say that he would have handled everything, no sweat, just because he'd finished high school and started college at the age he did, but it was still a lot, more than he had been used to, and he was only fifteen, and living away from home… They hoped he would continue to feel that way, the closer they came to finals.

Things had managed to settle, to some degree, in the whole mess which had been the introduction of Dora's boyfriend and all the feelings it had brought to the surface for Sam… and for Dora herself, too. When Lucas had told her about the conversation he'd had with his cousin, Maya had suddenly felt terrible, like in all this she had been so focused on her brother that she hadn't really considered Dora's side of it, and she loved that girl like her own cousin. The last thing she wanted, same as Lucas, was for any of those kids to get their heart broken.

They _were_ okay now, as okay as they could hope to be. Whatever Sam and Dora continued to feel in silence, they had gotten to put it somewhere in their hearts and minds where it wouldn't affect the rest of them so much. They valued the other's friendship too much to let it rip apart because of this situation. Sam was actually getting to like Adam, who was very easy to care for, as he was the kind of person to treat any stranger like an old friend. All of a sudden they were turning into a unit, a group, the three of them, the Schmidt twins, and Cecilia. Sam's new friend had not taken long to become someone the rest of them came around to care for much as Sam had done. In time, they had even heard of Dora and her hanging out together, without Sam or Adam.

"We weren't that blind back then, were we?" Lucas had pondered to Maya one night as the two of them cleared up in the kitchen, hearing Sam and his friends laughing about something upstairs. More than one of them had offered to help, but they'd been sent off with thanks. It allowed Maya and Lucas both to entertain the 'domestic kick,' as Maya would call it.

"I don't know, I mean…" Maya paused at the sink. "You weren't particularly hard to read, giving me those eyes," she imitated him, making him laugh.

"Is that what I looked like?" he stared back.

"Our problem wasn't about knowing we liked each other," she pointed out, and on this he had to agree. They had spent months in this state where he knew that she liked him, and she knew that he liked her, but they wouldn't take that step because… because she wasn't ready, and he respected that. It had taken months, and two almost kisses, and then finally it had all changed.

"How long do you think it would have taken if it wasn't for that night, the candy wrappers…"

"I think by then it really wouldn't have taken much. Christmas, tops."

"So, what you're saying is we could have had a… Merryversary?" She laughed.

"We still could," she turned a grin to him. They could… They still needed to fix that wedding date…

November had been good to all of them. For Lucas, it had been his goal to find a way and get himself back in a clinic, or a shelter, somewhere he felt he could both help and get some practical experience. He had gotten that, working at his aunt's clinic back in Houston, and he had loved that so much. After they'd moved back out here, he _had_ looked into potential places for him to go, but he'd also known that he needed to wait and see what his schedule would be like once he started at school, and once he found a job… And when he'd done that, between the commute to get to and from school and his three days at bookstore, he had no days off and very little time left to spare after that. Everything he had left, it was for Maya, for Sam, their families, friends… himself…

"I could disguise myself as you and take your place at the bookstore on the weekends, then you could go… What?" Maya asked, staring back at the barely hidden smirk.

"I'm not going to say it," Lucas shook his head.

"Say what?" she asked, grasping his collar. He just cleared his throat, setting his hand to the top of her head, which stopped inches below his. In response, she stretched on to her toes.

"Still not there," he 'regretfully' informed her.

"I will get stilts."

"Great. Now what about the rest?"

"Alright, fine, you've made your point," she sighed, coming back down to her feet. "Anyway… I'm sure you'll find a way to make it work."

"The semester's almost over though, which means my schedule is going to change again soon. If I make a commitment now and have to change it in a few weeks…"

"Lucas," she'd taken his collar again, this time not to make him talk but with what looked like an idea. He got her attention again, pointing to the fact that she was very close to cutting off his airway. "Sorry, I just…" she let go and straightened up his poor, ruffled collar again. "The Sandersons…"

"What about them?" he asked, and the look of disbelief on her face might as well have been on him, for how long it took him to grasp what she was saying. They had a farm, with horses, and pigs, and other animals, and maybe… maybe they could use a hand. There might not be much of a pay if any, mostly because he wouldn't feel right to take it, but it would just up the road from here, which would make it much easier for him to be able to fit into his tight schedule, regardless of the changes brought on by new semesters.

It had taken a few days for him to get up the nerve to go up and talk to Mitch Sanderson, but by the time he'd come back the deal was done. Lucas would go up there for a couple of hours every morning, and sometimes in evenings. Sometimes Maya would come along, and Sam, too, a most welcome addition as far as the whole family was concerned. It was nothing like the clinic, but that wasn't a bad thing, was it? It was something new for him to learn.

While Lucas was getting the hang of this new side job – which did pay, because Missy's grandfather, Thatcher, would not hear it otherwise – Maya was getting ready to kick off the official trial run of her Stage Ready team. They had hoped to get at least one school to agree to bring them on to assist with their holiday productions. Well, Maya had hoped it, because if they got at least one then it could mean they were on the right track, couldn't it?

They had gotten eleven schools altogether, seven in Austin and four in Houston.

Every one would get added to the large calendar on the wall in her office, and to see the dates fill in more and more, she could have thought herself in the middle of a very surreal dream. When Lucas had come in for their weekly Monday lunch date, he'd found her just standing there, looking at that calendar.

"You're not going to cry, are you?" he smiled, startling her.

"What? No… No?" she gave something between a smile and a cringe. "But… look…" she gestured at the calendar. Her first 'field day' was coming up, in the final days of November, and it was a wonder she didn't have a countdown marked in the days leading up to it, with how giddy she was getting. He suspected that the thing keeping her from doing that was the counterpart to her giddiness, which came in flares of anxiety that the whole thing would crash and burn. He knew she just needed to get through one of those sessions and she'd feel more solid on her feet, but until then… until then, all he could do was stand by her side, to give the impression of steadiness by keeping her from falling.

That evening, where they watched MJ Hunter hop around the place in his new star costume, came on the eve of that first Stage Ready session. The next morning, bright and early, Maya was to get in Sparkles with her team and make her way to Houston for the day. That was why they had come here for dinner that night after he got off work. There was no boost for her nerves like being around her family. It would mean no lunch date the next day, but they'd make up for it with stories when she came home again.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	30. Their Support of the Past

January 30th 2020

_Chapter 30  
Their Support of the Past_

"Who taught you how to flip pancakes like that?" Lucas asked.

"YouTube," Sam smiled, sliding the just finished one on to the growing stack before adding more batter and starting over. "Cara wanted us to make breakfast for Mom and Dad one year on their anniversary, so I looked it up."

"How old were you?"

"Uh, I was like seven, she was five," he recalled.

"How many of those actually made it on the plate?" Lucas asked, laughing.

"Four out of five. After that, Mom found us out and made me promise not to use the stove without her or Dad around. They were good though, so after that she started to show me how to do more things." In a beat of silence it was impossible not to feel the memories radiating off of him, and also how much he missed his parents, his younger siblings… He'd be seeing them soon though, and that helped. "I think I heard something," he looked up. "Maybe she's up?" Lucas listened for a moment.

"Yeah, she's coming. Keep going," he tapped Sam's shoulder, moving to fill a cup with coffee just as Maya came into the kitchen and paused at the sight of them both there.

"I woke up and there was no one," she declared almost accusingly.

"A sacrifice that needed to be made if I was going to be down here for this," he smiled, bringing her the cup, which she gladly took. "I haven't figured out how to be in two places at the same time yet." Going off the look on her face, she had a very specific idea on the benefits of his figuring that one out, but then decided to hold on to it for herself while her brother was in the room.

"Well, I appreciate it," she simply smiled, stretching up to kiss him hello before moving to give a one-armed hug to her brother, standing behind him. "Appreciate you, too."

After breakfast, much as he would have liked to be there to see her off to her first field day, he had to get ready and head in to the bookstore. When he arrived, Maeve was already there, as she usually was, though they were still missing the rest of their Monday crew, Tanner and Julia. They were both in college, him in his second year and aiming for pre-med, her in her third year – with a four-year gap between high school and college – as a history major. He would be described as 'a man of few words,' while they might say of her that 'you have to get to know her.' Tanner would be the one to say this of Julia; she was married to his brother. He lived with them and their three-year-old daughter, so they would always arrive together, which they did now, ten minutes after Lucas arrived. The store soon opened, and they were off.

Mondays were generally more quiet than the weekends, though they were by no means dead either. Some weeks it could get to feel like the Mondays were busier than the weekends. This one was sort of somewhere in the middle, and morning had been passing along at a steady pace.

He was just finishing up restocking a shelf when he happened to turn his head and spot a man browsing from a nearby display table. He blinked, taken out of his previous task by the sight of this face he hadn't seen in… oh, eight years, easily. He moved his cart out of the way and almost thought he'd lost track of him, but then there he was…

"Coach Wiley!" he called after him, and the man paused and turned in search of the voice… He spotted Lucas and at once broke into a smile, taking the few steps to bring them together, where he extended his hand and Lucas shook it.

"Mr. Friar…"

"Please, I think it's been long enough that you can call me Lucas," he nodded.

"Fair enough," the man laughed. "In that case, you might as well call me Mark."

"I might have to work my way into that one," Lucas admitted.

"I thought you might. I had no idea you were working here."

"Yes, well, I'm here three days out of the week, university the rest of the week," he explained. His former coach pointed at him like he was attempting to pull something from his memories.

"You wanted to become a veterinarian, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir. Still do, working on it," Lucas confirmed, and as he did, all he could think was how much this man had played a hand in getting him here, whether he knew it or not.

Mark Wiley had been his basketball coach and gym teacher in middle school. Much as he had been doing fairly well in his other classes, he was always most at ease when Coach Wiley was around. They had gotten along very easily from the start. The man had only known him less than a year when the events had come to pass that resulted in Lucas' getting suspended and needing to repeat the seventh grade, but it had been on his word more than anyone else's that he had been allowed to return the following fall, the year Maya had transferred in from New York and their group of friends had grown into what it had become. He had never really thanked him, though he'd wanted to…

He told his former coach about how he'd been in Houston the last four years before returning to Austin over the summer, moving in with his fiancée. Here again, the coach smiled knowingly.

"Miss Hart?" he guessed, and Lucas smiled back.

"Yes, sir. We weren't dating yet in middle school…"

"No, but I remember the two of you. If I ever had to put money on something like that, there's no question. I'm very happy for you both. You tell her hello from me, won't you?"

"I will," Lucas promised, then, "I'm actually about to go on my lunch break. If you're not busy, I'd love to catch up. It's on me."

"Oh, now, I've never been known to turn down a kindness, but you don't have to…"

"No, please, I insist."

The coach continued browsing a while before making his way downstairs to pay. When Lucas clocked out for lunch and headed down, he found the man waiting for him, reading one of the books he'd bought that day. They made their way to a nearby restaurant, and after getting a table and putting their orders in, they soon ended up talking about Lucas' high school basketball days, in particular those two years where the teams had been disbanded.

"I still can't believe they let it drag on like that for so long," the coach shook his head.

"Neither could we," Lucas agreed. "We fought for it as much as we could, but it was never enough. There's some of us who never got the chance to get back out there while we were still in school. My year, we at least got to have one more season."

"You know, they approached me about taking over the position for the boys' team," the coach revealed.

"I didn't, no."

"I wanted to, might have made that you kids got to get on the court again sooner, but I had a lot to deal with at home at the time, and I was barely managing with the middle school as it was." This rang a bell in Lucas' mind, and he remembered his mother mentioning how she'd heard that Lucy Wiley had fallen ill, following the birth of their third child. He must have worn his question on his face, as his coach provided the answer unrequested. "Everyone is doing well now," he nodded, smiling as he took out his phone and showed a picture, showing Mark and Lucy Wiley, with a boy in a high school cap and gown between them, a girl just a couple years younger next to her mother, and a girl who would have to be six or seven now, in front of the coach who had his arm around her.

"Wow, I still remember them when they were little," Lucas blinked. The Wileys had been fixtures in the stands whenever they'd have a game. He'd known Brian and Alyssa back then, and up until this moment he could only picture them as they'd been at the time, not like this, so grown and looking like their father more than ever. "And…" he pointed to the younger girl, a decade younger than her sister. He'd never met her.

"That's Janey," the coach smiled. "She's 'seven going on thirty,' you might say." Lucas laughed. "I'm looking forward to watching her grow even more, maybe take over the world," the coach went on, pausing on the picture for a beat before returning it to his pocket. Something about the way he said this made Lucas think there might have been more to it.

"Coach?" he asked, and he had inadvertently hit the nail on the head with this one word.

"Not for much longer." At Lucas' surprised look, he went on. "I'll be retiring at the end of this year."

"Retiring? But you're not… I mean, all due respect, you're just…"

"Not that old?" he chuckled. "It's not a bad word, Lucas, you can say it."

"Sorry, I…"

"No, I get why it would feel like it came out of nowhere. I've gotten that expression on more than one face whenever I've told people. It's time though. I care enough about that school and those kids to know they could benefit from someone younger, in better shape than me and my bad knees. Now my hip's starting to act up from a fall I took a few years ago… No, I'm not going to drag this out until I really can't keep up anymore. I'm going to pull back, let someone else take my place, and I'm going to watch my daughter grow up. Missed a lot of her siblings, and now Brian's off in California on a scholarship, and Aly's just waiting until they put that diploma in her hand so she can go, too…"

Lucas couldn't get their conversation out of his head, even after they'd finished eating and parted ways. They'd hugged, and he'd watched Coach Wiley walk off before starting on his way back to the bookstore and up to his floor. The whole time it was as though his brain was locked on the Middle School Channel, and they were rerunning the episodes of his time on the basketball team, with Mark Wiley standing on the sidelines, calling after his players, and the team practicing with him… He hadn't seen or spoken to the man in years, hadn't been one of his students for just as long, so why would it affect him this way?

Well, for the same reason he had gone up to talk to him earlier, wouldn't it? _I still forgot to say thanks…_

"What's gotten into you?" Maeve asked when she saw him walk by. Lucas stopped and turned back to look at her.

"I don't know if you went to the same middle school… Did you have Coach Wiley?" By the way her face lit up at once, he had to guess that was a yes. "I just saw him earlier, we had lunch together," he revealed.

"Oh, how's he doing? Man, his kids have to be grown up now…"

"He's retiring, actually," Lucas told her, and there was the surprised face again.

"Wow…" she spoke, like she was wondering if it been _that_ long. He had to leave her a moment later, as he was called on for help by a customer, but for the rest of the day and until he headed home, he kept thinking about the man who would always remain, no matter what, his old coach.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	31. Their Support of a Debt

January 31st 2020

_Chapter 31  
Their Support of a Debt_

"Hey, is it okay if Cecilia stays for dinner?" Sam asked when Lucas came through the door to find the two of them on the couch, playing a video game. The girl turned and waved with a smile.

"Hi, Lucas."

"Hey," he returned the greeting before looking to Sam again. "Absolutely. Where's your sister?"

"Upstairs," Sam replied, which would likely mean their room. They had started referring to the attic as 'upstairs upstairs.'

Reaching the room, he found Maya laid out on their bed, in what felt like the aftermath of letting herself drop to the mattress with a sigh of relief after a long day. To his knowledge, this only ever led to her dozing off when it had been a really exhausting day, good or bad. When he sat next to her and propped himself up on his side, she opened her eyes and the light in her eyes confirmed to him that it had been the former.

"I just came up here for a minute," she insisted, smiling.

"Yeah, didn't anyone ever tell you that was a trap waiting to happen?" he asked, wrapping his arm around her waist.

"Pretty sure _you_ did, but you know me, you have to repeat it sometimes." He laughed.

"So, the big day happened. How was it?"

She sat up now, and for minutes on end she told him about her time at a local high school, not their old one, but possibly the one Sam might have gone to if, upon moving in with them, he had still been in high school instead of college. They had ten kids signed up for the day and rolling in and out as it went. They could not be exempted from the whole day's classes, so they would be coming to the auditorium over the span of whatever class or classes they had been released from and then leave when their time was up. That made it so they would have one to three kids at a time, and from there the team would step in and do their thing, helping them with whatever they wanted help with, whether it was singing, dancing, acting…

"We had this one boy, all I could think about was Joey, when we all realized he wanted to be on stage, you know?" He did. Back in the day, it had seemed like the most ludicrous idea that Joey Garcia, who made the word 'shy' feel inadequate, might want to stand up in front of people and sing and dance, but now there he was, off in New York, on Broadway, on television… They watched his show every week and it had not stopped being surreal. "But, oh, the voice on him, I mean I think I cried a couple times. Tim just stood there like he'd gone diving and found the biggest pearl," she went on, speaking of their vocal coach. "And he didn't even want to _be_ in the show, he just wanted the lessons. He said no one would believe he was being serious about this if he went anywhere for something more."

"That sucks…"

"Yeah, so much," Maya nodded. "I gave him one of the program cards, the ones with everyone's info for the theater, told him to get in touch with us and we'd figure something out. I hope he does…" Lucas could only smile, watching his fiancée just stretch her wings, becoming the teacher she was meant to be, one way or another. "Okay, now what's up with you," she asked, in a distinctively 'don't think I can't see there's something on your mind, Huckleberry' look. He let out a breath.

"Coach Wiley was at the bookstore this morning." Just like when he'd told Maeve about it when he'd returned, her face had brightened with the memory. Actually, he'd had the experience with both Tanner and Julia as well, who had also gone to the same middle school, in their respective years. They had all known the coach, and they all remembered him fondly. Even tough-nut-to-crack Julia had tales to share. It might have been the most that Lucas had heard her talk at one time since he'd known her.

"Man, I haven't seen him in… years… Saw him a few times when I was working at the diner, he'd come in with the kids…"

"He's retiring, end of this year," Lucas told her, and the surprise came as he'd expected it. He went on to tell her what the coach had told him, his reasons for stepping back when he did.

"Okay, well… yeah…" Maya sighed, understanding as well as he did why the man would make this choice, whether they liked it or not.

"You know, ever since we got engaged, and we moved out here, it feels like I've been thinking more and more about the future, our future…" he confided.

"Me, too," she smiled, scooting closer, looping her arms around his. He smiled back.

"I think somewhere in the back of my mind, part of me had this image, this idea of one day, having a kid in middle school, and he would still be there, and he'd be their coach, too. I don't know, maybe he would have been gone by then anyway…"

"Well, I mean, that's like… thirteen years from now at the earliest, and it's probably going to be a few years more than that," Maya pointed out, almost apologetically.

"Yeah…" he nodded.

"It was a nice idea though," she tipped her head to catch his gaze again. "I know he meant a lot to you, still does."

"Yeah," he said, once more, feeling his mind just drifting along, back into those memories.

He doubted he'd even been supposed to know that Coach Wiley had spoken on his behalf, that he'd played any part in his return to school. But then one day he'd come home from hanging out with Zay, Dylan, Asher, and Nadine, and he'd heard voices coming from the kitchen. At the time, things had still been sort of tenuous as far as the trust he was afforded, especially so far as his just leaving the house to go play with his friends went. Usually, his father would insist on his dropping him off and picking him up, and he could only really go to their houses, no going off to the movies, or the park, the mall… But that day, he'd been sent on his own, with his father's blessing for 'widening' his options. It was to be like something of a trial run, to see how he did.

He could probably have stayed out there with his friends longer than he did, but he hadn't wanted to tempt the fates or something, so he'd come home early. And when he'd come up to the house he'd spotted a car in the driveway that wasn't theirs, so when he'd heard people talking, his response had been to approach without revealing his presence. He'd overheard what he first recognized as his mother's voice, and his father's, and then… Coach Wiley's? What was he doing there?

He'd stood there, out of sight, and he'd listened in. He could just see the man's face from where he hid. The way he spoke about him, you might have believed he spoke of his son and not one of his students. It had fixed him to the spot. Coach Wiley had talked to the principal? To the school board? He was waiting on a call back, and he would keep calling if he had to. At that moment in time, it hadn't been certain that Lucas would be welcome back to that school, ever, which he knew because of the talk that had been going on about possibly moving them elsewhere, to New York. But the way his coach spoke… It was the first time he'd actually believed it was a possibility he'd get to go back and be with his friends again, at school. His mother looked like she was going to cry, and his father was thanking the man with all the humility he had in him.

Lucas hadn't let them know he'd heard any of this either. He'd gone back and made as though he was just arriving, at which point he'd called out and made his presence known. He'd acted surprised upon finding his coach in the house, with his parents. Coach Wiley had said that he'd wanted to come and check in on him, see how he was doing, and that had been that.

"I don't think they even know that I was there," he told Maya, after recounting this. "They don't know that I know. None of them brought it up at any time. I guess he didn't want me to know, or to feel like… like I owed him…"

"But you do," Maya guessed.

"I do," he nodded.

"You want to do something, don't you?" He looked at her, that knowing smile on her face…

"Will you help me?"

"Honestly, that you think you have to ask," she shook her head, smiling as she leaned in to kiss him. She stayed close, her forehead to his, and he let out a breath.

"I know how busy you are right now, your program, the schools…"

"True, but that's in the day. I am blessed with the ability to leave all that behind once I'm back here in the evening, and on weekends. I insist that you use my assistance in whatever way you could need it."

"That's a dangerous offer," he joked.

"I'll risk it," she laughed.

They headed back downstairs, getting dinner ready now for the four of them. The way she told it, they guessed Cecilia was used to having dinner either on her own at home or up at the university so she might eat with her father, which might explain why she spent so many afternoons up there after getting out of school.

"If you're going to be alone any night, you're always welcome to join us," Lucas assured her, and Cecilia gladly accepted the invitation with a smile.

As they ate, the subject of Coach Wiley and his retirement came up. They almost expected Cecilia to chime and say that she'd been at their old middle school, too, but she hadn't. Still, both she and Sam thought it was a great thing that Lucas wanted to do something for the man. Rather than discussing any potential ideas for just what they'd do, dinner had veered into Lucas and Maya sharing stories of their middle school days with her brother and his friend.

"That's when you guys did the living art thing, isn't it?" Sam looked to his sister. "You told me about that once."

"It is, yeah," Maya nodded.

"She likes to joke that I couldn't stop staring at her," Lucas chimed in.

"Well, you couldn't, could you?"

"Because my person was posed to look at yours. And you're the one who even drew the whole thing in the first place, so I could say you made me stare at you the whole time."

"I didn't hear any complaints, did I?" Maya laughed.

"I'd love to do something like that sometime," Cecilia smiled. "Can't really draw or anything like that though…"

"Neither could I," Lucas told her, nodding to Maya and then to Sam, as though to say 'I had my artist friend, you've got yours.'

"He's not at my school though."

"Don't see why that has to stop you," Maya told her. "Just, you know, keep your ears open, you never know… In related news, I'm going to be at your school in a few days… There's still time to sign up."

"You could do like… a living storybook," Sam suggested. "Like Twas the Night Before Christmas, or A Christmas Carol…" Cecilia looked intrigued; Maya looked alit with ideas. Lucas just chuckled to himself. With those two in the house with him, he was confident he'd have his Wiley plan sorted out soon enough.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	32. Their Support of a Project

February 1st 2020

_Chapter 32  
Their Support of a Project_

The morning after he'd told Maya about running into the coach and wanting to do something for him before he retired, Lucas woke up in the dark and soon left for the Sanderson farm. He'd left Maya asleep, and most times when he'd return to freshen up before heading in to school or work she would still be around, usually just on the verge of leaving. Some mornings, she'd actually be standing outside, next to Sparkles the minivan, waiting just long enough to kiss him good morning before she had to go off to work.

The minivan was gone by the time he'd come back around this time, and when he got up to their room he found a note waiting on the dresser. _Sorry, had to go. Owe you doubles tonight. 366! Maya. (PS: Left something in the top drawer…)_ And when he'd opened said drawer, he'd found a small notebook, surrounded with ribbon he was sure came from the same stock they'd gotten in anticipation of MJ's birthday, and topped with a post-it. _What's a project without a journal?_ He'd chuckled. Of course, she would know, wouldn't she?

The blank journal was stuck into his bag almost in the same motion as he'd grabbed it on his way down to the car and off toward the university. All through that drive, it was like he couldn't stop thinking about it, which made that he couldn't stop thinking about the coach and what he might do for him either. Maybe that was the whole intent of the journal, wasn't it? A physical reminder that there was something he needed to do… After he'd picked up Robbie and Ramona, he'd spent much of the drive letting them talk amongst themselves because his mind was off thinking about what he might do, what he could need, and who…

"Lucas? Hey…" He looked briefly into the rear-view mirror to find that his friends were both looking his way. "You're not sleeping up there, are you?" Ramona joked.

"What? Oh, no, sorry, I was just thinking about… a few things… Hey, do you remember Coach Wiley?" he asked her. Robbie wouldn't know him, he hadn't grown up in Austin with them, but Ramona…

"Sure, I do," she laughed, and as ever the routine was the same. The mention of the man would make the other happy, and the news of his retirement would take them by surprise, and then there would be memories flooding in. Ramona's memories brought her back into a bad time, but softened thanks to the man in question. "He found me having lunch under the bleachers, every day after I came back to school, after my sister died… He'd sit up there and have _his_ lunch, wouldn't say a word, just ate with me. After a while I started sitting on the benches instead of under them, and we'd talk…"

Lucas remembered that time, although he hadn't known about the gym side lunches. They'd been fourteen, both of them, early in the summer after Lucas had been suspended and in the middle of the whole debate as to whether or not they'd end up moving to New York. It had been in the papers, on the news, a twelve-year-old girl had drowned at a local pool. He'd heard his parents talking about it a lot, how it shouldn't have happened, but he hadn't known until he'd finally gotten to go back to school in the fall, restarting the 7th grade, that the girl in question had been one of his (now former) classmates' sister. He had no trouble imagining Coach Wiley stepping in with Ramona though, not even a little bit. That was who he was, and that was one of the many reasons he had this project ahead of him.

He told as much to Ramona, sharing his own memories, and all she needed to know was that he wanted to do something for the coach and she was on board.

"Can you look in my bag, there's a small green notebook, looks brand new? Yeah, that one…" And for the rest of the ride, as he drove, Ramona would take notes for the both of them. Robbie would jump in with his own ideas, too, which his wife would add to the journal.

They were still talking about it all as they arrived at the university, though it was as much a mix between coming up with ideas for Project Wiley and just sharing memories of those old middle school days, with some of the elementary mixed in. It was dawning on Lucas how much, if some things had gone differently for all of them, if he hadn't been suspended and dropped one year under her and the rest of their old classmates, Ramona might have been more of a factor in his life in the past decade. She'd been his friend, maybe mostly within the confines of school walls, but there had been a few times where he'd been at her house and she'd been at his. And in those last weeks leading up to his suspension, he could look back now and realize he might have had the tiniest bit of a crush on her, even if he'd been too young to call it that. Of course, things had gone the way they'd gone, and he didn't see any of them regretting where they had ended up instead.

"Morning," Zelda greeted them as the trio walked into their first class of the day. Lucas and the others waved and said hello.

"Oh, here, that's yours," Ramona returned the green journal to Lucas, who took it and flipped through to the first pages, now covered in Ramona's scratchy handwriting. It was peculiar enough to be recognizable to others who'd seen it before, which was the case with Josie, as she walked by.

"Exchanging messages or something?" she asked, curious.

"Extracurricular activities," Lucas called it, catching a smirk from Ramona. "Tell you about it at lunch."

As promised, they all gathered a few hours later, their appointed Tuesday lunch time with the usual crew. Lucas, Bishop, Simon, Robbie, Ramona, Josie, and Zelda… _Four guys, three girls, just like the old days, except everyone's new…_ None of them would have known Coach Wiley like he and Ramona did, but even so, as they started telling the others about the man and what they hoped to do, they didn't have to know him to get why they'd want to do all this. Or maybe it went that, because they knew him as a person, they could expect it from him.

"Our gym teacher was horrible…" Josie started, with a laugh and a shake of the head. "Well, maybe not horrible, but…" she amended after a beat, looked around the table and seeming for a moment to step back, to remember where she was, and who was with her. She cleared her throat. "I hated gym class," she finally said, closing the matter by taking a bite of her salad, like she was finally starting to learn where the blame had truly belonged through all those years where she'd placed it at the feet of a perfectly reasonable teacher. She'd been doing that more and more lately.

"Are you doing this thing now or at the end of the year?" Simon asked.

"He'll expect it if you wait, won't he?" Zelda pointed out. "The faculty will throw him a party or something."

"You guys get to surprise him," Josie chimed in again off-hand.

This time around though, she might have contributed something useful without knowing it. It wasn't the whole of an idea, but it was something, a small seed waiting to bloom. It was enough to get Lucas to scribble something into the journal and put it away before continuing with his meal.

"You haven't told them why it matters to you," Ramona pointed out, later, as the Austin-bound trio got back in Lucas' car to head home. He turned in his seat to look at her and Robbie, buckling up in the backseat. "Your suspension and all," Ramona went on. He hadn't outright explained it to her, and he doubted Robbie even knew that much, though he trusted that he would keep confidence for his wife's old friend.

"How do you know…"

"I mean…" she shrugged, bowing her head for a beat. "That fall, when you restarted seventh grade, I was coming back in after Cami died. I spent a lot time around the admin office, they all wanted to make sure I was okay, you know? Anyway, you hear things when people tiptoe around you so much they sort of forget you're there. I put a few things together from all that."

"Right…" Lucas nodded.

She was right, he hadn't told most of the others about his suspension. Bishop knew, and the two of them here, but other than that… It wasn't even that he was hiding or anything. It had been so long ago, and it didn't feel like he had to go around like 'Hey, I'm Lucas, I got suspended from school when I was in the seventh grade and I had to repeat it.' Except here they were now, and where it would have made sense to bring it up, to give context to why this all mattered to him the way it did, he was keeping tight lipped about it with the people who were meant to be his friends. Did he really carry those old feelings even now, at twenty-four years old, well on track to becoming a veterinarian, living in a house he'd helped renovate with the woman who was to be his wife?

After dropping off Robbie and Ramona at their place, he'd continued on toward home. A lack of Sparkles told him that Maya wasn't home yet, but sounds from around the back of the house directed him to find Sam was back, and Cecilia would be joining them for dinner once again. Presently, they were making use of the basketball hoop, a gift from Shawn and Katy upon their leaving the Hunter Hart house after their summer sojourn there. Sam was chasing after the ball, which Cecilia had just thrown, and returned it to her once it had been retrieved. The way she angled the shot and tossed it, Lucas could tell she wasn't new at it. But then at the same time there was Sam, holding her crutch again while she shot the ball and standing behind her a bit, like there was a chance she might lose her balance and fall. She did appear a bit on the wobbly side, too, and he could see how it frustrated her, especially as the ball swished through the net.

"Hey," he called to them, getting their attention. Sam went and got the ball before it rolled too far away, while Cecilia walked to meet Lucas. "So… pasta sound good?" he asked her, which brought the smile back to her face.

"Yeah," she nodded.

"One of our roommates back in Houston showed us how to do those from scratch. Ever done that?"

"I haven't," Cecilia replied, though she sounded like she'd be very interested in trying.

When Maya returned from her second school session day, dinner was well on its way to being set and it all gave her a powerful flashback to nights in Houston, which she was very happy to find.

"Thanks for the gift," Lucas told her when he came over to welcome her back.

"Did it come in handy?" she asked, grinning.

"Little bit, yeah," he nodded.

"Any big ideas to share?"

"No 'eureka' yet," he shook his head. "But it might be close. You'll be the first to know when it does," he assured her.

"Counting on it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	33. Their Support of Mentors

February 2nd 2020

_Chapter 33  
Their Support of Mentors_

The following Saturday morning, Lucas was already on his way to the bookstore when he got a call from Maeve. There was a small fire in the store next to theirs in the middle of the night. No one was hurt, but the site was still looked over, and with all the activity around the street, their big boss had decided to hold off on opening the bookstore, through the morning if not the whole day. This made it so that they had an impromptu – paid – morning off and possibly a whole day off ahead of them.

He'd already pulled off the road when he'd gotten the call, and now he was left with a choice. Maya was in Houston for the day, coordinating with those schools out there where Stage Ready would be coming along in days to come. She would actually be spending most of the coming week out there, seeing to their four Houston sessions between Tuesday and Friday. Instead of spending four hours on the road every day, he had convinced her to just bunk over at Sophie and Chiara's. Neither of them was looking forward to being apart for days on end, but it was just the more reasonable option.

So, as for this morning, he would just take the opportunity and go back home, working on some assignments for class. Before he could turn in the direction of home again however, he looked and realized he was near his mother's favorite bakery, and it gave him an idea.

"Aren't you supposed to be at work?" his father smiled after opening the door and finding him standing there with a square box tied off with ribbon.

"Yeah, the fire department had other ideas," he nodded, then just as quickly, "Store's fine, everyone's fine, it was next door."

He'd just finished telling his father about Maeve's call when his mother appeared, likely summoned by the sound of his voice. She hugged him, thrilling over what he might have brought her in that box he carried, before recalling, like her husband, that Lucas was meant to be at the bookstore at this time. He told her about the fire next to the store, which had the expected reaction of her acting as though he had somehow just escaped death or bodily harm by a hair. In her mind, he might have come here this morning out of some post traumatic need to be near his parents… his mother especially.

"I'm not staying long, I'm going back home to work on some things for school while I've got extra time," he told his mother and father. "But there's something I wanted to talk to you guys about, so I brought these," he held up the box with a smile. Maya would joke that, now that they were engaged, every time either of them suggested that they needed to talk to their parents about something, the assumption that this something was a future grandchild would increase exponentially. Going by the flicker in his mother's eye just now, he had to say he saw her point.

They went into the kitchen, where the box was opened and its contents were brought around for the Friars to enjoy, sitting around the table.

"I ran into Coach Wiley a few days ago, at the bookstore," Lucas started.

"Oh, Mark," his mother smiled. "How's he doing?"

"Good, great," Lucas nodded. "Brian's in college, Alyssa is getting closer to that, and the little one, Jane, she's growing up fast. Mrs. Wiley is good, too."

"It's been a while since we've run into any of them," his father noted, like he was already planning to call and have the family over for dinner, a notion shared by his wife.

"We ended up having lunch together that day. He told me that he was going to be retiring at the end of this school year." Again, this caused a wave of surprise, although in his parents' case, it felt like the surprise passed soon enough, replaced with something like understanding on an age level. He'd never thought about it until now, but he had to wonder. "Were you guys in school around the same time?"

"You two graduated together, didn't you?" Melinda looked to her husband, who was already nodding.

"Anyone who saw him on the court back in the day would want that guy as a coach, for their kids or just to brush up their own skills. He might have ended up way up there with the big names if he hadn't busted his knees in college. He was really something."

"Wasn't Hank dating his sister for a while?" Melinda asked. Thomas chuckled.

"Jenny," he nodded. "He came this close to asking for her hand, too."

"Wait, seriously? Uncle Hank?" Lucas blinked, which only made his father laugh more.

"It was never going to happen. Anyway, they broke up not long after that, and then he met Tanya, and you know that ended, Joseph and the rest of them. I don't know where Jenny Wiley ended up, last I heard she was going off to study in Germany. Here, hold on," Thomas stood and disappeared out of the kitchen. They could hear him climbing up to the second floor.

"Maybe it would be better for you to take the rest of the day off… or the weekend, I mean, you do have a lot on your plate, with school, and the Sanderson farm, and the wedding… Did I tell you, I found this small shop that does…"

"Mom," Lucas turned back to her, sighing as he tried to pull her away from that line of thought. "The store's fine, it wasn't us, I told you."

"I know, I know," she straightened up in her seat, a shift which used to make him go 'uh oh' when he was a kid, like she was about to say something that would make him relent and do as she said, because there was no point trying any other way. "I can't help it if I worry about you sometimes, me as your mother and you as my only child…"

"Mom…" he held her gaze again. The old trick didn't work on him nearly the way it used to, and she knew that, even if she still gave it a shot from time to time.

"Alright, but just… just make sure that there's really nothing that could… you know…" she smiled at him, pleading just a bit.

"I will," he promised. That was good enough for her, or it would have to be, and she celebrated this with another treat from the box he'd brought from the bakery.

"Here," his father returned now, carrying what appeared to be a couple of yearbooks and a scrapbook. Sitting at the table again, he opened the first yearbook and started flipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for. The boys' basketball team, who from the looks of things had walked away the big winners that year… And there was a boy who looked very much like Brian Wiley, which could only be his father, the future middle school coach. "You know, he chose to stick with the middle school, because he knew how important it could be to get those skills honed in early. He could spot talent a mile away. Look at Maya…"

Maya, who'd barely played before moving to Austin and making friends with a bunch of enthusiasts… She'd started playing more because of them, and she'd tried out for the team, following Nadine. She would tell anyone herself that she'd never believed in a million years that the coaches would pick her, and when she'd seen her name on that list she'd been stunned. And by the end of high school she was leading the girls' team, one of their star players. He had no idea Coach Wiley had been the one to push for her to get a spot back then.

"Do you think I could borrow these?" Lucas asked, after they'd spent a little while looking through everything his father had brought for him to see. "That might actually be just what I need."

"Need for what?" his mother asked. In all this time, he actually hadn't gotten to tell them about his project, they were all so busy reminiscing. That kind of happened the lot, easily so. The man was attached to a lot of good memories.

Lucas went over everything he had already come up with over the last few days, his hope to do something for Coach Wiley, to note the years he'd spent at that school, all the lives he'd impacted in one way or another, big or small, his included.

He was right. His parents hadn't known he was there that day, that he'd overheard them talking with the coach. He'd never shared with them just how important that moment had been for him, and now to hear it, they were both taken with emotion, thinking back to that time in their family's history. So many years, and so much had changed for all of them… To them, the changes that related to their son specifically could only have a weight all their own.

"If you need anything else for this, you give us a call, or you just come over, alright?" his mother had gotten up, and Lucas had done the same, knowing that 'I need to hug you' face very well.

"I will," he promised her, smiling into her shoulder. He'd never noticed until now… He'd gotten taller than her at some point.

After leaving his parents' house, he'd gotten back in his car, the books left on the seat next to him. He had told himself he would go home and study on this unexpected morning off work, but now that he'd gotten this start with his project, there was another stop he needed to make, and it might well take up the rest of the morning. After that, he'd either be headed into work for the afternoon or he'd get another reprieve and he would get to study after all. Either way, it felt right for him to take this time and put it in service of giving Mark Wiley the thanks he deserved.

He didn't know what to expect of a school on a Saturday morning, but he knew it wouldn't be all empty and locked up. Climbing up the middle school's steps, he had to smile, feeling like he'd taken a trip back through time. How many times had they all sat up here, him and his friends, him and Maya…

He came back out again about an hour later, two boxes stacked in his arms. Loading them into his car, it really felt as though he was locked into this project for better or for worse now. He was already committed to it before, but now he had gone and taken steps enough that he couldn't back down anymore. It was all happening.

He had just enough time to go home and have lunch before he got the call to confirm he was going to be working that afternoon and through to closing. Part of him would have rather stayed behind to start and sort through the material he'd gathered from the school, but he had to go, so all he could do was keep his green journal near at hand, the better to add to his plans as they came. He could already picture the look on Maya's face when she'd see what he'd brought home. It would also mean a lot of the help she had offered him would have to be given from a distance, with the days she'd be spending off in Houston, but that was alright. The two of them had earned their confidence in one another and in their abilities to work through just about anything.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	34. Their Support of Memories

February 3rd 2020

_Chapter 34  
Their Support of Memories_

_Sunday..._

"Can't skip out and follow me out there this week, can you?" Maya asked him as they embraced by the door, once the last of her things had been packed into the minivan.

"I would go in a heartbeat," Lucas assured her with a smile, even as it felt like he was soaking up everything about her, filling up his mind to hold him through the week to come as he prepared to see her off until Friday.

"But," she nodded.

"But," he confirmed. She sighed, stealing a look to where Sam was playing catch with the dogs. "He'll be fine. I've got him," Lucas promised.

"Oh, I know that," Maya turned back to him with a laugh. "Boys' week... That should be interesting."

"Kind of looking forward to that," Lucas admitted. "Even if it comes at the cost of not having you around."

"Big cost, huge," she smirked, stretching up to kiss him. "And now I really gotta go." He pulled a card from her own plays, making an exaggerated sad face, which made her break into giggles. "Fine, one more and then you put those eyes away or I'm never going to make it to Houston."

"At last, my master plan," he whispered as she kissed him once more.

"You hold on to that now," she tapped at his chest before stepping back from his hold. "Sammy, come on, I have to go!" she called out, and her brother came jogging over, the dogs on his heels. She hugged him tight. "I'd tell you to be good, but who am I kidding, the misbehaving element is leaving with me," she smiled, giving him a cheek pinch. Sam pulled back with a laugh.

The dogs were left for Lucas and Sam to hold on to as Maya said her quick goodbyes to them, knowing they were all too likely to chase after the minivan if they caught on that she was leaving. They watched her drive off, until Sparkles was but a twinkle of red in the distance and then it was back into the house for Lucas, Sam, Trix, and Lou.

"So... What are you up to now?" Lucas asked.

"Homework," Sam shrugged. "You?"

"Got some people to track down..."

_X_

_Monday..._

"Hey, did you just get back?" Lucas asked, watching Maya on the screen as she settled in on the couch over in their old Houston house, pulling her hair from its bun. It was nearly ten in the evening. He'd been so caught up in his work that he hadn't seen the time until his phone started to chime and let him know he had a call coming in.

"Yeah..." she breathed, shaking out her hair with relief. "We had so many kids today, it didn't stop for a minute. We had some of them that stuck around into the evening, there were parents..."

"Oh?" he tried not to smile, even if he could tell just by the way she said this that she might have some choice words about those parents hovering around today.

"I don't know that I was ever called 'young lady' this much in one day..." Maya groaned. "Opiniated parents aside, I think we got through today alright. When one of the kids would just... have a breakthrough, you know... It was so good," her smile returned.

He already missed her, having spent one night and day away from her, but seeing her happiness shining through like this... It all became just a bit easier.

"What about you? Did you get anywhere today with the coach project?" she asked.

"Well..." he stretched to reach the green journal. He would have been perfectly contented just hearing about her day, hearing her voice and the way it made him feel, but if she wanted to be told about his day, he would tell her all he could. "I managed to track down a lot of the people from my list. Some of them aren't local anymore, not too sure what we're going to do about that. They all want to be involved if they can. Every one," he nodded. Maya smiled, that smile that said she was happy for you.

"That's amazing..."

"Yeah, it really is. Most of the ones I spoke to, wrote to, they had stories to share without me needing to ask, so that's something already," he told her, leafing through his notes. "Just when I'd think that I'd reached the depths of his involvement through the years, there's more. I'm pretty sure if I asked the kids he's coaching now they'd have even more."

"So do it," Maya shrugged. "I'm sure there's a way to involve them somehow."

_X_

_Tuesday..._

"Wow, you guys were tiny..." Sam declared upon seeing a picture of the 8th grade boys and girls' teams posing together with their coaches, the year where those teams had included the likes of Maya Hart and Lucas Friar. Upon hearing this declaration, Lucas had looked back toward his brother. "I mean... compared to today," Sam shrugged.

"Nice cover," Lucas pointed at him, which might possibly have been something more like 'saved by the bell,' as in that same moment the Skype bell rang. As Sam casually went back to his browsing through the material spread across the kitchen table where the two of them sat, Lucas tapped at his laptop and the screen soon filled with the image of Maya, back in Houston. It was earlier than the night before but still on the whole could be called late.

"Good evening, Austin," she smirked. Sam leaned over in his chair until his face could be seen by the webcam. "Isn't it past your bedtime?" Maya teased.

"Ha ha," Sam exaggerated, dropping back on to his chair.

"Hey," Lucas finally greeted his fiancée.

"Hey," she smiled. "So this is Wiley central, is it?" She could see some of the papers in front of him.

"Starting to be, yeah."

"Hit me," she nodded eagerly. "You get to go first this time."

"Okay, well, I talked with the secretary today, and then the principal, at the middle school and a couple of the high schools where most of the middle kids would have ended up. I don't know if it was all still being kept quiet that he was retiring, but now..."

"Oh, oops," Maya laughed apologetically.

"It's all good. It's kind of speeding things along, actually. They're going to see to some things on their end, where I couldn't have gone." When Maya laughed here, it felt like there had been a joke somewhere and only she had caught it. When he asked about it, she smiled.

"Just imagining you trying to sneak through the middle school without the coach seeing you, like some really tall 7th grader," she explained, laughing again when she heard her brother laughing off camera.

"Hey," Lucas 'protested,' looking to Sam, who focused on the photos again.

_X_

_Wednesday..._

"Shae absolutely wanted to make sure that I would say hello to you from her, so... hello to you... from Shae," Maya nodded, smiling. By the angle of the camera, Lucas could picture her sitting with her legs up on the couch, her computer set in her lap. He was in much the same set up on his end. Of course, he was on his own, as Sam was upstairs in the shower, while on the screen he could occasionally see his friends walking in the background. They would stop and wave at him now and again, Sophie, and Chiara, and Asher and Ray... According to Maya, the boys didn't look eager to go and find a place of their own any time soon as they'd said they would.

"Hello to her, too," Lucas chuckled. "I know she's not there, I mean..."

"I know," Maya laughed. He must have looked bummed out about something, as after they had already chatted about their respective days, she'd ended up taking her laptop and walking off upstairs, leaving their friends and her hosts behind. "You want me to repeat that to your mother?" she stopped midway up the stairs, addressing someone in the living room below. Lucas hadn't heard, couldn't say for sure who had spoken or what they'd said. "Our friends have dirty minds," Maya told him, spotting his curious look.

"We knew that," Lucas laughed.

"Two more nights and then I'm home," she smiled at him, finally stopping at the top of the stairs. "Can't come soon enough if you ask me."

"Same," he nodded. "I mean, it's good, right? Being apart, sometimes... It puts things in perspective."

"Like how you can't wait to have your little spoon back?" she casually asked.

"Definitely," Lucas confirmed, beaming.

"We've had worse, haven't we? That summer when I had to go to Philadelphia and you were out here in Texas..."

"Until I sailed off on Air Zvolensky to find you again..."

"And that was good, wasn't it?" Maya nodded.

"Putting aside the terror of what would happen if your parents didn't respond the way I needed them to..."

"Yeah, beside that," she hummed, recalling it all.

"This will be better," Lucas told her, and oh how he felt those three days apart already. Two more now, even more like one and a half... They could make that...

_X_

_Thursday..._

"You know, I could come and get you," Lucas told Maya with a smile as he watched her on the screen, absently collecting her things from around her as she prepared to start packing.

"Don't think I haven't considered it," she sighed, tipping back on her borrowed bed with her phone held before her. "Except then there would be two of us and two cars," she counted on her fingers.

"I could bring someone along to drive the second one."

"No, no, really. It'll be easier this way, and besides by the time you'd get here I would be dead asleep, and you know how I get."

"Whether I do or do not know I am going to reserve the right to pretend like I don't," Lucas informed her, which made Maya laugh.

"Don't think I haven't missed you enough that common sense only won out by thiiis much," she pinched her fingers together."

"Common sense and I are not getting along right now," he chuckled, his way of saying he felt the same.

"When did we go and become adults?" she hummed, propping her head up by sticking her free arm underneath.

"Someone must have snuck it in," he shrugged. "Like vegetables."

"Oh, my mother tried that with me when I was little. She said I hadn't looked at her with so much betrayal in my eyes since I was a baby and she took me in for my shots."

"It's a good thing you're coming home tomorrow," he told her, laughing.

"Why, you about to make yourself a Maya pillow?" she teased.

"We're very happy together," he gave her smirk.

"Oh, that girl better be gone by the time I get there," she replied with mock fury.

"Queen of the little spoons," he vowed, bringing her back to smiles.

"I'm just glad I get to be back in time for your big day."

"You and me both. Wouldn't have felt right without you there."

_X_

_Friday..._

Right near the time when he would finish up his morning hours at the Sanderson farm, he'd have a buddy nearby. Missy Sanderson would sit on the fence near the road, waiting for the bus that would take her to school, all the while sharing stories about one animal or another from her grandparents' farm. The way she'd talk about them, they might have been people, friends. It would make Lucas laugh every time.

Not long after the yellow bus had come along and Missy had run off to get on, Lucas had looked up to find another awaited vehicle. The red minivan named Sparkles. Mitch Sanderson had told him to go on ahead and he didn't need to be told twice. He jogged off to meet her on the road, and Sparkles rolled to a stop just ahead of him. The window rolled down.

"Howdy, going my way?" Maya drawled, leaning in the opening with a grin.

"What do you think?" he smiled back and moved in to kiss her. After five days and some hours apart, it felt like they'd reset all the counters and started over again.

"Well, I have the day off, so I was thinking I would drive you to school," Maya told him once he'd finally come around and climbed into the passenger seat. "Give Robbie and Ramona the morning off driving you."

"I would like that a lot, yes," Lucas agreed at once.

"Good, because I already texted Ramona to let her know."

Arriving back at the house, while Lucas quickly went to freshen up, Maya was left to reunite with a couple of eager pups and an equally eager little brother. Lucas came back down to find the two of them in the kitchen, where Sam was showing his sister some of what they had been doing for Coach Wiley.

Soon, he was off to catch his own bus, which he had been taking all week while his sister wasn't there to give him a ride. Maya and Lucas got in the minivan and started on the road for his university. For having been separated all this time, it hadn't taken long for it to feel as though she had never left. She really had been gone though, and the effect of her return would be felt in an extra lift in his steps all day, and in his voice as he told her the latest updates on the coming weekend and the deployment of Operation Wiley.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	35. Their Support of a Legacy

_**A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!**_

* * *

February 4th 2020

_Chapter 35  
Their Support of a Legacy_

"I'm really starting to understand the way you get with these things now," Lucas told Maya as the two of them led the way, their whole group weaving its way up to their seats here and there along the rows.

"And what way is that exactly?" she wondered.

"You know, just really kind of… too much excitement for too little a container, and that's not a joke about your height," he pointed back at her before she could presume as much. "It's just it's almost time, it's all coming together, and now the waiting feels like…"

"Like you're about to burst, my little container?" she teased.

"Kind of, yeah. How do you even stand it?"

"It's not like this is the first time you've done this, I mean what about the house, the proposal? That lasted way longer than any of this," Maya pointed out as they finally sat down.

"But on the whole, that was mostly just about you and me, this…" he looked around the gym, the crowded stands… "This is so many more people, and no matter how nervous I might have been… I had a good idea of how it would all pan out," he smiled when he felt her loop her fingers with his, the ring showing brightly on her finger.

"He's going to love it," Maya told him, leaning briefly to his shoulder.

She was right, it had all been very quick. It had been two weeks, just about, since that day he'd run into the coach over at the bookstore, and now here they were. As much work as it had required, he knew that for his part… this whole thing had been in the works for much longer than two weeks. This was him repaying his gratitude for an action already a decade past. And that was long enough.

He'd told Maya plenty about his plan as she'd driven him to school the previous morning, and then again at lunch when he'd discovered that she'd stuck around. He'd been more than happy to have her come and join the group when they all ate. It wasn't until he'd come home that evening, brought back by Robbie and Ramona, that he'd finally been able to show her all the things he'd gathered. Sam was spending the night at the Cassidy house, a sleepover to which Cecilia, Adam, and the Schmidt twins had been invited as well, so it had allowed the reunited pair some time to themselves. They'd ordered in and Lucas had taken Maya on a trip down Mark Wiley memory lane.

"You know he, and my dad, and Uncle Hank, and Mr. Shelby were all in school together? They were all on the boys' team together. There are still so many trophies and awards on display back there that they all got together."

That had been one of the things he'd found himself fixating on the most. He would look at those pictures, Wiley in his school days, and to find so many faces he could recognize, not just because he knew them as adults but because he knew a lot of their kids, had grown up with many of them… It was like history repeating, or… the next chapter of one generations' long saga… Years from now, he and his friends would be the ones bringing their own children into those schools, continuing the story.

"I'm just trying so hard not to focus on how weird it is to see your dad at that age," Maya would smile. "You really do look so much alike."

"Pappy Joe would make jokes how there could be no doubt where I came from. It would make my dad laugh… not so much my mom."

As easy as it was to get caught up with the throwback of those photos, this whole thing wasn't just about Mark Wiley the student, the high school basketball star. It was about what had come afterward, when he'd gone and become a teacher and a coach, and there was more than enough there for them to discover and to highlight. Lucas had found articles in local papers, from that first year where he'd taken over as coach, and the consensus seemed to go that he had made that school's basketball program into what it was today, taking it from years of wavering successes and overwhelming defeats into one of the best in the area. There had been some parents who'd moved their kids to ensure they could attend that school, so they could be coached by Mark Wiley. _Mark leaves his mark. _That was one of the headlines, and Lucas had sort of adopted it as a nickname for this project, this day.

There had been some debate about when exactly they would spring the surprise. The boys' team would be on the court, and the last thing they wanted was to go and do their thing and end up throwing everyone off, costing them the game. Thankfully, with the help of their old principal, they had been able to set things in motion so that the boys would get to play the following morning, turning it into a double day as the girls were set to play in the afternoon. Everyone would be aware of this already, including the players… just not their coach. He still believed he was getting his boys set for a game.

The gym felt like it buzzed with energy, with all these people here, so many of them here specifically on invitation. Lucas hadn't spoken or written to all of them separately, which would have taken forever, but he'd had some point people who had reached out to others and passed the information back toward him. He could sort of spot out the ones he _had_ spoken to. They would see him and wave at him, some of them, he suspected, only recognizing him because they took one look at him and figured out he had to be Thomas Friar's kid.

"He's totally going to figure it out," Lucas shook his head with a sigh.

"What? Why?" Maya asked.

"Everyone looks kind of… suspicious," he gestured around.

"No, that's just you," Zay leaned in from where he sat, one row behind, and clamped his hands to his best friend's shoulders, making Maya and their nearby friends chuckle.

"Yeah, relax, you're going to pass out," Asher insisted.

"Am not," Lucas frowned.

"Aren't you though?" Maeve tipped her head back, sitting in front of them.

"Oh, there's my mom, be right back," Ramona left her seat and scurried after a tiny woman looking lost.

"Maya!" a child's voice called, and they turned to see that it had belonged to Nellie Hunter, coming along with her twin, her little brother, and her parents. "Can we sit with you?"

"What do you think I've been saving these seats for?" Maya grinned, welcoming the leaping hug from the six-year-old and squeezing tight. Sure, it could still be days sometimes in between one visit and another, but somehow the knowledge that they hadn't seen their big sister because she'd been away made the reunions feel even more significant.

"When does the game begin?" Melinda Friar asked as she and her husband arrived.

"There's not actually a game today, Mom, remember?" Lucas stood, indicating where they had to sit.

"Oh, you know what I meant," she waved this off.

"Another twenty minutes or so," Lucas answered. He couldn't predict whether Coach Wiley would be coming around the gym at any point before the game, though he had his inside men in the form of the boys' team, who had their marching orders handed to them by the girls' coach. They were to ensure the surprise wouldn't be blown and everything would go as planned. "Okay, maybe I'm overdoing it just a little," he quietly told Maya as they were coming down to the last minute. For having been part of those teams, they knew to trust in a punctual start, and that hadn't changed in the eight years since they'd left.

"In through the nose, out through the mouth, Huckleberry," she smiled, squeezing his hand.

"Right, yeah, makes sense…" he slowly breathed.

From the moment the boys' team and their coach came out into the gym, and all up until their time in the gym was done, it all felt as though everything went by so fast. The wait had been endless but the event itself just went by so quickly.

Naturally, the opposing team, once the game had been pushed to the next day, had no reason to show up today, and so they hadn't come. Lucas could see the boys as they all sat there now, pretending like they had no idea what was about to happen, some of them maybe playing too heavily in the 'where's the other team, what's going on?' act. The coach didn't see any of this though. He was too busy asking himself that very same question.

Then, from the family's usual spot, seven-year-old Jane Wiley had gotten up and walked across the empty court toward her father, carrying a flat box on her extended arms. The hush fallen over the gym was enough to clue the coach to the possibility that something might have been going on, but not so much that he'd understand exactly what that something was. When his youngest daughter stopped and held out the box to him, he bent forward to speak and finally stood back up, pulling open the box being offered to him. For having been the one to pack it, Lucas would be one of the few to have his curiosity extinguished as he didn't have to ask 'what's in that box?'

He knew that what Mark Wiley wasn't seeing yet was a couple stacks of envelopes banded together, and a book at the very bottom, because all he _could_ see at the moment would be an old jersey, in the old colors of his high school, folded to show the back, with the number 36 underneath the name WILEY.

And when he'd look back up again, there would be many more jerseys now. Across the many spectators filling the bleachers to capacity and standing room that day, all of them who'd played with him in school would be wearing those same colors, that same team. All the kids who had not been players, who only knew him to be their gym teacher, had the school's athletics shirt, like they'd just stepped into gym class once again. And then, all those he had coached at this school, who far outnumbered his former teammates and students, far outnumbered the 'civilians,' too, wore the colors of that same team represented by the boys on the court that day. The girls had their jerseys, too. He may not have been _their_ coach, but he'd been there for them as much as the boys. All of them were cheering now, some of them waving signs that heralded them as the class of one year or another, the champions of this season or that one…

Coach Wiley was taking it all in, little by little, and he would see the faces, he would recognize the people, and his eyes didn't take long to start tearing up.

Some of them had come up to speak, one by one, sharing stories, sharing the many reasons why the man leaving at the end of the year mattered to all of them enough that they had to say it in this way. Lucas hadn't gone up, hadn't wanted to draw attention to himself, even as the people had started to step down from the bleachers, coming up to talk with the coach, reuniting with some of the others in the gym that day. By then, the lunch spread they had organized was brought in, and people got to serve themselves.

"You going up there anytime soon?" Maya asked, coming to sit with Lucas as he looked on to the scene. She held up a plate she'd filled and he grabbed a sandwich. "I mean I get what you're trying to do, I do." He looked at her. "He helped you without asking for thanks, you're thanking him without asking for any in return… Except you did know, or else we wouldn't all be here today. If you don't tell him, I will," she stared him down.

"You wouldn't," he stared back, unable to keep from chuckling.

"All those people who went up and said their bit, they had plenty to be thankful for and they said it, why do you think?" That was an easy question, wasn't it? The man had meant so much to them, and just because he'd done it all without asking for notice, that didn't mean he shouldn't see that gratitude acknowledged.

His secret was let out anyway. Barely a minute later, as he and Maya were still sharing her plate, the coach came up to the bleachers where they sat.

"It's been brought to my attention that you were behind all of this," he nodded to Lucas, a smile at the corner of his lips and in his eyes.

"Who told?" Maya couldn't help asking.

"That would be my most mature child," he revealed, looking back to where Jane Wiley was dribbling one of the balls, moving around the 8th graders and showing she may yet have had a jersey of her own in the future.

"I'll go see if she wants a teammate," Maya set the plate aside, dusting off her hands as she climbed down and took a moment to hug the coach before jogging off to join the girl.

"You know, I was starting to think people were talking behind my back the last week or so. Now I know why," Coach Wiley climbed up to sit with Lucas. "You did all this?" he asked, looking around.

"Did you look under the jersey yet?" Lucas asked. With the letters, being messages from those who had been unable to come, for reasons of distance above all, the book had been posted outside the gym door, for all to sign as they came in, before being inserted into the box and left in the capable hands of little Jane.

"I did," the coach smiled. "And you're not answering my question."

"I just… After we talked that day, I couldn't get it out of my head. You did so much for me, and I never got to say thanks. And everyone I talked to, Maeve, Ramona, Julia… They all had stories like mine, so it all kind of came together."

"I was only doing my job…" the coach told him, but Lucas shook his head.

"It felt like a lot more than that, to them, to me. That day, when you came to my house and you told my mom and dad about trying to get me back in school, I heard you talking, I knew it was you. It meant… a whole lot to me, to hear what you had to say. And I never said anything back. I guess this is like… thank you, with interest."

"You know, I always suspected about that day, but I never said…" Wiley chuckled. "I can't even begin to tell you, seeing all of them out there… It really puts a lot of things in perspective… Thank you, Lucas," he turned back to him, and Lucas tipped his head. He had a feeling this wouldn't be the last time they saw one another, not after those years in between.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	36. Their Holidays With Snow

February 5th 2020

_Chapter 36  
Their Holidays With Snow_

Maya had hardly made it a secret, as December kicked off. She wanted snow. Not just a little bit, no. She wanted a whole freaking winter wonderland. It was their first year back in Austin, the first Christmas they'd be spending in their house, and it was going to be a great one, if she had any say in it. Sam would joke that the universe really had it in its best interests to make it so.

Whether it was the universe or simply the weather happening as it would, they woke up one Friday to find their world had been blanketed in white.

More to the point, they had been awakened to discover this. The sun was barely up, and they'd both been startled awake by the sound of Maya's phone chiming with an incoming Skype call.

"No, five more minutes…" she grumbled, face in her pillow, while Lucas lifted his head just enough to see the screen.

"I think that's the new four-year-old," he lay back down. If anything was going to convince her to ditch the warmth of those blankets, her little brother was definitely going to be a contender.

"I know, I know…" she sighed, lifting herself on her elbow while she reached for her phone, turning on the lamp first. As predicted, when the call connected, she was presented with the freckled face of Matthew Jonathan Hunter, aged four, as of today. "Happy birthday, baby brother," she smiled like she totally hadn't woken up a minute ago.

"Maya, are you going to come make a snowman, please?" MJ giddily asked.

"Well, sure," she laughed. "But we're going to need snow for… that…" she'd turned her head to look out the window as she said this, only to pause in surprise. "Woah…" At this, Lucas turned to look as well, and the surprise hit him as it had done her. "Yeah, okay, tonight?"

"Okay!"

After she'd hung up with her brother, Maya had climbed out of bed to join Lucas, who already stood at the window, and see what he saw.

"Cold, cold…" she backpedalled to get her slippers on and throw a robe over her PJs, but finally she got to see for herself… her wonderland.

Living out here on the lane, in Pappy Joe's old house, their home now, had always been like hitting the next level in how their surroundings could change everything. It was a far, far cry from her days in New York. Looking out the window now, it felt like she just had one thing in mind and it was to break out her camera, or pencils, or paints… possibly all three, one after the other.

"Do you think Sam's seen this yet?" Lucas asked. May turned to look at him, and he regretted the question instantly, or possibly he anticipated he might need to apologize to him later. "Maya…" he tried to call her back, but she was already dashing out of their room and down the hall. Stopping at the door, she pressed her ear to it for a moment before cracking it open.

She only had a second to realize it was so quiet because her brother wasn't in the room before she felt a hit of cold… also the hit of a cold, wet thing, managing to lodge just at her neck where it was then able to break apart and slip inside her robe. She cried with surprise, turning around to find Sam standing there, throwing arm still in the air and dripping with melting snow. The grin on his face was something fierce, potentially over compensating, and such an echo of what hers might have looked like if the positions had been reversed.

Lucas stood at the door to their room, about halfway between the siblings, holding back the urge to laugh with all his might.

"So young to die…" Maya declared, chasing after Sam a half second before he turned and started back down the stairs.

After the 'face-off' had come to an end with a bit of running through the snow in inappropriate footwear and a couple of cold and snowy siblings, they had been welcomed back into the house with towels, rosy cheeks, and the promise of coffee, as Lucas had chosen to hang back and prepare for their return from the chase.

"Can you stay home today?" Sam asked his sister.

He'd made it through the end of his first semester, finals and all, and right now he had that look in his eyes like he wanted to do exactly what she'd wanted to do, as soon as she'd seen the snow earlier. Lucas was nearly done, too, one more final this afternoon and then his days of driving out and back would be done until January. As for Maya… she was sort of at an in-between. She and her team had completed their round of school sessions. Everything was on track for Stage Ready to start full out in the new year, too. They had a schedule, they had participants registered… It was all happening. At this point, she wasn't exactly twiddling her thumbs, waiting for the start, she still had things to do… But she could do those at home if she chose to.

Snowy wonderland… Brother here… Brother there… Oh, she chose to.

"I don't know, are you ready for round two?" she asked, giving the slightest leap forward, only an inch but enough to get Sam to startle, which made her laugh.

"I'm gonna get you this time," Sam declared, pointing at her.

"Yeah, okay," Maya nodded, sounding much more like 'in your dreams.' "You have to study now, right?" she asked, turning to Lucas with a much more sympathetic tone.

"Would have run out there with you guys earlier if I didn't," he nodded.

"Aww," Maya smiled, taping his hand. "I'll shove you in the snow later," she promised.

"Not if I catch you first," he smiled back.

"Oh, it's like that," she squinted.

"It is," he returned the look. He couldn't wait to get back now, and he hadn't even left yet.

After seeing Lucas off to his car, Maya had turned to her brother, the two of them sharing a look that was less 'let me tackle you into this snow' and more 'race you to the attic.' In the end they had to meet somewhere halfway though, as the open door had led to the dogs bouncing excitedly off into the snow. Once they had collected the pair of them and dried them off back inside the house, they had finally climbed up toward the attic.

The gable window still showed some coverage, although a lot of it appeared to have had time to slide off. It was hard to tell the difference, with the sky being clouded over in white as it was. What they had been looking forward to the most was to discover the view from the other windows, the ones that would open up a vast stretch of the land ahead on both sides.

"We're the first ones to see it like this," Sam pointed out as he and Maya looked through the front view. She looked at him for a beat… He had a point. The attic was brand new, and this was the first snow fall since its construction.

"Hang on," she hurried back down the steps, out of the attic and into hers and Lucas' room to grab her camera. When she returned, she snapped a few shots of the views from both the front and back windows. She showed the screen to Sam as he leaned in to see. "What now?" she asked him.

"The house," he smiled, and she wholly agreed on that, so they headed down, putting on some appropriate footwear and jackets unlike earlier. Despite the disruptions in the newly fallen snow, from their previous scuffle, they were able to get some good images. Maya had been showing her brother how to use the camera to its fullest extent, passing on those tips and tricks she herself had learned from Shawn, and from classes she'd taken back in high school.

"We need to come back and take some more later, when the string lights will be on and… Hey, no, come on!" she ran back toward the house, Sam on her heels, when they spotted Trix and Lou making a run for it once more.

After spending most of the morning back in the attic, quietly painting and drawing – Maya at her desk, Sam sitting cross-legged underneath the gable window – they had decided to go and have lunch, to see what the city looked like beyond the lane, on this snowy December day. Lunch had given way to a stop at the art supply store, which tended to be a lengthy endeavor when the two of them would go there together. By the time they left and started on their way to the Hunter Hart house, they had fallen down a line of discussion about Christmas presents for this family member or that friend.

They arrived and left again almost immediately, as Shawn had been about to go and pick up MJ from pre-school. Happy to get a chance at surprising the birthday boy, they went along for the ride, the three of them along with one-year-old Haley.

The birthday boy was in a decidedly less cheerful mood than he'd been when he'd gotten hold of his mother's phone and called his sister that morning. They found him in the midst of having a nosebleed dealt with. Shawn had hurried over, leaving his youngest to his eldest. They quickly learned that, in his giddiness after having been in the snow, MJ had slipped and fallen, coming back into the building in anticipation of being picked up. He clung good and tight to his dad when he spotted him, and Shawn rubbed at his back, working to reassure him. After they'd finally seen that the bleeding had stopped, and MJ seemed on the whole to be fine, they had left the bench.

"Hey, bud," Maya crouched to receive her little brother, once he'd spotted her and realized she'd come. Sam had Haley now, and Maya had a feeling MJ wasn't about to let go of her until they made it back to the house. "Hey, you're okay, you're alright," she told him.

"Can… can… we... still make the… the snowman?" MJ asked, in his little shaken voice.

"You bet, birthday boy," she kissed his blond head. "We'll make a whole bunch of them if you want."

MJ spent the ride home huddled against his big sister's side. He would get made fun of by some of the other kids sometimes, who'd call him a baby because he liked to hug people. More than once, she'd listened to her parents vent their frustrations, knowing they couldn't exactly go off on a bunch of toddlers, though they had some opinions to pass on to their parents…

They were nearly to the house when her phone rang and, one arm around her brother as she was, she fished it out blindly and stuck it to her ear.

"Hello?"

"Maya, it's time…" a frantic voice greeted her. She blinked.

"Who's this?" she asked, even as she pulled the phone back and saw that it was… Oh… _Oh!_ "Farkle, hey! Time, it's… The baby?"

"We just got to the hospital," he told her. She could practically see his face in her mind, eyes wide, jumpy… It seemed like just a moment ago they had been stunned to learn Farkle and Isadora were expecting, but no, that was… that was six months ago already, and now… now baby Minkus was about to make his or her entrance into the world, very possibly sharing a birthday with the boy tucked at her side at this very moment.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	37. Their Holidays With Life

February 6th 2020

_Chapter 37  
Their Holidays With Life_

Once he'd dropped off Robbie and Ramona at their place, all Lucas was looking forward to was a quiet evening at home, now that he was on holiday. After having been forced to play the reasonable one earlier that day, while Maya and Sam had been running through the snow in what could only feel like an invitation to frostbite, he wanted very much to get his chance at a frozen bit of mischief.

_Lucas: Be there soon, unless you need me to pick up anything on the way…_

_Maya: Can you get cupcakes?_

_Maya: Couple dozen should do._

_Maya: Any flavor will do, too._

_Maya: As long as one of those is chocolate._

_Lucas: Aiming for a sugar rush?_

_Maya: Always._

_Maya: It's for everyone._

_Lucas: Who's everyone? Where are you?_

_Maya: Chuckles'._

That had become their nickname for the apartment shared by Riley, Dylan, and Rosa, after Zay had mentioned that to be a mouthful, after which Asher had come up with the name, due to the fact that the residents' initials spelled 'RDR,' and it just sounded to him like 'hardy har har.'

So, he'd made the detour for the bakery before heading in the direction of the apartment building. He wasn't sure exactly how many of them were there or why it suddenly warranted a pit stop for treats, but he had done as asked, and he carried the stack of boxes through the door and up the stairs. The closer he got to the apartment, he could hear music and knew it had to be from his friends' place. Was this just all of them celebrating the end of the semester? They did have a few among them finishing up this first semester in Austin, whether it was their first one of college ever or in a new program. There was him, of course, and also Sam, and Rosa, and Dylan…

He, like Maya, had a key to the place, but with his arms loaded, a knock felt safer, so he knocked and waited. It took several seconds, enough that he had raised his fist and was about to knock again, until the door swung open and there was Rosa.

"Please tell them the whole blue or pink thing doesn't actually mean anything," she demanded, even as she took the boxes from him.

"The what?" he asked, feeling like he'd just been thrown in the middle of a story without the benefit of leafing through the start.

Looking around, he began to regret the additional, third dozen he'd gotten, when he saw the guests came down to a very 'one dozen might have bordered on fine' kind of group. Beyond the trio who made up the Chuckles roster, he found Maya and Sam, Zay and Nadine, and Rebecca and her boyfriend, Jax. Put in the four back in Houston and it could have felt very much like a night with the old gang.

"You know, pink for girls, blue for boys," Rosa rolled her eyes, heading into the kitchen. Left behind, left blinking, Lucas looked around the room, needing very much for someone to tell him what was going on.

"You look _lost_," Maya appeared like a miracle. Her face was all aglow, and upon catching his wide-eyed 'what's up?' look, she pulled him back into the hall and away from the noise. "Farkle called a little while ago. Baby Minkus is coming," she revealed, just a couple handful of words to make everything go from confusion to clarity and right on to excitement.

They might all have been in New York or on their way out there right about now, if not that the parents-to-be had insisted that it wouldn't be necessary. Much as they would have loved to have their friends around them at any time, especially this one, they had both chosen to experience it the way they would feel most comfortable experiencing it. They had been hearing from Farkle and Isadora both across the months, and especially as they drew nearer to the big day, they could understand the growth in nerves.

Farkle had been telling his oldest friends how he worried that it would all get to be too much for his wife, as she prepared to give birth to their child. She had made such strides over the years, but this would be something so massively life-changing… For that, they could understand their not wanting to be too crowded over, back in New York. That didn't mean they couldn't do their part, from back here in Texas, and celebrate whenever the dearly awaited one arrived.

"Haven't heard much from them since that first call, but that's to be expected, I guess," Maya went on. Standing out here, away from the noise of the small party happening back in the apartment, he could see how the anticipation was wearing in. That was to expected, wasn't it, when it was the two of them back there, about to become parents. Farkle and Isadora were some of the most important people in her life, and those words weren't given over lightly.

"Sure they'll call or write as soon as they can," Lucas told her, scooping her up in a hug that sent her teetering to keep her feet on the ground.

"Hey…" she laughed, arms around his neck. "I didn't get to say, congrats on finishing today," she smiled, which had him smiling in return.

"Thanks," he told her, possibly fighting the urge to carry her all the way back on to the street to give at least some semblance of following through on his challenge that morning. "Hey, it's still MJ's birthday," he realized aloud.

"I know!" Maya nodded. "When I told him about how the baby and he could have the same birthday, he asked if he could share his cake… Love that kid…" she beamed. "Sam and I went with Dad to get him from pre-school earlier. He fell and ended up with a nosebleed right before we got there."

"Is he okay?" Lucas asked at once.

"Oh, yeah, all good now, but he was holding on real tight all the way back home. All he wanted was to make a whole bunch of snowmen, so we did that, we did one of Dad, and Mom, and the twins, and him, and Haley, and me, and you…"

"There's a snow Maya and snow Lucas out there?" he asked, curiously grinning.

"Oh yeah, very cute, very lumpy," she nodded, pulling out her phone to show him.

"Well, at least they look happy together," Lucas smirked, seeing the two figures planted side by side on the Hunter Hart front lawn.

"The whole thing really made me want to explore sculpture in the new year," Maya told him. "I have the perfect model…"

"Keeping my pants on, thanks," he gave her a look, receiving a pout in return.

Going back into the apartment, he asked what Rosa was going on about earlier, or at least what had caused her to jump in like this. Maya revealed that they had started something of a pool, about whether the baby would be a boy or a girl.

"Right… What's everyone saying?"

"Well, it's a secret vote," Maya informed him. "Except there's ten of us, now that you're here, so for all we know it'll be an even split."

"You totally know what they all voted for, don't you?" Lucas guessed, going off the focused look on her face.

"Maybe, a little…" she shrugged. "Not like it'll make any difference whoever gets the most…"

She stopped as her phone rang and she saw that it was Farkle.

"Hey…" she blinked. "Hey!" she called over the room, who quieted down right quick as they looked over and saw she had her phone up. In the next moment, they were all rushing to huddle behind her as she answered the call. "Hey," she smiled as her old friend's face appeared on her screen. Farkle Minkus looked positively blindsided. The mad rush of a few hours ago had given way to relief, and just so much amazement. Maya couldn't help noting – and looking to Riley, who had her chin planted at her shoulder, peering along, she was sure _she_ thought the same – just how their little Farkle friend had never appeared to them so grown up as he did now.

"Is it over, is the baby…" Riley asked him. Farkle breathed in, nodding, and their cluster of waiting friends were a single chorused cheer. If the new father had wanted them to fall quiet again, he couldn't have done it any better than in the way he did it, intentionally or not. He only pulled his phone a little further back and tilted it, so that they could discover the bundle held in his other arm. The sight of the small face, with tufts of dark hair showing on its head, had left all ten of them speechless.

"Her name is Ada… Ada Marie Minkus," he announced, and it got the two former New York girls blubbering with smiles. Maya remembered that day, at Zay and Nadine's wedding. _In my heart, I think I hope for a girl…_ One look at his face now and they just knew he already loved her more than anything in the world.

"Lovelace and Curie?" Nadine asked, a knowing guess.

"We both picked one," Farkle nodded. "It didn't matter to us which one was first or second, it just sounded right this way. Ada was mine."

"How's Isadora doing?" Rebecca asked, as they all got a closer look at the newborn girl's face, more than one of them cooing and making faces like she could possibly see them and understand what was happening, when it was looking like she was asleep.

"She did so good," Farkle replied, his voice showing he'd had no doubt this would be the case. "It was all pretty quick, all things considered. Turns out she'd been in labor a while before she even said anything."

"Hence the panic?" Maya guessed, recalling how he'd sounded when he'd first called her.

"Yeah," he breathed, his attention falling back to his brand new daughter. "I should go back in there…"

"Send pictures, okay?" Lucas requested.

"Loads of them," Zay nodded.

"I will," Farkle promised. "Oh, Maya, will you tell your brother happy birthday from us?" he asked, remembering at the last moment.

"I will," Maya beamed, tipping her head to the baby in his arms. _Happy birthday to her, too…_

After the call had ended, the party had come unpaused, bigger and better than ever, as they shifted from the wait and into the proper celebration, for the birth of little Ada Minkus.

"Wait until MJ finds out he's got his birthday buddy," Maya grinned, as she, Sam, and Lucas all headed home later on. They would be headed back to her parents' house the next day, for the boy's birthday party. Ada's birth had been unpredictable, hence the cupcakes bought at the last minute, but for MJ, as the days had gone by, bringing them closer to his 'big day,' the trio had been working together to conjure up the best birthday cake they could muster. It was shaping up pretty well, if Maya had anything to say about it. The finishing touches would be going on the following morning, before they packed it up and headed to the Hunter Hart house.

"The party might end up with us at the post office, trying to send cake to an infant," Lucas suggested, making her giggle.

When they arrived back at the house, Sam told the two of them to wait for him to get the camera and turn the Christmas lights on, so he and Maya might get those shots they'd wanted to take. As they waited, Lucas noticed she was keeping a bit of distance between them.

"What…"

"Hey, I'm not taking any chances," she shook her head, gesturing around them at the snow.

"Is that so?" he smirked.

"Hey," she pointed at him, warning. "Don't even think about it."

"No?" he asked, advancing on her.

"I said no!" she squealed, taking off at a run. The chase was on. It was swift, and it was short, and it ended in the snow, with giggles like bells.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	38. Their Holidays With Family

February 7th 2020

_Chapter 38  
Their Holidays With Family_

They didn't need to worry about wanting for pictures of the new little Minkus. Ada Marie was a daily staple of their inboxes, many times over, courtesy of her shutterbug father most of all. It was like their new favorite show. _Did you see this one? Isn't she sweet in that one?_ There was no telling as of yet exactly when they would get to see the baby in person, but in the meantime they were happy to feed their eagerness on pictures and videos.

The girl was a whole week old the morning Maya, Lucas, and Sam took off from the house on their way to the airport. They'd all gone to bed early the night before, in anticipation of this departure. Whether they actually needed to leave so early depended on who you asked. They would be spending about two hours waiting for the flight to land, the way they were going. But the passengers were worth it. They were family.

"Your face? Right now? It's adorable," Maya reached over to prod at her brother's cheek. Sam gave a half-hearted nudge, pushing her arm away.

He couldn't pretend like he wasn't bursting at the seams at the thought of seeing those people coming off the plane. His grandmother, his aunt and his cousins, James and his kids, his brother and his sisters, his mother… his mother most of all… It could have been easy for him to pretend that the distance didn't affect him, after all this time, but he was still fifteen, nearly sixteen, and being away from the people who had been his world all his life… No one understood this more than his big sister right now, so if he needed to be there very early, to ensure that his would be one of if not the very first face his family saw when they got off the plane, then that was what they'd do.

"Stop…" he told her now, though the laugh in his voice suggested he didn't mind the poking nearly as much as his words would have them believe.

"Make me," Maya grinned. _Poke, poke, poke._

"Lucas!" he called for backup, and Maya 'gasped.'

"Snitching on me? That's low, Sammy, that's real low… Especially if you're snitching to someone I can be very persuasive with," she turned a smile to her fiancé at her side. "What do you have to say to _that_?" Her brother looked at her for a moment, then turned his attention to Lucas to unload his response.

"With great power comes great responsibility," he calmly stated. Maya turned to Lucas, who was giving a face like he'd been put in the spotlight and he was now forced to put down judgement.

"He just Spider-manned you, didn't he?" Maya whispered.

"I think I have a solution that will make everyone happy," Lucas finally told them, looping his arm around Maya. _Her_ arms were effectively pinned to her now, keeping her from poking her brother, but on the plus side she was being held by the guy she loved, so if that wasn't a solid compromise…

"Alright, well that was a good play," Maya smiled, settling in, her expression switching over as she looked to her brother and gave him the 'I'm watching you' gesture. Sam laughed, looking back to the arrivals board, even though they still had a long while to go.

A few seconds later, both Maya and Lucas heard the ding of a notification on their phones, one second after the other, which they rightly interpreted to mean a new 'episode' in the Ada Marie Minkus show. Maya managed to get her phone out, despite the arm that 'restrained' her, and they saw she'd been correct. The message – from Farkle – came attached with a short video. This one showed Isadora, sitting peacefully on the sofa in their home, with baby Ada curled up in her arms. The girl was wearing what they recognized at once as being one of the outfits they'd sent as gifts in the weeks preceding her birth. It looked just barely on the side of too big, but then she'd grow into it in time.

Ada was awake, and generally enjoying life. In this moment, she looked sort of captivated by her mother. Isadora sang to her, nice and smooth. She was singing a TXNY song, one of their first, one of the ones she had written herself. It was near to impossible to look at that video and not feel deeply touched, but in particular Lucas could just tell without seeing her face how it would bring tears to Maya's eyes. He'd stroke her arm with his thumb, on the end of the arm he had looped around her and she'd just go sniffling up, like if he acknowledged the fact she'd be feeling it all, then she might as well go ahead and catch her breath. He knew how much the people in her life mattered to her, in ways he could hardly have known on the same level.

"Tucson!" Sam pointed to the board later on, springing to his feet before Maya or Lucas had the time to realize what he was going on about. "They're here," he pointed to the line informing them that the flight from Tucson was about to land.

"Hey, chill, little brother, come on…" Maya gave his shoulders a squeeze as she stood.

"Yeah, if you look too desperate your mom is going to want to take you back with her," Lucas piped in.

"You won't get to finish your degree, your friends will be sad, and none of them more than your loving sister…" Maya dramatically intoned.

"Okay, okay, can we just go," Sam took her hand, and they were off.

Sam wasn't the only eager one that day. It wasn't that Maya wasn't eager to see her siblings and everyone, but then circumstances had made it so that she was getting to be used to being apart from them all, while this… This was the longest Sam had been away from everyone, and the longest everyone had been away from Sam. Now they were about to see each other for the first time in months…

"Do you see them?" Sam asked, eyes scanning the faces of people stepping from the flight. Maya and Lucas looked along with him, and Lucas was the first to spot any of them, though it happened barely a second before the voice of one Elizabeth Anne Hart, better known as the Lizard, let out a squeal that cut through the confusion and drew their attention.

_"Sammy!"_

"Oh, look out," Lucas smiled. The ten-year-old could have played football for how fast she broke through on her way to reach her big brother. When she got there, she locked him into such a hug that he would have lost his footing if not for the pair at his back reaching out with four hands as one. As soon as he'd been steady, Sam had lifted his sister into his arms and she'd locked arms and legs around him, like she'd never let him go again. Going by the smile on his face, Sam might have been alright with that.

He'd no sooner put her down that Eliza turned her attentions on Maya, who scooped the girl right off the ground again, even as Sam's attentions were now taken with the littlest of the Hart siblings, led along by the hand by the middle girl and middle child of the quintet. Wyatt almost looked like he had been going on skepticism that he'd truly be seeing his brother and sister today, while Cara had taken it upon herself to prove to him that it was all true. The moment he spotted the ongoing reunion happening just ahead, he gasped and shot off like a rocket, letting go of Cara's hand and running into Sam's waiting arms. He started talking so fast that it was hard to comprehend what he was saying, but it sounded a whole lot like he was reporting on the activities of the 'ship' up in Maya's attic room in Tucson in recent times, which was as good as saying 'I missed you so much.'

"Hey, you," Maya opened out her arm for Cara to join the sister heap, which she happily did. "Did you get taller again?" she breathed, holding the thirteen-year-old close. If she kept this up, she really would surpass her…

"Come here a second," Lucas snatched up Wyatt from Sam's arms so he could go and hug his mother when she came in sight. Abigail looked like she might have gone at a run the way her youngest daughter had done, for how tightly she hugged her first boy, her first child… She pressed kisses into the side of his head like she'd supported this separation long enough and she would enjoy having him back for as long as she could. She held his face in her hands, looked at him with such a smile… Her patience had been rewarded at last.

The more of them came around to join the cluster, it really got to feel like, for all the snow, and the lights, the decorations and the madness of shopping that had been going on, the music and the movies… This right here… This was truly the start of it, of Christmas. It was a little under a week away now, and by all accounts it was shaping up to be that the next few days would be some great ones.

"Do you get that feeling, too, like you just want to keep looking at the weather all the time, to make sure there won't be a storm again like last year?" Maya asked Lucas as they drove on toward home, leading the rented car riding behind them. That vehicle contained Abigail, James, Sam, Eliza, Emma, and Wyatt, while Sparkles the minivan, along with the two of them, brought along Cara, Teddy, Luna and her girls, and Elizabeth Hart.

"I don't need to. Zay's been texting me updates like every hour on the hour the last couple days. He and Nadine are hosting the two families this year and he really doesn't want their 'first married Christmas' to turn into anything like last time out here." Maya could barely keep from laughing.

"Damn…" she spoke quietly, shaking her head with the realization of how all of them were getting on to that part of their lives, more and more. Marriage, and babies, and homes, and full-time jobs… She wasn't against it, far from. Deep down, a part of her had been looking forward to all that, but that didn't make it any easier to realize how they were all just growing up, that they were adults… A cough from the backseat brought her back out of her thoughts. "Sorry, Granny," she sheepishly replied, though both she and Lucas in the passenger seat were trying to hold back from laughing at the reprimand on the word.

"Kind of feel bad about leaving them behind tomorrow night," Lucas turned to Maya a few minutes later, once the back of the minivan was back in conversation, discussing what sounded like a funny incident on the flight over.

"They'll be fine," Maya told him. "I think they're planning to go skating or something. I passed on the invitations from my parents, and your parents… They won't be bored. We would have brought them if we could."

"Are you talking about Sam's new _girlfriend_?" Cara asked from behind them, a smirk in her voice.

"She's not his girlfriend," Maya pointed at her without taking her attention off the road. "Cecilia's his friend. We're just going to see her school's Christmas show. We all helped her come up with the idea, and I showed her a few things…"

"Giiiirlfriend…" Cara cooed, sitting back with giggles. Maya sighed.

"This is going to come back and bite us later, isn't it?" she asked Lucas.

"Oh, big time."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	39. Their Holidays With Art

February 8th 2020

_Chapter 39  
Their Holidays With Art_

It had taken some convincing and the acquisition of an extra bed, along with sleeping bags and inflatable mattresses, but the visitor out of Tucson were staying at the house on the lane and not a hotel. At some point, it had involved appealing to Abigail's boyfriend with something like 'Come on, the Lanes staying on the lane? How can you not?' Whether or not that had been the deciding factor, she couldn't say, but in the end it had finally been agreed.

Now the house was as crowded as they had ever seen it, and they were perfectly happy for it. Maya and Lucas had happily relinquished their bed to Abigail and James, while Granny Lizzie had insisted for Sam to keep his bed, while she bunked with her daughter in the borrowed bed set in the third room, across the hall from the master room. The other kids were spread out through the three bedrooms and the attic, where Maya and Lucas had set up their temporary residence.

"You know, I could get used to this," Maya whispered, the morning after her family's arrival. Lucas turned his head to her, finding she kept on looking up through the gable window, showing the sky beyond in its early colors.

"It's pretty good," he agreed, looking back up before turning to her again. "Want to keep looking for a while? I can go get breakfast started."

"I'll help," she shook her head, though she hadn't broken eye contact for this, so he smiled, leaning over to kiss the side of her head.

"I'm sure you will, but you take your time," he told her, slipping out of their sleeping bag and getting to his feet, stretching. "See you down there," he whispered before sneaking on their bunkmate in the attic and calling her bluff by prodding her side with his foot. "Want to help, too?" he grinned when Cara squirmed and laughed.

"How'd you know I was awake?" she asked, sitting up.

"He always knows," Maya informed her sister, who'd sort of scoot-crawled over to embrace her before joining Lucas. "Be there in a few, alright?" she smiled.

The morning had been spent making the very most of the snowy land around the house, which had been much of the selling point for having the Tucson Harts come over to Austin instead of going the other way around. Eventually, they all had to go back inside, to thaw and dry up and eat, and then it was time to get ready for the rest of the day, in particular the evening, where Maya, Lucas, and Sam were concerned. The others had gone off to the Friar house, taking up the invitation extended by Lucas' mother and father as soon as they'd heard that they would all be coming over.

"They're going to be family before long," Melinda had pointed out, the smile on her face becoming a familiar one they had nicknamed the 'my baby boy is getting married' smile. Both Maya and Lucas suspected the wedding would be a primary topic that day, and they had tasked Cara and Teddy Lane with keeping their eyes and ears open, the better to report what they found out. Both of them had agreed, the two of them having grown closer as friends and – if things kept up the way they were going – future brother and sister in the months since Sam had gone off to Austin.

"Hey, you ready to go?" Maya popped her head through her brother's open door, giving a final tug at her ponytail before starting to twist it into a bun. Her brother was sitting on his bed, cross-legged, face supported on his balled up hands, elbows at his knees, an open comic in his lap… It was a pose she never liked to find him in, knowing it would mean that there was something on his mind.

"Yeah," he replied blankly, reaching one hand down to turn the page on his book before resuming his troubled position. "Is it time to go?"

"Not yet," Maya told him. Abandoning her bun and leaving the blond ponytail to tumble back over her shoulder, she went and sat next to her brother. "What's up?" she asked, leaving no space for him to try and let her believe that there was nothing.

"Cara and I had a… I don't know, a fight, I guess, before she left with everyone," Sam confessed.

"Oh…" Maya blinked. She thought she'd heard something earlier, but she'd been braiding up Ginny's hair, and Sadie was telling her about something else… "What was it about?"

"Stupid stuff," Sam shrugged.

"Usually is," she nodded. "Hey…"

"I know she didn't want me going away, I get it, but it's never been a thing whenever we'd talk and now today… I don't know… She started on me about Cecilia, and Dora, and I just…"

"Right…" Maya sighed. "But we're going to the show tonight, and you've been looking forward to that…"

"I know, I am…"

"Okay, then you're going to have to tell your face that," Maya gave her brother a small smile. "This is Cecilia's night, and she deserves to have her friend there to cheer her on, yeah?"

"Yeah… Yeah," he agreed, more confident on the second pass. "She's been texting, saying she couldn't wait to show me the whole look."

He hadn't seen it yet, as Cecilia had decided to keep it a surprise until the day came. He'd been helping her practice her poses, for each page of their live story book, with the costume part of her character at least, but not with the paint and everything else that would turn her into part of the story. It was different from Maya and Lucas and their live art of years prior, as she'd be portraying more than one scene, which would mean she'd have to be able to move from one pose to another. Maya had been working with her and her classmates to get them ready, which included the makeup components.

"Yeah, and you really can't miss that," Maya smiled. "So… we good?"

Arriving at the school soon after, the trio made their way through the halls until they reached the auditorium. Sam was texting Cecilia to let her know they had arrived as they went to find their seats, Lucas steering him by the shoulders so he wouldn't veer off course.

"She says she wants me to go backstage, is that okay?" Sam asked them both, looking up again.

"Yeah, go for it, we'll save your spot… or sell your ticket, haven't decided yet," Maya told him. He squinted at her before moving up the aisle and out of sight. "There's a market for high school Christmas shows, isn't there?" she turned to Lucas as they sat.

"Oh, yeah, you can't hold on to those for a second, the tickets just disappear," he told her, making her laugh. "It really takes you back, doesn't it?" Lucas asked as he looked around.

"Do you know what my favorite one was?" Maya smiled.

"I can't say, but if you asked what my favorite one was, it might sound strange, but…"

"Junior year?" she guessed, and he looked at her, finding her nod to indicate it was hers as well. It _would_ seem strange, wouldn't it? That had been the year of the accident, just a couple months after it in fact.

That Christmas, they would still have been stuck in that zone where he was not welcome in her house, and generally expected to keep far away from her, by her parents anyway. They would still see each other, at school more than anything, and the prospect of the holiday break had generally meant a break for them to have a mandated reason to be near one another. In the end they may have found a way to sneak a meeting and exchange gifts, but for a while it had seemed like they would be weeks without seeing each other, and it had been hard not to feel like it would be the worst Christmas ever.

But then the school show had come around, and like everyone else he'd ended up in the auditorium to watch it all. And when she'd come on the stage, her arm still in its cast, the old faded scar on her forehead still much more visible at the time, he'd felt immediately like he knew why she was up there, why she'd bothered to participate at all. She'd stood up there, knowing full well that a lot of their classmates would be staring at her, at those remnants of the accident, and they'd be whispering to one another… She didn't care. She'd gone up there, and she'd sung her song, and as far as they were concerned it was just him she was singing to, and it had been a memory he already cherished as it was being burned into his mind.

"Yeah…" he smiled. "Junior year."

Sam returned a few minutes later. By then the auditorium was a buzz of voices, most of the seats already filled… The show would start before long.

"So? What'd you think?" Maya asked her brother as he came and sat between her and Cecilia's father, who'd finally arrived a minute before, sounding like he'd rushed in fear of being late.

"What?" Sam asked, looking at her and Lucas, at the professor sitting there with the freckled nose his daughter had inherited.

"Cecilia, the full costume?" his sister told him.

"Oh, yeah," Sam blinked, like that hadn't been the reason he'd gone back there in the first place. "It's really nice, she… yeah…" His whole gaze seemed to be somewhere else, off with his thoughts, and Lucas swore he heard Maya mutter something like 'oh, crap' under her breath.

Whatever this was about, it would have to wait, as the show quickly began with the school choir's opener, followed by a number of performances, solos and duos and small groups… Cecilia's story book group were to close out the night. Whenever any of the kids she'd worked with would come on stage, Maya would tap Lucas' arm and lean in to whisper some fact or another, like his very own personal commentary track. When the last group was about to come on, Lucas was the one to do the arm tapping.

"Is he alright?" he whispered, indicating Sam. Maya gave him a look.

"Depends on what your definition of 'alright' is," she told him. He looked at her brother again, sitting as he'd been sitting throughout most of the show, like he was paying attention but he was also not. He'd been told about the fight with Cara, and maybe for a while he'd let himself believe that was the reason, but now he was presented with an alternative, without the aid of much explanation.

"Oh…"

"Yeah…"

"Crap…"

"I know…"

The curtain opened once more, presenting the audience with the very tall open book which had been constructed for the occasion, complete with the large painted 'pages,' which would serve as backdrops for the various scenes and be turned to reveal the next, just like in a book. Each turn would demand a reset of its players, but for now only one of them appeared, standing in the middle of their title page and holding her pose like she was part of its two dimensions.

Like Maya six years before, they were sure a lot of her classmates were looking at Cecilia and putting much more focus on her crutch than was necessary, like they didn't already do enough of that every day since she'd returned to school with it for the first time. They'd given her the option of finding a way to hide it in her costume somehow, but she didn't want to, didn't think she should have to, and to see her as she stood up there, there really was no arguing on it.

She made a great impression on two people that night. First, on her father, who watched his girl standing on that stage and couldn't help but be stricken with how she was growing to look so much like her mother, like his late wife… It had dipped his smile in tears for the duration of the story. And second, she'd made an impression on Sam, before the show had even started, an impression which left him with so much confusion, and perhaps the future vindication of his nosy little sister.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	40. Their Holidays With Cheer

**_A/N: Sorry for the delay, computer issues :)_**

* * *

February 9th 2020

_Chapter 40  
Their Holidays With Cheer_

Lucas was awakened on Christmas Eve. He'd been dreaming, he was almost sure of it, and then all of a sudden he was awake, just a bit disoriented, and looking up into his fiancée's face as she stared down at him. She had her hand over his mouth and held a finger to her lips. _Quiet._ When he nodded, she pulled her hand away and smiled, leaning in to kiss him before motioning for him to follow, indicating their attic buddy, who was truly sleeping this time around.

He followed her, out of the attic, down the stairs, and with boots and coats on they had stepped out on to the porch. The morning air was brisk, but they'd seen worse.

"Something wrong?" Lucas asked.

"What? No, why would something be wrong?" she shook her head.

"Sneaking…" he pointed around them, bracing against a passing chill.

"I just thought… This might not be our 'first married Christmas' like Zay and Nadine, but it _is_ our first one living out here, and well, all my family being here, it's not like we can really take a moment to really acknowledge it. Not once they all wake up anyway. So… we're here…" she indicated the house with a smile, which he already mirrored.

"Ho ho ho," he pulled her into his arms.

"Oh, yes, that's better, warm me up," she hummed, burrowing herself as close as she could.

"You know, I was right here the first time I remember seeing snow?"

"I didn't know, please tell me," Maya told him.

"You just want me to keep holding you, don't you?"

"Half the reasoning, now tell the story."

"Okay," he laughed. "Well, I must have been like… four? My parents were out of town so I was staying here over the weekend, which was more than fine, I mean I loved being here, with Pappy Joe and Granny Susannah. I was upstairs in their room… our room, now… I woke up from my nap, and I got out of the bed, went to the window. I'd always do that, so I could see if my parents' car was out there, because that would usually mean I had to go, and sometimes I'd just go and hide somewhere because I didn't want to leave my grandparents' house." Maya chuckled. "Hey…"

"Sorry, sorry, go on."

"Anyway… They weren't going to be there that day, of course, but it was habit. And when I went up there, I just saw… snow in the sky, and on the ground… I thought I was still dreaming. I tried to open the window, so I could touch it, but I couldn't manage it. I almost got it, but then my grandmother came hurrying in, telling me not to play with it, that I could have fallen through and broken my neck…"

"Sensible woman, I like her."

"Oh, you would have _loved_ her… and she would have loved _you_, too," Lucas smiled. "Anyway, she took me downstairs, got me dressed up, the coat, the hat and scarf, mittens, boots, everything, and the whole time she just had this smile on her face and I thought… whatever's about to happen here, it's something special, important. Once she brought me outside, I thought it had to be actual magic."

"Little Lucas sounds like such a dork…" she smirked up at him.

"He really was," Lucas nodded.

"Good. Thank you for the story."

"Plenty more where that came from."

Their moment to themselves was interrupted by a knock at the window behind them. They turned to find a mass of small faces staring back at them. Eliza, Wyatt, Ginny, Sadie, and Emma all stood in a huddle, waving at them.

"And we're off," Maya looked back to Lucas. He quickly kissed the side of her face and they headed back into the house.

It did get to feel like they had been sitting at the top of a hill, sitting on a luge about to carry them down at breakneck speed, off into whatever horizon they could only just vaguely make out ahead of them. Theirs was not a peaceful holiday, nor was it ever expected to be. They did not lack for friends or family, and they were always aware of this, and thankful for it, but now… Something about the holidays, about having them all… mostly all… in one place at about the same time, made it all that much more notable, like all those separate pockets of feelings, activated at one time in their hearts made it feel like they had superpowers, like they could fly…

With the added presence of the Tucson Harts, Maya and Lucas had been left to figure out how exactly they would juggle that group, and their friends, and his family, and her family… It had come down to having their friends come over on Christmas Eve, and then going over to the Hunter Hart house on Christmas Day, where they would be joined by the Friars, the Hillards, and the Cassidys, along with the Tucson Harts, who would also be along for the ride on the 24th. It was shaping up to be a rehash of their mega movie night, only taken to the next level, with the addition of Maya's visiting relatives.

"Alright, boys and girls, gather around, gather around," James was holding court in the kitchen just after lunch, as the guests were expected to arrive before long. His audience was made up his kids, and Abigail's, and Luna's, and with the flourish of his voice not one of them knew to look anywhere except right back at him. He was mesmerizing. "Over here we have enough cookies to make jolly ol' Saint Nick even jollier, until he can ho-ho-ho his way into next year!" The kids laughed excitedly. "But do you know what, tasty as they are – and believe me, I've had one or two," he held up seven fingers, to more giggles, "I bet they'll be even tastier after you junior artists take a crack at them, so you go on now, you've got icing, you've got sprinkles, you have… no, no, not these," he grabbed a bag of jujubes and casually stuck them under his arm like they were never there. "Alright, are we all set now?" The children informed him – loudly – that they were ready. "Then let's get decorating!"

"Dad…" Emma Lane pointed to her father, or more precisely to the bag under his arm.

"Yes, lovely?" James innocently asked. Emma gave him a look and he stepped back like he'd been knocked down. "Ooh, I know that look… Fine, fine, alright, you caught me," he put the jujubes back on the table. "You owe me a cookie," he pointed to his daughter, who turned and had a laugh with best friend Eliza.

Watching the whole scene unfold nearby, Maya couldn't help being amused by the whole thing, but also to see Abigail as she watched, too. After everything the family had had to deal with, losing Kermit as they did, Maya would look at her stepmother, and she would see how happy she was with James in her life, how she had embraced Teddy and Emma like they were her own, as much as James had done the same with Wyatt, and Eliza and Cara, and Sam, too, off in Texas as he was. It might have been so easy to hold on to this thought like this new family dynamic might somehow diminish what their losses had meant for them, but what they had instead was… all of this. They were just good for each other, they fit…

The first to arrive were the ever growing Obi family. Lion had come up to the door first with daughter Zola, and the two-and-a-half-year-old was a ball of eagerness at the sight of her godmother, just as Maya scooped her up for monster kisses. Then came Willow, with one-year-old son Sekani perched in one arm, her belly well defined beneath her coat where the third and last – as far as they knew – was happily swimming along. They made quite the picture, all of them together, the little family getting to feel not so little anymore.

"I swear it's like the last three years have felt like you've been pregnant all the time," Maya hugged her former bandmate.

"You're telling me," Willow laughed.

After they had arrived, it turned into a parade of doorbells, and hugs, and coats, and boots… They'd planned ahead for this, but still every time a new pair of feet relinquished its snowy covers it really felt like it wouldn't stop. Wyatt had elected himself as being in charge of coats, so that every time the doorbell would ring he would abandon his cookie decorating, wipe his hands in haste, and dash over to the door, collecting one, or two, or however many coats, and carrying them as carefully as he could over to where Sam might help him hang them up.

"Slow down, you're all red in the face," Lucas laughed, when the boy was 'summoned' again to get Rebecca and Jax' coats when he'd just finished bringing Sam the previous batch, which had been passed to him by Sophie, Chiara, Asher, and Ray.

"I'm okay," Wyatt insisted, turning to their newest guests with expectant arms.

"Better hand them over, he means business," Sophie smirked before moving toward Lucas. "Where's Maya, I've got… a thing…" she held up a bag, which he guessed must have been the gift she'd been asked to pick up, for their coat master presently within earshot.

"Attic, I think. For reasons," he nodded, which fell in that same line of maintaining 'magic' secrets.

"Thought she might be," Sophie nodded, taking off toward the stairs.

As predicted, Maya _was_ in the attic, though she'd shut the trap door, the steps retracted along with it, the better not to have any short-statured young people sneak in and discover that 'Santa' was really 'Mom, Dad, Big Sis, Whoever.' When she heard what sounded like someone trying to open the door, she paused, mid-wrapping.

"Hello?" she called.

"Rapunzel, let down your hair!" a familiar voice called back, and she grinned before moving to open the door.

"Watch your head," she warned, and the steps slid into place. "Also, my hair was never _that_ long," she teased, as Sophie came up and into the attic, the better to be hugged tight. "Hey, merry merry Eve to you, Zvolensky."

"Merry merry Eve, Hart," Sophie laughed. "Here," she held up the bag, and Maya snatched it up, looking through the open door to ensure no small brothers were roaming about.

"Thank you _so_ much, he's going to love it."

"Happy to help," Sophie nodded. "So, what's the status on the… 'crisis?'" she asked, moving to get a look through the front window.

"It's only funny if you're not living in the middle of it," Maya shook her head.

"Apparently," Sophie turned back to her. "Well?" Maya sighed.

"Well, it's friend day, so they should be coming along anytime soon if they didn't show up since I came up here."

"I didn't see anyone down there," Sophie shook her head. "I'm sure it'll be fine though, right?"

"Seeing as my brother can't make heads or tails of his own feelings anymore, and I don't see him saying or doing anything until he's figured it out… I don't know. Christmas can make people do things they would never usually do. I blame all those movies, and the greeting card truck they rode in on." Sophie bit back a chuckle, looking back out again.

"Car," she declared.

"Is that official police talk?" Maya teased.

"Sure. Seeing a girl, roughly fifteen years of age, bottle red hair, one crutch…"

"That'll be Cecilia," Maya moved to have a look.

"Ah, the unexpected plot twist," Sophie smiled.

"Do not make me kick you out of this attic."

"I just might kick myself out, so I can go see how it all goes downstairs."

"On second thought, please stay. I have so much wrapping to do, and I've missed you… _so_ much… Christmas is hard, you know?"

"Whatever you say," Sophie laughed. "Here to serve." Maya smiled, looping her arms with one of hers.

"Well thank you, Officer Zvolensky."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	41. Their Holidays With Warmth

February 10th 2020

_Chapter 41  
Their Holidays With Warmth_

It felt like they'd barely gotten to sleep when they woke again on the following morning… Christmas… After all the kids had gone off to bed, leaving only Abigail, James, Luna, Elizabeth, Maya, Lucas, and – for a time – Sam to carry on with their 'merry merry Eve.' There had been a movie on, and then there'd been some last minute gift wrapping, and a bit of cooking and baking ahead of the following day, and then finally they had gone off to bed.

As the hosts of this visiting party, Maya and Lucas had volunteered themselves to get up in the middle of the night and get the presents under the tree, which had led to their spending a little while sitting on the couch together, where they could take in this moment in time. The house was quiet, and still, creaking ever so slightly, as houses did. There was the slight chill of winter on the air, the muted sound of wind from outside. It hadn't snowed in a couple of days, but there was still plenty on the ground, and they found it easy enough to imagine as though it was flowing through the air at this instant. Her family was upstairs, sleeping, and they were here, looking on to their tree – a noisy mess of decorations they would never trade away, thanks to the helping hands of young helpers both local and visiting – with its burst of colorfully wrapped presents. And they were here, him and her… It could have felt too good to be true, except they were not sleeping, and they knew it.

In the end, they _had_ gone to sleep, right there on the couch, with Lucas' legs stretched out ahead of him while Maya's were curled up on the couch with her as she leaned to him and he held her. They woke up when some of the little kids came rushing down to see whether the still very real Santa had come by, even though they were far from home. They had left a sampling of their self-decorated cookies for their holiday visitor, with not one but two glasses of milk, on account of there being so many cookies to get through.

While the kids were distracted by the presents, barely noticing the pair on the couch who were now awakening, Maya looked up to Lucas and bit back a smile, discreetly wiping away traces of milk and a lone sprinkle left on his face. He made a face like 'oops, nearly busted.'

Their plan for the day had been made upon a single, non-negotiable request from Maya's young Hunter siblings. They wanted to open presents with her. So, it was agreed that everyone here at the house would wake up, and they would open those presents that were here, and then they would get dressed and head to the Hunter Hart house, for those presents and then a much earned breakfast. The Friars – all branches expected for the day – would be expected to arrive sometime before lunch.

"You made it just in time to save yourselves from Hurricane Nellie," Shawn greeted them, after embracing his eldest and wishing her a merry Christmas.

"What happened?" Maya asked. Shawn looked past her and Lucas, to the kids still coming out of the cars.

"She came downstairs in the middle of the night, hoping to sneak a look at you-know-who, but what she found instead was…"

"You-really-know-who-and-you-call-him-Dad?" Maya guessed.

"Bingo," Shawn sighed, giving her a look when he saw she was trying not to laugh.

"Sorry, sorry," Maya held up her hand in apology. "How's she doing now?"

"Well, Katy tried to explain it to her, but she kept backpedalling, like she wanted to tell the truth but not to have her stop believing."

"Sounds about right," Maya nodded.

"Then Gracie got in there, told her she'd known for a couple years."

"How'd _that_ go?" Lucas asked.

"Better than I thought it would," Shawn declared. "She's okay now. She's excited about making sure the littler ones don't find out."

They got to see this for themselves, as everyone came along into the house and eventually ended up in the living room for Presents, Round 2. Nellie had ended up sitting on the ground with her twin, her big sister, and Lucas. Perched on top of Maya's crossed legs, she would look on excitedly whenever anyone would open one of their presents and, kid or not, she would intone some variation on 'I wonder what _Santa_ brought you.'

"Okay, okay, take it down a notch there," Maya locked her arms around her, laughing.

There were some presents still under the tree when they'd finally gone into the kitchen for breakfast around the lengthened table. They were to be handed on to their guests yet to arrive. They started to arrive and, just like the day before, Wyatt Hart was on hand to gather up their coats, though he didn't have to go at it alone here, as he found himself joined by his new partner in coat checking, the even smaller MJ Hunter. More than once, the boy could be heard shouting 'I can't see! I can't see!' from beneath the cover of one coat or another, before his 'elder' directed him.

"I'm going to bust out this video when they're about fifteen or sixteen, it's going to be _hilarious_," Maya told Lucas, showing him her phone and the recording of her brothers weaving along with the many coats of the Cassidys, who'd just arrived.

If Dora generally looked like a woodland creature, on Christmas she looked like she'd just flown down from the North Pole after finishing a successful toy season with Santa Claus.

"Look what they're wearing," she whispered to her cousin with a sparkling grin, nodding back to her brothers. Junior and Alex were wearing matching ugly sweaters and looking entirely awkward about it. "They lost a bet with Dad."

"And you…" Lucas chuckled.

"Oh, I won," Dora shrugged, like it was obvious she would have, making her cousin laugh even harder. "Where's Sam?" she asked now, looking around the room.

"Uh…" Lucas looked, too. He'd been there a minute ago, but now he was nowhere to be found. "Not sure. You go ahead and get those under the tree," he indicated her bag. "I'll go and find him for you."

Following his hunch, he made his way into the basement, once upon a time Maya's room, when she'd surrendered her old one to become the twins' nursery. The place didn't look much the way it did back then anymore, but you could still sort of conjure it up in your mind if you'd been here enough times, which he had, and Sam as well. He was sitting in the corner, next to an old bookcase Maya had left behind, which now held boxes of diapers, toilet paper, and any other items Katy and Shawn needed loads of to attend to any one of the kids.

"This is going to be another one of those talks, isn't it?" Sam looked up at him.

"One of those?" Lucas asked.

"The ones where they have piano playing in the back on those family shows, where the kid's in turmoil and the parent or the older sibling comes and says what they need to hear?"

"And on Christmas, too," Lucas shrugged, sitting with him.

"Jackpot," Sam looked back down. He had a box in his hands, wrapped, topped with a bow…

"Is that for…" Lucas already knew the answer, his brother's posture said it all.

"I bought it for her… before I moved out here," he revealed. "It's not like I was expecting anything for it, but she told me about it a while back, and I saw it, so I got it for her, wasn't sure when I'd give it to her. If I give it to her now, she might think… I don't know what she'll think, but it could come off the wrong way, you know?"

"One of these days I'll tell you about all the twists and turns your sister and I went through. It's probably not what you need to hear about right now. The point is yes, I know, and that place just _sucks_." He'd been doing better, realigning himself to the reality that he would need to carry those feelings in silence, that Dora would only be his friend, but this didn't come without the occasional flare up, and Lucas expected this was precisely why Sam had been upstairs one second and gone the next. And then there was the Cecilia of it all, which had only made for more wrinkles for Sam to try and smooth down.

"Can you tell me what's in there?" Lucas tapped the box with his finger. When Sam told him, he laughed. "I remember that show. She used to greet people at the door by holding up the box set like 'I want to watch this, please make it work,'" Lucas mimed, making Sam smile. "If you really want her to have it, I can give it to her. I can say 'hey, remember when…' Nothing weird about it, just one cousin being nice to another." Sam considered this for a moment.

"Then what would I give her?"

"We can switch a couple labels around, you give her what Maya and I got her."

"I…" Sam hesitated, shook his head. "No, I can't do that. I'll just… I'll tell her I forgot her gift at the house, and… I'll get her something else."

"Or, I could do what your sister would do. Ready?" Lucas nodded, snatching the box out of Sam's hand.

"Hey, wait…" Sam tried to get it back, but Lucas was quick to get on his feet.

"You are a good friend, Sam. And good friends get each other some thoughtful gifts. Doesn't mean they want anything more than to make their friends happy, okay? Just give it to her. And if you try and chicken out, I will make you give it to her."

"You wouldn't," Sam blinked.

"Okay, fine, I wouldn't. But you know who would?" He did know. He sighed.

"Fine…"

Lucas didn't have to call in reinforcements. The present found its way under the tree, and in due time it was unwrapped by its intended recipient. The smile that came over Dora's face when she saw what was inside may have been the most bittersweet thing Sam Hart had ever experienced in his young life, but he focused on the sweet. His friend was happy.

By the time they were all home again, with their visitors still around, it almost didn't feel like the holiday knew how to come to an end. The kids were allowed to stay up past their bedtime, 'because it's Christmas,' but mostly because most of them were a good closed eye away from falling asleep, and one by one the little warriors fell and were carried off to their beds. The last standing were the eldest two of Maya's siblings along with Teddy Lane. Sam and Cara appeared to have made up since their fight, the brother and sister sitting huddled together as they all watched a movie together.

Lucas and Maya were the last ones standing at the end of the night, seeing their guests off upstairs before picking up a few things.

"Hey, you know what?" Maya turned to him as she closed the refrigerator door. Lucas turned to her.

"What?"

"I think I forgot one of your presents…" she intoned.

"You didn't," he played along. "But what could it be? What could you give me that I don't already have?" he wondered, approaching her.

"The gift that keeps on giving?" she suggested.

"Oh, yeah, that's a good one," he agreed, making her laugh as he kissed her. "Hey… Merry Christmas…"

"It's after midnight," she pointed out.

"I won't tell if you don't," he promised, and she kissed him again.

"Alright, then, merry Christmas to you, too."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	42. Their Holidays With Music

**_A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_**

* * *

February 11th 2020

_Chapter 42  
Their Holidays With Music_

The morning of the 31st of December was to be the first one in many days where the only occupants of the house at the end of the lane were those three who called it home. The Tucson Harts had departed back for the city which gave them their nickname the previous morning. It had been agreed, when the decision had been made that they would all be coming to Austin over Christmas, that they would in turn be spending New Year's Eve with the Lanes back in Tucson. It would be the first big sort of family gathering where James would be bringing Abigail and the kids into the fold. As such, Sam had flown out with them. He would return in a few days, in time for the start of his winter semester at school.

"It might be good for him, you know?" Lucas had told Maya, after they watched her siblings march off to grab their plane. She'd looked at him, unsure what he meant. "A few days away from the whole…"

"Girl drama?" Maya had guessed, making him smile. "Maybe… hopefully…"

The house had felt so quiet once they'd gotten back from the airport. They'd spent most of the day seeing to returning things as they were, packing off the spare bed, the sleeping bags… It had been an investment they'd made, factoring in the number of times they'd found themselves hosting any number of family members or friends over the years. They might have turned the room across the hall into a standing guest room, except they never knew exactly when that room might be needed to become something else…

"So, what do you think?" Lucas had asked, once they had finished sorting out the house and collapsed back on to the couch with some satisfaction and a bit of exhaustion. "After all this time with so many guests around the place, and now we have the house to ourselves, I would very much like to take you out, or stay in, whatever you want. Capital Date or lowercase date?" She'd chuckled, the old codes so much a part of them after so long.

"Well…" she'd turned to him. "I'm wondering if there's such a thing as a… I don't know… lower capital… date?" He'd considered this for a moment.

"Fancy dress at home?"

"Yeah," she'd smiled. "I just figure that we might want to pace ourselves a bit, considering tomorrow night…"

"Alright, that's probably a good idea, yeah," he'd agreed.

"Don't think for a second that I'm going to be a slacker about this," she'd 'warned.' "I am talking very best dress, and everything else to go along with it, all to leave you with that look on your face like you might pass out a little."

"Two can play at that game, you know?" he'd grinned, leaning in to kiss her.

"Kind of counting on it," she'd smiled.

Waking up the next morning, the last of the year and the first one they actually spent in their own bed after all the ones up in the attic with Cara, the stillness of the house left them both in that sort of cosy feeling, like neither of them was looking to move an inch out of place. Lucas held on to her, as he would usually do, and Maya breathed quietly in and out, thinking about the years, the one about to end, and the one about to begin.

The one that was ending had been one of the most life altering ones in all her years, she felt. It wasn't just to do with her own life, more so for the collective world that surrounded her. She'd seen friends get married, others become parents… There had been the move back to Austin, and new starts in school for a lot of them, including her little brother, as he'd come and moved in with her and Lucas. And then the two of them… They were here, living – sort of – on their own, in their house, engaged to be married… He was carrying on with his path to becoming a vet, and she might not have been teaching just yet, but she had Stage Ready, and that… that might have been one of her greatest achievements.

As for the year that was about to begin, Maya felt a sort of anticipation for it like she'd rarely felt before. She couldn't wait to see what happen next, what she'd be looking back on, when December 31st rolled around again. What would her work baby look like, one year on? And then the wedding… Well, they hadn't set a date yet, had they? They had sort of come to a conclusion, together, that with everything already going on in their lives at the moment, it would be up to them to decide when it would all happen. That went without saying, sure, but it had more to do with the fact that it could all become very much out of their hands, with people around them making it seem like their engagement put their wedding on a timeline, with a deadline ahead of them, when in fact they were sort of content to exist in their engagement for the time being, as they set their lives further in motion.

It wasn't going to happen this year, she didn't think, but the one after that… maybe in the summer… She had to get back to her sketches, her dress…

"How long before you have to go?" a sleepy voice asked, and Maya smiled, turning herself around until she could be face to face with her bleary-eyed future husband.

"Well…" she hummed, looking past him to get a look at the clock on his night stand. Morning was doing a fine job of getting away from them. "Still got a little time," she assured him, attending to his hair as best she could, as it had gone a bit 'sticky uppy,' as Eliza would say. "Might need all of it to deal with this mess," she scolded, until he stalled her hand with a smile.

"Leave it, I'll take care of it later."

"Yeah, but I like doing it, and I know you enough to know you can't say no to that…" she whispered. After a beat he finally 'relented' and allowed her to continue her work. He supposed there were worse things than lying in bed, watching his future wife fix his hair with a face of concentration and delight. "So," she told him as she kept at it, "Tonight, you're going to be right there at the front."

"You know it," he confirmed.

"Good, because when the countdown starts, yours is the only face I want to be looking at, and when we get to zero…" she trailed on, and he kissed her. "Exactly."

The band had been finding its footing back in Austin since the fall, though on the whole they'd almost kept a low profile. They'd done some shows, and those had been great, but for knowing the presence they had held, in Houston and then here again before all that, they could not say they were going out of their way. That had been by design, allowing themselves time to find themselves again, with this altered line-up where Nadine had joined them again, bringing with her the sounds of her violin along with her voice. And all the while, band practice had seen them work to put together new music, all with the aim that, by the start of the new year, it would be put out there for people to discover, old fans and new alike. They were going to make a splash again.

It would start tonight. They had a gig, with one of the local radio stations, and their countdown to the new year. They'd had a great working relationship with this station over the years. They'd been the first one to play TXNY's music over the air.

Eventually they had made their way downstairs for breakfast, just him and her and the dogs. Maya had gone ahead and showered and dressed – mostly – for the show that night, the better to show it off, while Lucas had gone to get the food and the coffee ready. They were just finishing up when the doorbell rang. They looked at each other, while Trix and Lou ran off barking, to see whether either of them knew who that would be. They did not.

"Wait, I think…" Maya got up to head for the door, grabbing her last piece of bacon on the way, while Lucas followed after her. While the promise of a treat called the dogs back, Lucas went to open the door and found their neighbor from up the lane.

"Happy almost New Year!" Missy Sanderson beamed at him.

"Hey," he smiled back, stepping aside to allow her in. She stepped on to the small carpet, wiping off her boots before taking them off. They'd been seeing a lot of her, whenever they'd look out the windows over the last few weeks, just walking along, on her own at times but most times with her dog. As she'd told them already, she intended to enjoy the snow as much as possible while they had it. This time, her walk had carried her all the way here. "Happy almost New Year to you, too."

"You're doing that show tonight," Missy turned to Maya with an even greater smile.

"I am, yeah," she confirmed.

"I asked my parents if I could go. They said yes, but not until the end, because that's going to be after midnight. So, I was thinking, maybe if I'm with you then they won't mind. Our house is close, so you could drop me off on the way back, it would be easy. I just really want to go…" the girl pleaded, looking to the two of them like she was this close to pulling the big innocent eyes as a tactic.

"Well…" Maya considered this, stealing a look to Lucas, who gave a small shrug to say it was fine by him if it was for her. "Look, I'll call them, and if they say yes then you're on. But if they say no, then that's what it's going to have to be. Deal?"

Missy's parents had said yes, and one look at the giddy girl suggested that she had prepared for the eventuality that they might agree. She was all dressed up and ready for the concert.

She would stay with Lucas until later, when it was time for them to head up for the show, after Maya took off to pick up her bandmates. Sparkles the minivan was all loaded up and, as it had been in past show days, Maya had looked very satisfied that it did exactly what it had been acquired to do. After an afternoon of playing 'go fish,' and a dinner of 'super cheesy grilled cheese,' Lucas and Missy had gotten into the car and headed to join the others who'd be on the audience side of this night's show, anxiously awaiting the presence of those on the band side.

"Sophie is working tonight, but she sends her love," Chiara told Lucas as they hugged upon finding one another.

"The emotion _and_ the person," Asher pointed out, coming along hand in hand with Ray.

"Yes, exactly," Chiara liked this notion very much.

"Both are appreciated," Lucas smiled.

"There's a lot of people," Missy commented as they made their way up front. There was no assigned seating… or seating, for that matter, but they were essentially VIPs, which meant they could be brought right to the front for the show about to begin.

"Good thing you'll be able to see alright," Lucas smiled at her, and the girl had never looked so happy that her parents had agreed for her to be there.

"I like your shirt," she told him.

"It's not often you have a reason to walk around with your girl's face on your clothes without it coming off weird," Zay piped in, appearing at his best friend's side, with an identical shirt. "Hey, we match," he tapped Lucas' arm, and Missy laughed, as he looked around and saw both Dylan and Will also had the same one, like they'd gone all in to show they were the boyfriends, fiancé, and husband of the band.

"I can stand in front of you the whole time and you won't see a thing," he turned to 'warn' his young guest, only making her laugh more.

TXNY had the privilege of being the act that would be on stage when the clock struck midnight, which meant they all had much more to see until then, but that was more than fine by them. It was a great and lively night all around, though of course they were all anticipating the last act of the night, and by the sound of the rest of the audience as they waited on them to come up, so did a lot of others throughout the room. They didn't have to worry about capturing the roar that came on when the band took to the stage, what with the whole matching guy squad – as nicknamed by Rosa – recording the whole thing.

Watching them come up on that stage that night, Maya, and Riley, and Rosa, and Kayla, and Nadine, their presence was instantly electrifying. It reminded Lucas of how much he loved seeing Maya on stage. Looking around that room right now, he could see why she hadn't felt compelled to take that record deal last summer. They didn't even need it. They were doing things on their own terms, and they were making it all happen.

Before they knew it, the host for the night was coming on to lead the countdown to midnight. The whole time the guy spoke, Maya was looking back to Lucas, in the front row, with a smirk that told him she'd be coming for him as soon as moment arrived. The room was of one voice, loudly counting down, and when they called _Happy New Year!_ that loud voice was a single, never-ending cheer. Maya climbed down from the stage and was in her fiancé's arms in three seconds flat, sealing the turn of the year with a kiss, streamers and glitter raining down.

"Next show, we're getting you guys new shirts with 'guy squad' on the back," she teased.

"Fine by me," he declared, holding her in his arms. "Any chance I get to show my support."

"Hey… Want to get married this year?" she asked, with a giddy sort of smile on her face that seemed to echo out on to his face in a heartbeat.

"Do you know what, I kind of do," he laughed as she nodded along.

"Good, I was hoping you'd say that," she brushed glitter from his face before kissing him again.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	43. Their Careers to Learn

February 12th 2020

_Chapter 43  
Their Careers to Learn_

Even though they had been engaged for seven whole months already, something about having narrowed down the window of _when_ they would actually walk down the aisle had left Maya and Lucas with a bit of renewed thrill. They may not have set the day or month, but they had set the year, and even if that was maybe the easiest part of it, it was something. They had a few days left until Sam returned from Tucson, and they had done their best to make the most of those days. They were both working again after their brief holidays, but factoring in that Lucas was still working part time, breaking in his new schedule for winter, he had ended up spending a couple of those days primarily popping in to visit his fiancée at the theater and lending some very willing eyes and ears wherever they were needed.

Finally, the day came that Sam was due to return to Austin, and Maya and Lucas went to pick him up from the airport. The night before, they had received a number of calls, from Dora, and Josiah and Deanna Schmidt, and Cecilia… They all wanted to be there, too, to welcome their friend home. It would be the last day before the start of the winter semester or the back half of their high school year, and the next thing they knew they had a sleepover planned out, at the house, with Sam and all of them along with Adam.

And the whole thing was to be a surprise. So, after leaving the quintet back at the house, Maya and Lucas had taken off on their own after all.

"They're going to be okay back there, yeah?" Lucas asked as he drove.

"What, you think they'll start snooping?" Maya chuckled. He shrugged. Maybe? "Dora's out there, and she's your cousin. You trust her, don't you?"

"I do… Yeah…You're right, I'm just…"

"Turning into your dad?" she smirked. He tried to look insulted, but he couldn't even do it. As far as he saw, it was as much a tease as a compliment.

Even though they had enjoyed these last days with just him and her at the house, they were not looking to make it a habit to be without Sam. It was like a part of their little unit had been missing, and now that it was coming back to them they felt like the minutes couldn't pass quickly enough.

"Want to get on my shoulders?" Lucas chuckled, turning his head when he caught movement in periphery and found that Maya was just hopping in place, trying to see further ahead.

"Don't think I won't," she gave him a squint.

"Well, I don't think it's necessary anymore, look," he pointed and she looked back so far she might have gotten whiplash. There he was, their… well, her brother… Lucas saw him as that, too, but then it always felt a bit weird to refer to him as _our_ brother.

"Walk faster!" Maya called out when Sam finally looked over and spotted them. A few of the other passengers getting off the plane looked at her, confused. "Not you, my brother," she pointed. "Welcome to Austin," she waved amiably, while Lucas bit back a laugh. "Hush it, Huckleberry," she 'warned' just as Sam finally reached them and she pulled him into her arms. "Welcome back, Sammy," she sniffed, trying to keep from crying for how happy she was to have him back.

"I was only gone for a few days," Sam told her, even though he was hugging her pretty tight, too.

"Yeah, well, you know how it is, you don't see someone for most of your life, then you see them every day, and one day apart feels like forever…"

"Love you, too, big sis," Sam smiled as they pulled apart again.

"What about me?" Lucas asked, raising his hand. Sam was in his arms a moment later.

"Yeah, you're okay, too."

"He's been spending too much time with you," Lucas told Maya from over Sam's shoulder, making her laugh.

The ride home consisted mostly of Sam's wanting to make sure that they had gotten his things for school the next day, from textbooks to other supplies he might have needed. He didn't worry about any of that, of course. He'd come to just the right people when it came to browsing books, and notebooks, and pens, and everything else a student might need. He had sticky notes and highlighters enough to learn everything there was to know, in an array of colors for the most overly organized of people.

Despite themselves, they had been trying to gauge how he was doing at the moment, specifically with regards to his ongoing girl dilemma. Even though the sleepover had been his friends' idea, seeing as _they_ knew about the mess happening in his head, they now had to wonder if they were having him walk into a trap.

It hadn't gone so bad as they might have thought it would. As eager as his friends had been to see him again, Sam had been thrilled to find them waiting at the house, more so to learn they'd be spending the night. They'd all gone off into town to see a movie, had dinner out Ma Maggie's, and then headed back to the house for the night.

The next morning, Josiah and Deanna had volunteered to drive the others to their respective high schools, leaving Sam to catch a ride with his sister, as had been the plan before the whole sleepover plot had been put together.

"Do you guys _have _to go?" Maya turned to 'her boys' after the others had taken off in the twins' car. "It's the first day. They tell you what you're going to do this semester but you won't even do any of it today, just ask someone next time…" she innocently suggested.

"Now what kind of behavior is that to encourage in a couple of well-behaving students there, Teach?" Lucas smirked.

"Not teaching yet, am I?" Maya countered before turning to her brother. "Ready to go?"

"Uh, yeah," Sam nodded. "See you later," he waved to Lucas before heading off to get in the minivan's passenger seat. Maya frowned, watching him go. She turned to look at Lucas and found he had the same sort of 'what was that about?' look on his face.

"There goes my other full-time job," Maya sighed, gesturing off after her brother before coming up to Lucas and stretching on her toes to kiss him. "You have a good boring day today," she smiled. "Listen to your teachers, take notes…"

"That's not what you were saying a minute ago," he pointed out with a grin.

"Yeah, well, it is what it is. Go on, get out there, make good choices…"

"Hug a puppy?"

"Always. _Always_ hug the puppy," she kissed him again, and they were off, him to his car, her to her minivan and her distracted little brother. "Right," Maya sighed, buckling her seatbelt before turning to look at Sam, who seemed to be attempting to ever so casually hide something in his hand. "Passenger/driver privilege?" she offered. He looked at her.

"What?"

"It's like… you know… doctor/patient, lawyer/client… You tell me stuff while I drive you to school and no one hears about it."

"That's not a thing."

"It _can_ be a thing. I'm making it a thing right now, because what's the alternative really, except that you go to school looking all mopey… again… It's the first day. Is that the impression you want to make?" _Again…_ No wonder she always wanted to get involved in romantic troubles. They were always messy, and drawn out unless someone stepped in to clean it up. This whole infernal situation had been going on for months already, and if she was tired of it then she could imagine how _he _was doing.

"How do you even do that?" Sam sighed, opening his hand to reveal a now slightly crumpled piece of paper. It looked like it had originally been folded several times over, after being pulled from a spiral notebook.

"Trade secrets," she shrugged. "May I?" she pointed to the sheet. Sam hesitated for a beat. Yes, he'd shown it to her, but as contents went, maybe… Finally, he slipped it into his bag. "Okay, that's fine," she assured him. "You don't have to…"

"She left it in my room, this morning, I think. I'm not sure when she wanted me to find it, now or later. She sort of… asked if I wanted to go out with her," he slowly revealed, and after wondering at first who the 'she' was in this scenario, it finally became clear, much like something that had come flying from a distance, only to come into focus and be identified a half second before it smacked you in the face.

"Cecilia?" Maya breathed. Sam nodded. "Oh… Wow… Good for her… I mean…" she looked at her brother. "Okay, well, do you know if you're going to say yes? Or…"

"I was going to, before they all left," he told her.

"Oh!" Maya gave a small smile.

"But I couldn't make myself do it, not when…"

"Oh…" she blinked.

"Yeah," he groaned. "Can we just…" he pointed ahead of them.

"Oh, right," she started the minivan and pulled out on to the road, heading for the university.

"It's all a mess…" Sam declared.

"I…" Maya hesitated, thinking 'well you said it, not me, even though we both think it.'

"I have to be able to say it in front of her, it's not like I'm going to hide the rest of my life if things go okay…" They'd switched from one girl to the other here, and he was lucky she could keep up. "But I couldn't do it, so does that mean I should… say no? I don't want to hurt Cecilia."

"Because you like her."

"Of course."

"As more than a friend?"

"Yes."

He looked almost startled, caught off-guard. Maya smiled to herself.

"No, but… that can't be right, I mean… I like Dora, too. I try not to, but I still do. You can't like two people at the same time, not like that, can you? Isn't the person supposed to be like… the only one you like, 100%... Not fifty-fifty…" Now he looked like he was questioning his entire life all over again, and Maya felt her small step forward turn into about ten steps back. And was she even in any position to counsel him, when she had only ever loved one person, a solid 100% and then some…

"Alright, look…" she sighed, trying to work it out as she went along. "I am sure that there are people out there who believe they're all in, and then one day it turns out they really weren't. Or they really were up there and… life happened… My mom and our dad probably thought they were all in, back when they had me, and that didn't work out in the end, but look what came from that. You, and Cara, and the Lizard, and Captain Wyatt in his spaceship… And your mom, who loved our dad so much, now…"

"She loves James," Sam nodded.

"Yeah. This thing with you and Dora and Cecilia, it's… it's complicated… So complicated," she mumbled to herself. "There's parts of it you can't do anything about, and other parts… You're one of the smartest people I know, the most caring. I know you don't want to hurt anyone, and I don't think you will, not intentionally, but you need to just… take a chance, for once, and trust that, in the end, you'll end up where you're supposed to be. So… Do you want me to make a little stop over at Cecilia's school on the way to the university? Answering over a text is so not the way…"

"Her classes start in like twenty minutes," Sam looked at his watch, a rumbling of anticipation rising in him. Maya gave him a smirk.

"We've got time. You might have to run."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	44. Their Careers to Ignite

**_A/N: Leave it to me to forget to post a chapter until way late because I was so focused on writing a couple other chapters... _**

* * *

February 13th 2020

_Chapter 44  
Their Careers to Ignite_

_Lucas: You're joking?_

_Maya: No! He's really doing it!_

_Lucas: No, but really._

_Maya: I swear on all my siblings, and my parents, and the dogs, and you._

_Lucas: Wow._

_Maya: I know._

_Lucas: How'd he look when he went in there?_

_Maya: Like he might pass out… or throw up… So nothing I wasn't expecting._

_Maya: He's coming back! TTYL_

She had tried not to write him just yet, to wait until whatever would happen did or didn't come to pass, but then after watching her little brother jog up from the minivan and toward Cecilia's high school… Her nerves were just not having it with the wait, and the anticipation, and just staying out here. If she didn't do _something_ she would have gone in the building to try and sneak a look. But now Sam was coming back, so she allowed herself to climb out and meet him.

"So?" she asked with a nervous smile. He'd looked all pale and a tiny bit sickly when she'd last seen him, and now he looked… well, still a bit on the woozy side maybe, but…

"I did it," he told her, like he didn't quite believe it himself.

"What did she say? What did _you_ say? Wait, you still need to go to school," she interrupted herself. "Okay, get in, tell me on the way." They climbed back into the minivan and started on their way to the university.

When he'd finally gotten around to telling the story, which took a couple minutes of sitting and processing, Maya had half a mind to pull to the side of the road so she could give him her full attention. She would have done it, too, if it wasn't that both she and he had somewhere to be and they were on a clock. So she went on driving, and he told her what had happened when he'd gone in search of Cecilia.

By some chance, they'd been discussing their class schedules the night before, back at the house, and he remembered seeing the room number for her first period of that day. Her brother was one of a few people she could believe would remember that kind of thing at a glance. He had gone in search of that room, hoping he would find her there. He didn't, but luckily for him her locker was just up the hall from the class, and that was where she'd been standing. _She _had seen him, and when she'd said his name out of surprise for seeing him in her school, he'd turned and seen her.

"This is going to sound weird, but she kind of looked… different all of a sudden."

"Different how?" Maya asked.

"I mean, she didn't change or anything, but I saw her and it was like… whatever it was that kept fogging my head up was gone, and I could see so much clearer now. I don't know that I'd ever been so happy to see her…" he smiled to himself, and even though she couldn't see it head on, out of the corner of her eye it was one of the best things Maya had ever seen. "She was surprised to see me, of course, and I think she was wondering if I'd found her note or not. I told her that I'd found it, and I'd read it, and that I'd come to find her because I wanted her to know as soon as possible that I did want to go out with her."

"What'd she say?" Maya quickly asked.

"Nothing at first, she just looked kind of shocked, you know? I kept looking to make sure her crutch wasn't going to slip and make her lose her balance or anything."

"Would have been bad, yeah…"

"But then she just kept staring at me, and… she just started to smile, and she laughed… Her laugh's kind of the best, you know?"

"Yeah, it's… it's a good one," Maya agreed, her own face locked in such a smile, listening to her brother's voice and how lifted it felt all of a sudden. "Thank you, red light," she breathed as the car slowed to a stop and she was able to look at Sam, reach for his hand for a good squeeze. "I'm so happy for you, I can't even handle it. Did you guys decide when you would…"

"No, well, her teacher showed up then, and he could tell I didn't go there…"

"Because you weren't wearing the uniform?" Maya teased. "And you're a boy…"

"That, yeah. So I kind of had to leave, but she said she'd write."

"Not bad, first day of school, huh?"

Maya carried her good mood all the way to the university, where she saw Sam off for the day, and then to the coffee shop down the street from the theater and then into the building where she soon ran across Siobhan, and Matilda, and Lily, treating each of them to their preferred drink and pastry combo before taking the last of these to her mother's office.

"I bring caffeine and sugar, how much do you love me?" she declared.

"Well, now, I need to wait and see what the rest of my children bring me," Katy laughed.

"Please, I've got seventeen years on those tiny humans," Maya 'scoffed,' setting her tray and bag on the desk, where her mother gladly served herself.

"Can't argue with that. By the way, you're _really_ chipper this morning, is there a reason for that? Should I be getting balloons?"

"Ooh, balloons…" Maya pondered for a moment, then, shaking her head, "No, too much, too much…"

"I _was_ joking," her mother laughed like she really didn't understand what she was going on about.

"No, yeah, it's all good, it's just… first day of school, for Lucas and Sam," Maya explained, sitting on the edge of her mother's desk with her own cup until she was shooed into sitting in a chair.

"Oh, right!" Katy nodded. "The girls and MJ started again this morning, too." Halfway through the year already, Maya was sure she would have gotten used to the fact that her sisters were now first graders, but nope… it still felt so weird that they could be that age already. "And _you've _got your big day coming up," Katy went on. "I've said how proud I am, yeah?"

"Only a couple hundred times, but I'm not complaining," Maya smiled.

"If you're not too busy today, I could use your help with something."

"Shoot," Maya nodded at once, feeling energized enough to speed through any of her workload and then someone else's while she was at it.

"Just a quick reading for an audition," her mother casually replied.

"Well, I can get Stanley," she pointed out the door. "He should be around here today…"

"No, no, just you, it'll be fine."

"I'm not the one who does those though," Maya reminded her mother.

"Why, you used to do it all the time," Katy pointed out.

"Yeah, with you, when I was like six and reading things I _really_ shouldn't have been reading about…" It took way too long for her to put two and two together, and when she did she just stared back in awe. "You… You're the one auditioning?"

"Yeah," her mother chuckled.

"But you haven't… I mean, not since we moved out here."

"Well, I always thought I'd get back to it eventually, but you know, I got pregnant with the twins… and then MJ… and Haley… Time just kept on getting away, but that didn't mean I wasn't keeping my options open. And now Haley is one and a half, and she will never be a big sister… It's time, and there's a part, for a play coming on later this year," Katy pulled a folder from her desk and held it out to her daughter. Maya took it, setting her cup down to have a look.

"Oh, yeah, I heard about this one… Woah, lead role?" she looked back up to her mother. "Don't take this the wrong way, but are you sure about this? It _has_ been… ten years and then some."

"Which is why I need your help," Katy nodded, taking her words in the best way.

"This is… this afternoon," Maya blinked.

"If you're busy, you don't…"

"Hang on," she got up, taking her coffee and donut down the hall to her office, where Lily waited, playing on her phone as she ate her muffin. "Hey, what's on for today?"

A few minutes later, she returned to her mother's office, shutting the door before pulling her hair into a ponytail. She was ready to go. Her mother had something not unlike Sam's nervous/excited look from this morning, which only kept the fires burning on Maya's giddy energy. The two of them spent nearly two hours at fine tuning Katy's audition. It had been so long since they'd done anything like this, close to if not half Maya's lifetime ago. But it called back so many memories that it felt like the gap in years would shrink down until it didn't feel so wide.

Still, despite all that, Maya watched her mother, listened to her as she gave her monologue and… If she was entirely honest, which she couldn't say for certain her mother would want her to be, the memories she had of her acting were… Well, they weren't _bad_, not exactly, but they weren't exactly good either. There was a reason Katy Hart had not been anywhere near a household name, and it wasn't just about rotten luck or undiscovered talent, missing opportunities, anything like that.

She remembered those old auditions her mother had her help to prepare, and if she could tell at the time that her mother needed a lot of work, the Katy she saw now… She couldn't explain it. Maybe the fact that she'd spent the last ten years in a theater, not acting but still in the midst of this world, or maybe that she'd just lived so much in all this time, fuelling her experiences in the world…

She was kind of amazing… captivating… If she saw her on a stage, she would remember her, she'd _want_ to know who this woman was.

"Was it okay?" Katy asked when she was finished. Maya blinked. Her mother had been a completely different person a moment ago, and now she was herself again. When she was little, much as she'd work at it, her mother would still read as… well, her mother, like no matter what name you put to her character, she was just Katy Hart, in whatever situation the scene required her to be in. "Was it bad?" she cringed, when Maya hadn't replied. "It's that last part, I just…" she shook her head.

"No, no, don't do it any other way," Maya insisted, moving to rise from her chair.

"Are you sure? You don't think it was too much?"

"Not at all. It was like… just enough… like Baby Bear level, you know?"

"Four kids six and under, yeah, I'm familiar with Goldilocks," Katy laughed before looking at the time. "Oh, I have to make a call before lunch, and you… I have taken enough of your time, go on, I release you."

"Okay, but only because I'm meeting friends at lunch today and I have check in with the team… Let me know how the audition went, okay?"

"I will," Katy breathed deep.

"Break a leg," Maya hugged her mother. "Both legs, arms…"

"Yeah, alright, get moving while I can still walk," her mother laughed.

Getting back to her office, Maya couldn't help but think of tonight, when she'd be home, and Lucas would come back, and they would all share how their day had gone. Between Sam and Cecilia making a run at it, and Katy's audition, and Lucas and Sam's first days, they would have enough conversation for a six course meal…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	45. Their Careers to Grow

February 14th 2020

_Chapter 45  
Their Careers to Grow_

Recently, as they'd kicked off the new year, it had come to all of their attention that their group of friends had all gotten to see much less of one another than they would have liked since their return to Austin. Oh, they still saw each other a lot, once a week at least, but then for having been so used to seeing each other every day, or in some cases having been geographically parted for four long years… It didn't feel like nearly enough. They had thus made a resolution for 2026, to make efforts to change all that. The first of those involved a standing 'lunch date,' for any of them who were able to make it. They had chosen a day where they knew their various schedules – barring their being unexpectedly occupied – would have a shot at aligning and allowing for this.

Maya left the theater when the time came, making her way over to the diner. Sitting in those large booths was like hitting pause on the progress of time. Here, they were in a sort of constant and unending loop of just The Diner. She could be thirteen and new to Austin like she could be on the verge of turning twenty-four, as she was now, back in town again after being away at college, and this place would always give her that same feeling like she was home. It was one of the first places in Austin where she _had_ felt at home, back when the move from New York was like an open wound in her.

"You're expected, over there," she was greeted by a smiling Fernando Garcia, who just looked like an older, larger version of his nephews, Asher and Joey.

"Thanks," she smiled back, veering toward those back booths to find her friends. Already arrived and chatting away were Riley, Rosa, Nadine, Kayla, and Rebecca. This would turn out to be all of them for the day, as the guys hadn't been able to make it. This was more than fine. She could do with a girls' lunch.

"Hey!" Riley was the first to spot her, waving at her as though she hadn't seen them already. "I wasn't sure you'd make it."

"Yeah, sorry, I was helping my mother with her audition, and then I had to get a couple things done and…"

"Wait, what audition?" Rosa cut in. Maya blinked, realizing she'd said it without thinking. Was she supposed to keep it a secret? Would she jinx her because of that? She could tell herself she didn't believe in jinxes all she liked, but then something like this would happen and immediately her brain would go 'oh, crap…'

"Uh, she's sort of going out for a part, for a new production that's coming up," she explained, scratching at the back of her neck.

_"You told me she used to be an actress?"_ Kayla asked.

_"Yes,"_ Maya signed back, though with an accompanying expression that read more like 'sort of.' "She wanted to be an actress, wanted to be… a big star," she signed and spoke at once. "It just never really worked out for her. And then we moved out here because she got the job at the theater, and she wanted to give the both of us a better life, and then there were my sisters and my brother…"

"I remember the first time we had a sleepover at your place," Nadine smiled. "We read some of her old scripts she had. She wanted Zay to become an actor," she laughed, and the girls laughed, the three of them who'd been there especially.

It all seemed like so long ago all of a sudden. A whole decade of their lives, and even though it had felt like an eternity away from the other end of those ten years, too, now… All those years were packed to the gills with memories, with living… Putting down those markers, year one, year ten… One couldn't be blamed for turning a look the other way, to think about what it might be like when they hit year twenty… They'd be in their thirties by then, and it might have felt so odd to think about as it would have before, but it was still just… odd…

All through lunch, it felt like that whole line of thought was prodding at the back of her mind, like a sharp little finger digging deep into her brain she couldn't stop. The further it would dig, it would get closer and closer to cascading into other lines she really didn't need it to reach. The most unexpected one of those was this little insecurity she had been discovering and trying to ignore in the past few months.

She wasn't struggling. She had enabled her own success in coming up with Stage Ready and getting it off the ground… mostly off the ground… Everyone who would hear about it would look at her like they were so impressed and proud, and she was that, too, of course she was. But…

But she had spent the last four years studying to become a teacher. She _was_ a teacher, by degree if not by an actual posting, an actual classroom, with students. After going around, not knowing what she wanted to make of herself in life, she'd discovered her way, just there in front of her, and it had meant the world. She wanted to be an art teacher. She had done the work, she was ready. But she wasn't teaching.

She knew it was going to be tricky. She was going after a very specific post, and it might be that it would take a while before she found an opening. And then she had to get hired once that happened, didn't she…

It was still the first year after she'd finished college, it wasn't so bad. And she was getting work experience in the meantime, wasn't she, work that just might be useful for her in the long run… for her and for others, too. Now wasn't the time to start panicking and wonder how long it would take or… if it would happen at all. A year might go by, and another, and another… She might end up sticking with the theater, which wouldn't have to be a bad thing. But…

She didn't want it to get to the point where she decided to settle for a backup. She felt it too deeply, she _needed_ to be doing what she'd been preparing to be throughout those years in Houston. She couldn't give it up.

"Hey," Nadine tapped her arm. Maya looked up. She was vaguely aware that the others had taken off already, back to their jobs, or school… Now it was just her and her returned bandmate. "Walk you back to the theater?"

"Isn't it out of your way a bit?" Maya stood from the booth and followed her out of the diner.

"Maybe a little, but a bus is a bus. I'll get where I need to be eventually. We didn't really get to talk much over lunch… Mostly because you were off in your own bubble, but hey, I don't judge."

"Sorry about that," Maya sighed. The whole point of these lunches was for all of them to get to hang out and talk, and she'd just sat there, eating her food and giving the odd nod of approval.

"I swear, it's like I watched you decline and decline the whole time we were in there. You came in like you were having the best day and now it's like…" Nadine mimed something hitting the ground and imploding.

"It _is_ a good day," Maya nodded. "Sam is currently swooning away about Cecilia. She left a note for him this morning, asking him out on a date. I drove him to her school, and he told her yes, and now he's all bubbly and smiling and it's just so good."

"Wow," Nadine laughed. "That's amazing."

"Yeah, and then this whole audition thing with my mother, I mean you know how she was, I showed you videos. But today, when I was helping her prepare… I don't know how she made that turn, but she's just _so good_." Maya's voice trailed off, turned into a short sigh. "She put her dream aside for all these years, to look after me and my siblings when they came, but she never forgot. She couldn't. It was what she was meant to do."

"That's great… Right?" Nadine asked her.

"It is," Maya assured her. "It really is, I just… You know how I get sometimes. Stuck in my own head, spinning out." Nadine replied with a sympathetic nod.

"What's got you there now?"

"Wondering how long it's going to take before I get to do what I've been wanting to do all these years… Feeling ungrateful for what I've been doing at the theater because of it… You know, fun stuff."

"Maya…"

"I know, okay? You don't even have to tell me. At this point, I'm not sure I'd want you to anyway."

"I get that," Nadine promised.

"Why did it have to happen now though? We're _just _coming out from under that cloud of teenage triangle of doom, things are supposed to be good now, just in time for Stage Ready to kick off, and then my birthday's coming up, and… oh, if Lucas gets a whiff of this he's going to start giving me those worried eyes of his…"

"Oh, yeah, those…" Nadine had to chuckle just a bit, which she immediately apologized about.

"No, please, laugh away. It _is_ laughable, I'm just not… there… yet."

"Can I at least give you like… a patch… to get you through the day?"

"Sure," Maya smiled.

"Okay," Nadine paused on the sidewalk, reaching over to stop Maya, too, and have her turn to face her. "You have pulled together this _great_ program out of your giant goofy brain. You've already helped… a bunch of kids with those Christmas shows at their schools. You are not just an artist that paints, and draws, and wants to start sculpting, apparently. You are an artist that sings, and plays music, and _writes_ music, and dances… When you get back to the theater, you should go look at Stage Ready's Facebook page again. You showed me all those messages, the photos, the videos, from the students, the teachers, the parents… You _are_ an art teacher, Maya, even if it's not exactly the kind you set out to teach."

"Wow…" Maya blinked a sting from her eyes, letting out a shaky laugh.

"Yeah, that went way bigger than I thought it would…" Nadine replied, like she was concerned she might have overstepped some bound. Maya just reached out and hugged her. "Oh, good, okay," Nadine hugged her back. "Better?"

"So much," Maya nodded. "I don't know that it rooted out everything, but you… you did good."

"Anytime," Nadine proudly smiled.

"I think we need a do-over for lunch today. You and Zay want to come over for dinner tonight? You'll get to tease Sam while he gushes over Cecilia…"

"My favorite sport," Nadine grinned as they started walking toward the theater.

"We're such great big sisters…"

"Right?" They shared a laugh, safely away from their younger siblings. "I'll write to Zay, but yeah, we should be good for it. I'll let you know as soon as I can."

They parted ways in front of the theater. Nadine walked off to her bus stop as Maya headed inside and back to her office. Sitting at her desk, as 'prescribed' by Dr. Zhu, she pulled up the page on her computer, reading and watching her way through those messages until Lily returned from her lunch break and they got back to work. She had some of these printed and stuck to the walls already, and she'd replied to just about every single one. Maya breathed deep… Her patch was holding.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	46. Their Careers to Share

_**A/N: Sorry for the delay again, been a bit scatterbrained these days ;)**_

* * *

February 15th 2020

_Chapter 46  
Their Careers to Share_

_Maya: There's going to be six of us at dinner tonight. Can you pick up a couple things on your way?_

_Lucas: Sure, send a list._

_Lucas: Guessing Cecilia is the 4th, who are 5th and 6th?_

_Maya: The former Bostonians!_

Maya had packed up the last of her work for the day to bring home with her so she'd be able to leave early, get home, and start cooking. This dinner was turning into something more than she'd anticipated, and the more time she had for it, the least likely it would be that she'd rush and turn into 'chaotic chef Maya.' She was going to make the best 'happy first day of school/congratulations on the date/thanks for being awesome friends' meal she could.

"Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of food out right now, don't give me those looks," she squinted at Trix and Lou. Both dogs had been circling her feet from the moment she'd started working at the stove. Now they were sitting to attention, staring up at her with those eyes… "You're going to start whining and booping my legs now, aren't you?" They kept looking at her. If possible, their eyes got bigger and brighter. "You are bullies, the both of you. Cuddly, sweet bullies, and I am weak today," she whispered with a sigh before grabbing them both a little something and crouching to hold it out to them. They abandoned their polite poses at once and stepped up to eat from her hands. "Don't think this is going to be a thing, okay?"

The next person to arrive at the house turned out to be Cecilia. It had happened before, on those evenings where the girl ended up joining them for dinner, that they would arrive and find she had already arrived. She would be waiting patiently on the porch, doing homework, or reading a book, or playing on her phone… She'd told them once how, with all the time she'd spent in the hospital after the accident, she had developed pro-level skills at patience. She always came prepared in case of a wait.

"You know, in the future, we might just have to get you a key," Maya greeted her as she was let in. "Outside it's cold, inside there's dogs." Trix and Lou had followed her, always eager to greet a guest, especially when they caught a familiar scent. Now, they illustrated her point on the benefits of having a way into the house.

"I…" Cecilia looked like she meant to say something but wasn't sure how. They'd only just seen each other that morning, and yet… A lot had changed for all of them since she had caught a ride to school with the Schmidt twins and Dora and Adam. Very possibly, Cecilia was looking at her now and wondering if things between them were about to change, now that she and Sam were going to having a date…

"I'm going to take a guess here and assume your father is not exactly… skilled… with hair and makeup and all that stuff," Maya coaxed her into the subject.

"Uh… no."

"Right, so, how about, whenever you and Sam have the date, I help you get ready." The way Cecilia looked at her now, with something like hope mixed with grief, she knew exactly where her mind had gone. "Yeah?" Maya smiled. Cecilia slowly nodded. "Do you know what you're going to wear?" She shook her head. "We can fix that," Maya promised.

"Okay… I-I mean thank you…" Cecilia replied, finally breathing out.

The two of them had never really gotten to spend much time on their own since coming into one another's lives. Now, they worked together to get dinner ready, and what Maya noticed the most was that, as momentarily shy as she'd gotten on first arrival, Cecilia was quick to recover. As long as she'd known the girl, that had been part of who she was. She had something of fearlessness in her. Maya hated that she saw it this way, but she suspected this trait had come along in the aftermath of the crash which had cost the life of her mother and the full mobility of her body. It _could_ also have explained how she'd come to leave that note for Sam today, a bit of a 'life is short' nudge.

Nadine and Zay had arrived as finishing touches were going on in the kitchen. Maya trusted Nadine not to have gone into much detail with her husband about what they'd discussed earlier, for her part as much as Sam's, but even what little she would have told – that Sam was going to be taking a girl out on a date – would have been enough to shift Zay into curiosity mode. Now he was here, and there was a girl who could well be The Girl, Sam's Girl. Nadine and Maya would try not to chuckle, much as they felt the urge to, watching Zay interact with Cecilia like a nosy uncle. Lucky for her, Cecilia wasn't flustered at all by this. She answered his questions swiftly, though keeping to herself what parts she didn't want to share and doing so very politely. Zay was rightly impressed with her, and he wasn't alone.

The questions had been cut short by Sam's arrival, and oh how there was the slightest magic beat when he and Cecilia saw each other again for the first time since that morning, at her school. Just the way they seemed to balloon up on a smile, Maya could well imagine how they had gone through this day, replaying the moment over and over in their heads and trying to rein in the expressions that would have extended over to their faces.

Then they remembered that there were other people in the room, other people who would be watching this moment between them. They both sort of did their own version of clearing one's throat, playing it cool.

"I, uh… I didn't know you guys were going to be here. Are you having dinner with us?" Sam asked Zay and Nadine.

"Yes," Zay replied, and Maya swore that he sort of paused on his way to saying something else, considered it for a moment, and redirected elsewhere, like he'd been told not to mention certain things. She gave Nadine a look and mouthed a silent 'thank you,' thinking about what he could have innocently said and ended up making her brother – who was not nearly as fearless as Cecilia – go about as red as her dyed hair. "If it helps, I didn't know about this until this afternoon."

Had it been anything but day one, Lucas would likely not have been home until much later than he ended up arriving. Maya and Sam might have been accustomed to delaying their own dinners in order to have the meal with him, but they wouldn't have wanted to make their guests do the same, even if they would have probably agreed to it. But since it _was_ the first day, and he knew the professor who taught his last class of that day would not be keeping them very long, he was able to make it in time for a relatively prompt dinner.

"I'm not going to say I can't wait until everyone goes home, but I will say that I have missed you a lot today," Lucas declared as he walked up from his car to find Maya waiting for him on the porch. "You look like you missed me, too, standing out here," he informed her, climbing on to the porch.

"Now what's wrong with standing outside?" she smiled, her feet leaving the ground when he pulled her into his arms. "Say the word, I will kick them out right now."

"What about Sam?"

"I feel like crashing on a friend's couch is an important experience in any college student's life," she shrugged, making him laugh before kissing her.

"I might consider it," he told her, looking at her… He really had missed her so much.

"You're not going to believe how much you missed today," she looked at him with that spark in her eyes, intriguing him at once.

"Oh?" She tipped her head back to look through the window, making sure the others were still chatting it up inside, before turning to him again. Just to be on the safe side, she started to sign, keeping her hands as close to herself as possible.

_"My brother is going on a date with C-C." _That was their sign for her, and even so, Lucas looked like he wondered if he'd seen that right.

_"Cecilia?"_ he spelled it out, and Maya nodded. _"He asked her out?"_

_"No, she did." _Lucas stared at her. _"Yeah,"_ she confirmed before giving him a quick rundown of the morning, with the note, and the talk, and going to the school, and how Sam had been ever since he'd come back out of there.

"Wow…" Lucas spoke out loud, and Maya shushed him. _"Sorry,"_ he signed with a sheepish smile. _"So this is good news, yeah?"_

_"Great news. Speaking of that…_ My mother went on an audition today," she switched back to speaking out loud, now that they weren't talking about people who were just feet away from them.

"Wait, what?" Lucas gladly allowed his surprise to be vocalized here.

"Yeah, for the lead role in a play that's coming up. She had me help her run her lines for the audition in her office this morning."

"Okay, but, don't get me wrong here, but I thought… I mean, she hasn't been acting since you guys moved out here, right?"

"No, no, she hasn't," Maya confirmed, shifting her thoughts briefly on to those Stage Ready notes on her office wall before her brain even had time to try and turn this around until she was off again. "Doesn't mean she didn't want to though, and now she's going for it. "And Lucas, she was just… She was so good, like better than I'd ever seen her, by a _long_ mile. I think she might actually have a shot at this."

_And what if she doesn't get it? After all this time, all this waiting for another chance? What happens to her if they say no? Maybe they'll say it's because she has her other job, something, but all she'll think will be that she wasn't good enough._

"Alright, so now you heard about a bit of Sam's day, and my day… How did it go today?"

"Pretty great, actually. Got one of my new professors today, and she was very good, like… she didn't keep us all period, but she probably could have and we would have stayed."

"I love those…" Maya sighed enviously.

"Oh, and I don't know _what_ happened over the holidays, but Josie showed up and she looked completely different."

"Different how?" Maya asked, suddenly the one receiving the surprise instead of dishing it out.

"Like more the way she was when Willow and Lion got married. I swear, for a second I thought she'd say she wanted to be called Josephine now. And she was nice… not that she was mean before, she was just… Josie… except now she's this."

"Drastic change like that… I kind of want to know what it's about, too," Maya admitted. "But for now… For now there's friends, and dinner…"

"Good, I missed you all, and I'm hungry, two for two."

By the end of the night, Zay and Nadine drove Cecilia home, and Sam told his sister that the date had been set for the following Saturday evening. He also told her that Cecilia had asked for him to mention that she would be calling Maya about 'you-know-what.'

"What did you talk about before I got here?" Sam had to ask.

"Oh, you know, girl stuff," she casually shrugged. "You'll find out soon enough."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	47. Their Careers to Earn

February 16th 2020

_Chapter 47  
Their Careers to Earn_

As much as Lucas had enjoyed his three-day weekends, even if he was working at the bookstore on those, he was getting to think that he would enjoy this new schedule of his a lot more. He still had a day where he had no classes, only this semester it had landed on Wednesdays, which would make it so that he would be driving out to school two times two days in a row instead of four. He didn't mind the drive, not all the time, though his Friday drives had gotten to feel like more or a chore than he cared to admit. Now he'd have two days at the bookstore, two at school, one at the store, and two more at school, and he'd start again… He could deal with that.

His days at the store might have been slightly different, but at least the people remained the same. Maeve would be a constant throughout. On weekends they would be joined by Aarti and Mona, and on Wednesdays now as on Mondays, it would be them and Julia and Tanner.

"How did that even work out?" Lucas asked Maeve when he showed up that first Wednesday. She paused her search at the computer and turned to him.

"How did what work?"

"Winston was working Wednesdays…" he pointed out. Maeve smirked. "What?" Now she laughed. She repeated what he had just told her, holding her thumbs and indexes together at the thumbs to create the letter W, which she waved at every word. She was looking at him now like she really wanted him to use another W word, the better for her to point it out to him. He just stared back, gave a nod, and turned to walk away, like he wouldn't give the satisfaction. "Okay, okay, come back, geez!" she laughed, and he returned to her counter. "It's not like I had a choice to shuffle things around, or there wouldn't have been space for you and you'd lose a day. I asked Winston if he'd switch a couple of his days and he said yes, it's not a big deal. Happens all the time."

"Yeah, but it was his day, he had his whole routine, he told me once…"

"Look, I can't talk about it, he's just… He's going through some personal stuff, okay? He couldn't come in to work anymore, so it was kind of a 'one's misfortune' kind of thing."

"Oh…" Lucas blinked.

He didn't know Winston very well, except that when he wasn't working at the bookstore, he was at the supermarket where he and Maya and Sam shopped every week. One day, Lucas had gone in to pick up something on his way to work, and he'd been wearing his vest, which Winston of course recognized. The two of them had gotten to talking, confirming that they not only worked at the same store but on the same floor and with the same people. He was in his fifties, maybe sixties, Lucas wasn't sure, but he was pretty sure he'd never met a single person who was so well and widely read as him. He had a knack for book recommendations like no other, which he heard about through the rest of his weekday crew.

Now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure he'd seen Winston at the market for a couple weeks now. He figured he was on vacation, but now…

"Look, can you just sort of… keep it to yourself?" Maeve quietly asked.

"Absolutely," Lucas nodded. "If you talk to him though, tell him I said hi?"

"I will," Maeve smiled and nodded.

"Hey, so I was thinking we could all hang out sometime. You've been to a couple movie nights, but I was thinking it could be fun to have the others there, too."

"Like a store mixer?" Maeve grinned.

"Something like that," Lucas slowly nodded, considering the suggestion.

"But just our floor," Maeve added, which might as well have been 'just the best floor.'

"Oh, for sure," he laughed.

"Great! We should totally do that. Weekend after next maybe, or… No, wait, you have a day off in there? Fiancée's birthday, yeah?"

"Yeah," Lucas nodded.

"So, two weekends after next?"

"That should work."

They spent much of that morning, the four of them, tossing ideas back and forth about they might pull this off, what they would want it to be. There were definitely two schools of thought in this, between Team Maeve, who wanted games, and themed outfits, and Team Julia, who just wanted them to get together, have some food and hang out, maybe watch a movie or something, but nothing more involved than that.

"I don't think they're going to let go of this," Tanner told Lucas at one point, as the two of them watched the girls tossing looks to one another, like they were looking for the ideal tactic to get their side to win. In his head, Lucas could hear Rosa's voice calling for _someone_ to protect the books, and he bit back on the urge to laugh it gave him.

"Right, you take Julia, I got Maeve?" he suggested, and they parted on a couple of bumped fists, both soon occupied with customers even as they kept an eye on their 'target.'

The more the day progressed, Lucas found himself thinking about his new classes, the ones he'd had so far, and how they carried on from those he'd taken in the fall. His second semester had only just started, and it felt as though the simple act of being here today, on this different day, really drove home how things were moving forward for him, with school. Whenever they'd have a new semester, there would always be that period where everything was new, and then days and weeks would pass, and they'd hit their stride. It sort of felt like that, but on a bigger scale. He'd stopped thinking of it as him going off to his _new_ school four days a week.

He was helping an old woman looking for something for her granddaughters in mid-afternoon when he looked up and discovered Maya, standing just a few feet away, looking on with that 'I like to watch you do your job' smile of hers. It was hard for him to keep going without tipping his hand and smiling back, but he focused and saw the woman through her shopping until she was good and ready to head down to pay for her selections. When she was on the escalator, Lucas turned back and went to find Maya, who had passed the time by browsing some of the table displays.

"Find anything to your liking?" he asked.

"You're just walking right into it, aren't you?" she smirked without looking up yet.

"You mean because now you're going to say something like 'as a matter of fact, I _was_ looking for a tall cowboy type.'"

"You're so good at your job," she turned that smile up to him now.

"Speaking of which, aren't you supposed to be at yours?"

"This whole grace period before Stage Ready's kickoff is doing wonders for unplanned visits to see you when waiting until evening _just_ doesn't feel doable," she shrugged.

"Can't argue with that," Lucas gave a quick look around the floor before allowing himself to sneak a quick kiss. "I'm going on break soon."

"So I did time it right," Maya declared, looking satisfied.

A few minutes later, he made his way down to the small café near the magazine stands and spotted Maya waiting for him at one of the tables. She was just finishing talking to a girl who moved on toward the elevators after waving to her. After she'd gone, the smile on Maya's face seemed to lose some of its glow for a moment, regaining it when her line of sight came in contact with him, and then the smile was back and more genuine than before.

"Who was that?" Lucas asked as he approached and sat across from her.

"Amy Welch, from junior high, remember?"

"That was her?" he blinked, looking back to see if he could still see her. He _had_ known her, long before Maya did, from just being in school with the rest of them, in elementary school, and then again in junior high, but then when they'd moved on to the ninth grade she'd ended up going to a different school than the rest of them and so they hadn't heard from her in… well, eight and a half years, more or less.

"Yup," Maya confirmed.

"So, I'm guessing she's still kind of…"

"I was really hoping the years would have been kinder to her personality, but here we are," she sighed. "You're much better company, so let's just ignore that, yeah?"

"Are you sure?" He couldn't help it. He'd seen that look on her face a minute ago, and now he couldn't forget that he'd seen it. He had to acknowledge it.

"Stop that," she pointed to his face with a small smile.

"Stop what?" he casually asked.

"Pouty fiancé face," she gestured in the general area of his head. "You know how some kids at school got, when TXNY started to get attention?"

"Oh, yeah," he nodded. How could he forget? Even back then, his primary motivation seemed to ensure that no one would harm her, in any way, and that whole situation had just been… unpleasant.

"Right, so put that through the Amy Welch filter, with eight year's inflation and… yeah… It's not a good mood to be in, and the only way to banish it is to ignore it and move on, until it shrivels up and dies." He took this in and finally decided to accept it. "This one's for you," she indicated one of the two cups on the table. He'd seen it, but then he'd just as soon forgotten it was there, distracted by the Amy aftermath.

"Thank you," he pulled it to sit in front of him on the table.

"How's your day going?" she asked.

"Are you sure you don't want to wait until tonight? What if we have nothing left to discuss?" he teased.

"I think we're good," Maya chuckled. "In case of emergency, I have a whole slew of backups, each more embarrassing than the next and involving all those awkward teenage moments I'm sure Sam would love to hear about."

"Or… there's always the wedding," he redirected with a laugh.

"Oh, is someone getting married?" she played cluelessness.

"Couple people," he nodded.

"Which people?"

"The ones sitting at this table."

"Well that's… Hey, that's us," she grinned. "Would explain this ring on my finger," she wiggled her hand about.

"Would do, yeah," he nudged her foot under the table. She smiled on for a beat, but then he could see the thoughts shifting on her face, the thoughts in her mind practically legible over her features, like she was telling herself 'stop deflecting.' She looked up at him again. "Wasn't because of her, was it?"

"No, well maybe it was, a little, or it just sort of… reinforced why I came out here in the first place," she confessed. He sat up a bit now.

"Maya, what's going on?"

"Just wanted to talk… about a few things… stuff that's been sort of getting at my brain the last couple days." It wasn't the first time, and he usually picked up on it, but she'd gotten it past him this time around. "So, I packed off to work from home the rest of the day, even though it's really nothing, I mean at this point I'm not so much working as double checking, and triple checking, so that by this weekend…"

"Maya…" he cut in, knowing how long that sentence could run if it was given traction in any way. "What's got in your brain right now?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	48. Their Careers to Seek

February 17th 2020

_Chapter 48  
Their Careers to Seek_

If it was up to her, she'd never have to put her own burdens on him. He welcomed them freely, she knew, but then it would just put worry in him she'd rather he didn't have to feel. She sought to protect him more than she cared for her own troubles. But after a couple days, it did get to feel like Nadine's patch – while it still held overall – had encountered a couple holes, punching through and seeking to expand. She'd come to the bookstore that afternoon because she'd finally told herself something had to be done, and she needed to talk to him. Out here at least, she had a shot at dealing with everything without bringing it back home to Sam.

"I just… I've been thinking about how it could still be another year, or more, before I get a teaching post, and it all spiraled… a bit…" _Spiraled a lot,_ Lucas thought, reaching across the table, nudging her fingers where they sat, until he could slip his own underneath and hold her hand. It made her smile, just a little for now, but a start.

He'd actually been expecting this. A while ago, she had made a similar statement, expressing the chance that it could take time before she got something. She'd had that sort of smile about her that just gave off something he would describe as 'I'm consciously optimistic, but subconsciously terrified.' It was really only a matter of time before the ball dropped.

"Okay," he simply replied, showing that he was paying attention to her but also that he was leaving the floor to her, to keep talking.

"You know, the part that pisses me off right now is I was doing fine, and then the thing that pulled me down again is… I overheard a conversation, at the theater. They haven't announced it yet, and no one's supposed to know, but… my mother's getting the part she auditioned for."

"That's great," Lucas smiled.

"It is," Maya agreed, nodding along. "I had to just press my mouth shut and get back to my office without anyone seeing or hearing me before I could even let it out… as quiet as possible."

"Yeah," he chuckled, imagining her back there.

"I was so happy for her, I _am_, but then it's like I let down my defenses and… here we are. I should just be happy for her, how she's just living her dream… finally… instead of letting myself wonder if it would take this long for me, too." There it was.

"It's not though…"

"No, maybe not. But maybe it'll end up that it won't happen at all, that I'll just do something else. And I know… I know that's not a bad thing, that it would be complaining about something I shouldn't have any space to complain in, and I'm really not."

"It's _your_ dream," Lucas shook his head. "You get to decide how you feel about it."

"Got a few of those, don't I?" she looked at him, her fingers tapping at the hand that held hers.

He knew _those_ dreams very well, yes. They were the ones she shared with him. And because these were _their _dreams, it could complicate things, especially for her. He knew how much the life she'd created for herself since she'd moved to Texas meant so much to her, to the point where those challenges that came along, like this question over her eventual job, would get to feel so much bigger out of nowhere, and there was nothing she could do for it except to work her way out. No quick fixes, just a lot of personal searching. She couldn't bear the thought of it all falling apart around her.

"For better or for worse," he nodded, which tugged a snort out of her.

"Good point," Maya agreed. As silence drew on for a few seconds, it felt as though he could see her rearrange a few things in her head, and what it came down to was something along the line of 'here I have one thing I only have partial control over, and here's something I have nearly total control over.' She pulled out her phone now, setting it on the table between them and opening up her calendar, tapping the arrow to turn to the next month a few times. February, March, April… Her finger stalled before continuing, like this was a good start. "What do you think? Spring? Summer? Fall? Winter?"

"Great seasons, all of them," he nodded, unsure where she was going at first, but she held up her hand again, showing her ring. _For the wedding. _She wanted to pick a date. It made him smile, and he resettled in his chair, looking at the calendar. "Can I just see…" he pointed to the phone, and she nodded, so he picked it up, flipping through the months without her being able to see.

"What are you doing?" she asked, curiosity rising.

"Checking to see what day of the week," he held up a finger, as though he hadn't gotten there already and found that the answer was 'Sunday.' Seeing as she looked this close to pouncing, he handed her back the phone. Going by the way she smiled, he figured she'd been thinking the same thing.

"I was kind of looking forward to having two anniversaries to celebrate, but I could do with this," she nodded. "Like a mega anniversary," her eyes sparked.

"Sounds good," Lucas laughed.

"Although… with you being in school and all, midway through a semester, it might not be the best excuse to cut class because you have to go on your honeymoon…" she pointed out. "And we are definitely having one of those."

"No argument there. Alright, so… summer?"

"Summer," she nodded. The calendar was tap-tap-tapped back a few months away from November. "June, July, August…"

"Anything calling to you in particular?" She considered this, cycling through those months several times. "Deep concentration," he whispered.

"I _will_ shush you," she informed him without looking up. He just smiled to himself, saying nothing. Maybe they hadn't fixed much, but they'd moved the issue just far enough that it couldn't touch her anymore, and to see her uplifted again was all he could ask for.

Now, she paused in her browsing, and considered, and finally highlighted one day before setting the phone down again and turning it for him to look.

"What do you think?" she asked, sitting up expectantly.

"I think… that when I go back upstairs, I'm going to have to tell Maeve I'll be needing the weekend of July 11th off… and a bit more after that," he grinned, more so for the smile on her face. He couldn't think about much else than the notion that he would be marrying the girl he loved in a matter of six months. Everything he knew said that this wasn't a whole lot of time, but then if Sophie and Chiara could pull off a wonderful day like they did with so little time… then they could make six months work.

"Please do that, yes," she replied, and oh how her face looked bright and alive in that moment, like she could barely contain herself, like she wanted to pick up a pencil and draw…

"I really want to kiss you right now," he informed her. She took a look around the semi-populated café before turning back to him.

"I think we can make that happen," she decided.

"Yeah?" he smiled, standing as she stood and walking around to pull her into his arms. It would have to be something more than a quick peck and far less than anything inappropriate, but what could he say? They had a year, a month, and a day… "I love you," he kept her locked in his arms a moment more.

"I love you, too," she returned, with that smile so strong on her now that nothing and no one could crack it. "Okay…" she breathed out as they pulled away, like she was feeling hot all of a sudden. "Well. I should go," she told him, laughing after a beat. She felt at her cheeks like they might be warm. "See you at home?"

"Pizza?"

"Oh, so much." She picked up her cup and moved to head out, then, a few steps later, turned back and returned for one more kiss. "You know what that one's for," she tipped her head.

"I do," he promised. _Thanks for getting me out of my own head._

He watched her go for real this time before taking his cup and heading back upstairs to his floor. He must have had his emotions on his face, too, going by the way his co-workers gave him curious looks.

"What did you do on your break?" Maeve whispered at him when he stopped to throw out his now empty cup. The way she said it suggested she believed he might have done some things he really shouldn't have been doing at his place of employment.

"Uh, well," he looked at her, briefly smiling to himself as he knew he was about to keep his promise to Maya. "I need to put in for some time off in July. Actually, you're going to need some, too, and whoever's working Saturdays by then…" Maeve looked briefly confused at this statement, but then she put it all together.

"Picked a date?"

"July 11th," he nodded, and he didn't know how those two words could make him so happy, but he swore he felt like he'd meet every single living being, human or dog, stranger or friend, in the near future and inform them that he was getting married on that day. That was how happy it made him. "Maybe give me a minute before I talk to customers…"

"I'll give you ten, you're kind of wired right now," Maeve teased, moving past him to greet a woman coming off the escalator.

Having picked a date, he soon came to realize, was one big weight off their shoulders, yes, but only in the way that, by removing that weight, they had then allowed a deluge of new paths to open ahead of them. It wasn't just a date, it was a deadline. All those things to do… He already knew that as soon as he told his mother about this she would be all over the place, turning into Hyperspeed Mel, who would blow through all these preparations like a human tornado. _Maybe we should tell her yet… a week or two…_

"If you want to sneak away to the section with all the wedding books, I'll cover you," Julia appeared at the counter a little while later, as he was looking something up on the computer. "It's as though your face relaxed but you're still just smiling," she told him. He laughed.

"Maeve told you?"

"Oh, I'm not talking to _her_," Julia declared, and only for knowing her better than the common stranger did he know this was said as a joke. Despite their 'spat' over the mixer, they were actually something close to best friends. "No, Tanner's girl works down in the café," she explained, which was as much of an explanation as Lucas needed for how the information had travelled.

"Here I thought this store was huge," he smiled.

"Not when it comes to anything like this," Julia assured him. It wasn't like it was a secret that he was engaged at the moment, but clearly he and Maya weren't the only ones to be excited at the prospect of an actual date being chosen.

"Your invitation will be on its way as soon as there's one to send," Lucas assured her.

"It better be!" she called back, carrying on with her work.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	49. Their Careers to Expand

_**A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!**_

* * *

February 18th 2020

_Chapter 49  
Their Careers to Expand_

By some miracle, the news of the wedding date had managed to remain a secret as the week drew to an end and the weekend kicked off. That was for the best, as the last thing they needed right now was to end up with more on their minds than the two big things happening, one on Saturday and the other on Sunday.

Maya woke up on Saturday morning, swearing that she could just make out… Was the shower running? The sun didn't even seem to be completely up yet… and there was still an arm wrapped around her that said that Lucas was still next to her, which meant if someone _was_ in the shower, it would have to be Sam. But why now? What was he trying to do? His date wasn't even until…

On second thought, it made perfect sense. Sam _would_ be up at the crack of dawn to get ready for something like this.

"Is that the shower?" Lucas mumbled, half asleep. Maya turned around just enough so she could touch his face.

"Go back to sleep, it's fine," she told him, kissing his closed eye before slipping away and on to her feet, walking quietly out of the room and down the hall.

The water was definitely on in the bathroom, and one quick peek into Sam's room showed that he wasn't there. The bathroom door was open, so… not the shower, unless he figured he wouldn't need to since they were asleep… No, he'd still close it.

It turned out not to be the shower but the sink, where Sam stood, his wet hair sticking up at weird angles as he examined his reflection. As soon as Maya spotted the 'instruments' set before him, she knew what he was intending to do.

"Have you ever given yourself a haircut before?" He jumped and turned around. "Pro tip, _maybe_ don't try it on the day you're going out with a girl for the first time. Other pro tip, ask for help. Other _other_ pro tip… Don't you think it's a little early to be playing barbershop of horrors in here? Your date isn't for another half day, give or take. It really won't take that long to get ready. Just… step away from the clippers and I'll make you pancakes?"

"I could have done it," Sam insisted as he followed her out.

"Sammy, you've got a big ol' smart brain in that head of yours, but you'd also have one less ear on it if I'd left you alone… or lost a couple eyebrows and ended up bald," she shook her head, running her hands through his hair. "It _is_ getting a bit on the long side."

After breakfast, which Lucas had joined before long, possibly drawn by the smell of pancakes, the brothers had taken off together, so Sam might have a proper cut. Maya had employed this time by heading off to Cecilia's house, to keep her promise. First things first, she'd taken her to shop for an outfit.

As much as she could seem fully secure in herself most of the time, here some insecurity seeped out, and Maya could sense that Cecilia felt safe enough with her that she could be honest, for which Maya felt honored. She wouldn't let her down.

"What are you looking for? Skirt? Dress? Pants?" she'd asked, and immediately there had been hesitation in the girl. The way she shifted her weight around, Maya more or less knew what this was about, but she played it coy. "It's a bit cold out, a dress like that, some good tights to keep your legs warm…" she gestured toward one of the racks.

"That could work," Cecilia nodded.

They'd picked out a few options before making their way to the changing rooms. The girl there had offered to help Cecilia, looking at her crutch like she wasn't entirely sure how to proceed.

"I've got it, thanks," Cecilia had made her way into the room and shut the door.

Maya hadn't actually seen the winning outfit on Cecilia, not in person anyway. She didn't want to open the door and show her, or at least she wanted to, but she couldn't. She didn't want her to see the scars from her operations.

"You don't have to if you don't want to," Maya had told her through the door. "How about… Can you take pictures? Just down to where the skirt ends?"

This had led to a series of back and forth exchanges between the two of them, as a picture would be taken, and sent on to Maya, who would then look it over and give her thoughts. She had also brought up this impression like maybe Cecilia didn't often take anything off a rack where she wasn't already a hundred percent sure that she would be okay with it. The fifteen-year-old had confirmed as much, saying that she usually bought clothes and tried them on once she was home.

"Oh, hey, hey!" Maya stood up from where she'd been leaning on the wall next to the changing room. "Oh, I like this one," she smiled. "And all I'll say is that going by the look on your face in this picture, you like it, too. Am I wrong?"

She wasn't wrong. Soon, the winning outfit was paid for and they left the store.

"Shoes, what about shoes, do you need any?" Maya asked, staring down at her feet like she might be able to find what size she was, in case they were the same and she could just lend her some.

"I have these boots, I don't get to wear them too much. Hang on." One quick search on her phone had produced an image of these boots.

"Yeah…" Maya nodded. "Check it out," she held up her own phone, with the picture of Cecilia in the dressing room, over the girl's phone, to combine it all. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Cecilia smiled.

"Tights?"

"Need them."

"Okay, let's go."

They had ended up back at Cecilia's house, and by the time they had done all their shopping, had lunch, went and experimented with hair and makeup, it was time to put it all together and get her ready for her date to pick her up… or at least to be driven over by his chauffeur/brother.

Whatever results his self-inflicted haircut might have produced, the one he got done by an actual professional was entirely worth it. None of the four of them there came away from this encounter without a reaction, whether it was Lucas discovering the final results of Maya's efforts, or Maya seeing her brother with his neat new cut, or Sam and Cecilia both getting a look at each other…

"I, uh… I was trying to decide what I could bring you, and then I saw that they had more of those little figurines you collect from the comic book store. There was one on display… That's one of the ones you're missing, yeah?" he presented her with the thing, no more than three inches tall, sitting in his palm. Cecilia confirmed she was indeed missing this one, and she picked it up as though it had gone and become her favorite one of the collection with no contest.

"That may have been the cutest thing I've seen in a while, and I say this having several siblings and friend-nieces and nephews of a very cute looking age," Maya declared, as she and Lucas sat to dinner at Ma Maggie's that night. They were sticking around to pick up Sam and Cecilia when the night was through, so there was no reason for them not to have a night out of their own, right? Lucas told her how he'd taken Sam to get his haircut, before putting him in the hands of Dylan and Zay once he had to go to work. When he'd gotten home again, he'd picked up the nervous Sam and driven him to the house.

"The whole time, I was expecting him to call or just show up," Lucas chuckled.

When they'd picked up the two of them outside the movie theater, they were just sort of huddled on a bench together, talking along, as he held her hand in his. They smoothly let go and played it cool as they stood up, but Maya caught her brother's eye and oh, he knew he would be hearing all about that from her when they got home, and it would be delicious or awkward, depending on which side you stood on.

"How was it?" Maya asked Sam, climbing into the back with him after they'd dropped off Cecilia. "Tell me. _Tell me!_" she tapped at his arm repeatedly.

"Stop, stop!" Sam tapped back until she 'surrendered.' "All I'll say is that it went really well. Can you let me have the rest to myself a little while longer?" Maya smiled.

"Take your time… just not too much… Yeah, okay, leaving it alone."

The whole thing had kept her in a good mood all through to the next morning, which was good. She wasn't about to say no to a boost to send her into her first day of the officially rolled out Stage Ready.

She'd woken up at about three in the morning. After that, she couldn't go back to sleep even if she tried, so she'd slipped out of bed as discreetly as she could and climbed up into the attic. She tapped the telescope on the way to her desk, pulling her robe a little tighter around herself to ward off the slight chill in the air. She'd remained here, drawing this and that, whatever came to her mind, hoping maybe to get sleepy again but expecting very little of it.

She wasn't sure when the guys had gotten up, or when they'd gone and started making breakfast, but then much like the day before, the smell of food had found its way up from the kitchen, and Maya had gone in search of it like a floating cartoon character.

"Did you even sleep?" Sam inquired.

"Did you kiss her?" Maya countered with a smirk, knowing he'd redden like a tomato and retreat.

"I really wish I didn't have to work today, I would so sneak in to have a look," Lucas told Maya, later on, as he dropped her off at the theater.

"What do you mean, 'sneak in?' No, no, sir, you come in, you participate," she pointed her finger at him, only managing to keep a straight face for a second more before bursting into giggles.

"Okay, just go in there and do your thing," Lucas smiled on, waving to the building. She kissed him and she was on her way.

Already there were a few people in the lobby, and she recognized a few from their profile pictures where they'd sent in messages and questions. Continuing on through to the back, where the offices were situated, she ran into some of her team, who all looked as eager to begin as she did. She also saw her mother, standing off in her office and looking sort of far off in her thoughts.

"Morning, Mom," she went up to her door. Katy turned to look at her.

"Oh, morning, baby girl," she smiled. "Today's the day, huh?"

"What's the matter?" Maya asked, seeing through that smile.

"They, uh… They finished the auditions."

"Oh?" Maya asked tentatively. Had she misheard? Did her mother not get the role? Had they gone for someone else?

"I got the part," Katy informed her, like she didn't quite believe it herself.

"What?" Maya blurted out, a bit louder than she'd intended. "Sorry!" she called out into the hall before going into the office proper and shutting the door. "You got it?" she sped up to her mother. Katy nodded rapidly. "Mom!" she pulled her into a tight hug at once, and Katy hugged her back, finally coming out of her stupor, finally realizing it.

"Okay, you and Lucas and Sam are coming to dinner tonight, we can celebrate that and we'll do the same for _your_ day. You just focus on that right now, deal?"

"All those breathing exercises you did, any chance those are good for nerves?" Maya asked with a small smile.

She'd gone off into her office. The moment she stepped back out, she knew, she wouldn't get to stop or be by herself again for very long until the end of the day. She psyched herself up by untying and retying her hair, then untying it again and switching from a ponytail to a bun. It was good and solid, and something about having her hair out of the way always worked best to make her focused.

Deep breaths, couple ones, and then the moment she walked out that door she had to be Maya Hart, Stage Ready Coordinator-slash-Mentor. _Slash teacher. You are an art teacher._ Nadine's words mingled with her own inside her mind, and they made her smile.

Maya walked out of her office, and she followed the weaving hallways that would lead her out to the stage. Out here, the rest of her team was already chatting with a few of their attendees for the day. There were a few kids, few teenagers, adults… There was one man and woman who looked like they were anywhere between sixty-five and seventy-five, both with plenty of motivation in their eyes. They'd come to learn, just like the others.

Siobhan had come out to attend this first session, to get a look at how it all worked out. A few others had done so, including Katy Hart. It could all have thrown Maya off her loop, but… no. She was alright. She might not have been in the place she expected to be, but there was no doubt whatsoever that she belonged here. Some of their students that day may have had doubts going in when they were put in the hands of a girl of not quite twenty-four years, but she was determined to make it so that by the time they left here today her age would mean nothing and would practically have been forgotten.

Not too far away, in the backroom of the bookstore, Lucas took a few minutes off his floor, sitting in a corner with his phone in his hands, watching the screen as he remained connected on a Skype call with Katy Hart. From where she sat, and where she kept _her_ phone, he could see Maya standing on the stage, addressing the people in the audience, welcoming them and telling them how the day would go. He may not have been able to be there in person, but he could still sneak a few looks with the assistance of his future mother-in-law. One way or the other, he was able to look on and smile, bursting with pride as ever for his bride to be.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	50. Their Bonds to Progress

February 19th 2020

_Chapter 50  
Their Bonds to Progress_

If the first month of this year was any indication, then it was going to be one monumental year for a lot of people. February was only starting, and each day that passed took them closer and closer to what was to be The Biggest Day of this giant year.

They couldn't keep _that_ cat in the bag for very long, not if they expected to get a move on with their preparations for the wedding and have it all go off smoothly. _July 11th…_ They would think about that date, or they would be made to think about the month of July, or summer at all, and it would be like… a tiny pocket of energy, breaking open and flooding through them.

The secret had finally come out the day they'd had the party for Maya's birthday. It was a surprise, at the house, and while Maya had been out with Sam, everyone else had been arriving, with presents, and food… Lucas was showing Nellie and Gracie how to blow balloons, to middling success, when he'd happened to look over and spot Nadine as she pulled something from a drawer and asked 'What's this?'

Lucas recognized the brochure from a distance, but before he could do a thing about it, his mother had looked over and seen the picture on the front. The untied balloon had slipped from his hand and gone flying as the air burst right back out of it. It had made both twins jump, though Gracie had hit the deck at once. MJ, nonplussed and sitting nearby as he sorted the bag of balloons by color, had turned and crouched to join her, as though wondering 'oh, are we playing hide and seek?'

There had been no way around it, and he'd had to confirm that, yes, they were making plans for the wedding, and he had told his mother, and Nadine, and any of the others hanging around now, that it would be over the summer, but he wouldn't tell them the date just yet. It felt like something that needed to happen when Maya was there with him. If anything, it had gotten everyone to work faster to get the party set up, as though that would make her arrive faster and with her the chance to finally hear more about the upcoming nuptials.

Maya gave a good show of acting surprised, which might have just been her being happy to see everyone there that day, but Lucas didn't doubt for a second that she'd seen right through whatever story Sam had cooked up to get her out of the house. Plus, well… it was kind of impossible to hide everyone's cars all that well around here, even if they had parked up at the Sanderson farm.

Lucas had taken the very first opportunity he'd found to quickly let her know about the brochure situation. To everyone's credit, they waited until later in the day to finally inquire about the wedding date.

Since that day, they had been weaving through a constant field of helpful information both expected and unexpected, even as they dodged entirely unwanted information.

"Is it just me, or does everyone have a completely different vision of what this wedding should look like?" Maya had wondered aloud one night.

"No," Lucas assured her. "Sometimes I'm not sure they even remember _who_ it's all for."

The expanding timetable bringing them closer to the day they'd exchange their vows now came, it seemed, with a rising number of social engagements, in particular family dinners. Now, as far as Maya went, family meant the Hunter Harts, here in Austin, and the Harts up in Tucson, and _they_ were not coming over, not now. Instead, the happy couple was being summoned by the various branches of the Friar family, as well as those of his mother's family. The branches of the Sullivans were to be found in more than one city in Texas, though, for the time being at least, the ones who wanted to see them weren't so far away.

It was tonight, in fact, that Lucas and Maya were to head out to be hosted for dinner at the home of Melinda's great aunt and uncle. The prospect had been one that left them a bit stressed, and in order to alleviate some of this, without coming off too obvious about it, Melinda had convinced her younger brother to find a valid reason to end up at that dinner as well. Now it would be Maya and Lucas, and their hosts, and Michael Sullivan and his family.

"Hey," Maya leaned over the back of the couch where Sam sat with one of his textbooks open in his lap. He'd been focused enough that her arrival startled him.

"Geez!" he blinked, looking back at her.

"How do I look?" she stood back so he could see.

"How do you _want_ to look?" Sam asked back. Maya considered this. In nearly eleven years of living out here and knowing Lucas, she had never met the couple they were headed to visit. All she knew about them came from mentions here and there, courtesy of Lucas and his parents. It wasn't that they were bad people, or even rude people, but on the whole they preferred to keep to themselves, which made this invitation particularly intriguing.

"_Not_ like a fluffy little lamb strolling into predator land," she finally told her brother. "That would be a terrible theme park," she muttered after a beat. Sam bit back a laugh.

"You look great," he promised. "Distinguished, but not stuck up."

"I'll take it," she breathed, walking forward again. "Now, you," she pointed at him. "I have… absolute faith in you that you won't use this opportunity, alone with your girlfriend in this house tonight, to… you know…" she awkwardly stated, as uncomfortable at bringing up this subject as Sam was at being involved in it.

"Maya!" he frowned.

"Hey, look, no one wants to talk about it, so if you don't do anything that will require me to bring it up again, in so… _so_ much more detail, then we won't have a problem, will we?" she pointed out.

"Nothing will happen," Sam sighed.

"See, you say that," Maya waved her finger at him, "And then you're just sitting around, and it's dark, and it's quiet, and all of a sudden…"

"Stop! Stop it right now!" he clamped his hands over his ears, abandoning his book on the couch and dashing for the stairs.

"You'll thank me later!" she called after him.

"What are you doing?" She stood up straight now and turned around, finding Lucas had returned from his errand.

"Putting the fear of whatever he needs to be afraid of in him?" she casually informed him, her face splitting into a smile when she saw he was looking her over, noticing her look for the night. "I'll take that as a sign of your approval?"

"Not sure what it's a sign of, but do we need to go out there tonight?" he joked.

"I don't know, you tell me, these are your mother's people, how do _they_ feel about tardiness and commitments?" she countered.

"Okay, fine…" Lucas gave a semi-accurate reverse impression of a child being forced to go to bed. He wasn't looking forward to this night, not all of it at least. Years of anecdotes confirmed that he didn't particularly care for his great aunt Nicolette and great uncle Russell. If it wasn't for his uncles and their kids being there, too, he might have discovered new and valid reasons to bail out.

They both knew they had nothing to worry about as far as Sam and Cecilia went. Sure, they had been dating for nearly a month now, but they still had a giggly sort of feeling in them whenever either of them stated the fact that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. So, as far as anything more… hands on… was concerned, she felt something like 99.9% certain that there was nothing to worry about. The final 0.1% went in favor of the line of thought 'his mother put him in my care, for Lucas and me to look after him as she would do if he was still in her house.'

The part that was at once odd and relieving was how Sam's relationship with Cecilia had done so much more than what could have been expected. For one thing, it had somehow managed to realign much of what had been thrown into disarray the previous fall, where his friendship with Dora Cassidy was concerned. It was as though the simple reality that they both had someone in their lives, and that they were both happy, made it so that they were able to tap back into who they had been as friends before everything had gone twisted. All of a sudden, it was the four of them, Sam and Cecilia and Dora and Adam, a lot of the time hanging out, here at the house or at any of the others' homes…

"You know you can just use that key we gave you," Lucas greeted Cecilia with a smile when she arrived, a few minutes before he and Maya had to leave.

"I know," Cecilia nodded, leaving it at that though there was the feeling that there might have been a 'but' to follow. They knew she had used it before, on those days where she came to have dinner with them and she'd be the first one there. She would be found sitting on the couch, with the dogs to keep her company. Beyond that though, they hadn't seen her use it to let herself in when any one of them would be in the house. "It's a tie-wearing dinner?" she inquired now, pointing to the thing around his neck.

"Very much," he confirmed, resisting the urge to reach up and loosen it a bit… or take it off entirely. He wasn't so much opposed to the tie as he was to what it represented in this case.

"Maybe we could go with you," Cecilia suggested. "Sam's young college genius, and my dad's a professor, so I talk pretentious know-it-all," she informed him, making him chuckle. "Not my dad," she quickly specified. "Just… some of the people he has to deal with…"

"I get it," Lucas told her. "And thanks, but we'll be okay. You two have fun here tonight," he nodded, trying not to sound like he'd just said 'someone should get to at least.'

"But not too much fun?" Cecilia guessed, with a much more unflappable attitude than her boyfriend, who'd almost done the whole fingers-in-the-ears, la-la-la-can't-hear-you routine. Lucas couldn't respond to that, so he just cleared his throat before calling up the stairs that she'd arrived. A moment later, there were steps on the stairs, and Sam had re-emerged from wherever he'd gone hiding.

"Hey…" he smiled, approaching her and giving a small hug. Lucas and Maya had no idea if the two of them had kissed. Sure, by now, they probably had, but then if they had to go off any evidence they had themselves witnessed then they were out of luck, because they hadn't seen anything, no chaste peck, no make-out session, and nothing in between. Maya was sure they had to have kissed, but Sam was too shy to show it. Lucas tended to agree.

"Right," Maya came back along, grabbing her jacket and slipping it on over her dress. "Dinner is up to you, cook, order, whatever you want, just so long as it's here. You know how to reach us," she told her brother and his girlfriend, who both nodded. "Last chance?" she turned to Lucas. "In or out?" He looked at her, at the young couple… Part of him really wanted to say 'let's just stay here,' but no. It wouldn't be so bad. And at least there would be his uncles and the kids to keep him in some right place. That's what he told himself, because otherwise he'd say something more like 'well I can't just leave them in there all by themselves…'

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	51. Their Bonds to Family

February 20th 2020

_Chapter 51  
Their Bonds to Family_

"So…" Maya slowly spoke, her voice breaking the silence in the car which had invaded and persisted for what felt like the past ten to fifteen minutes of this ride. Lucas was so focused on his driving, like he was off in some other place in his mind, and he had nothing extra left to provide after the thinking and the driving. Seeing him shut down like that, she was already shifting her own perceptions for the night to come and the part she'd have to play in it. "Anything you want to tell me before we head in there? Because the feeling I'm getting right now is that I really shouldn't be going in blind right now. I mean, I get why you haven't told me much before. It's not like they were in your life all that much, yeah? I've met so much of your family over the years, but not those two, and I don't get why we scored the invitation all of a sudden…"

"Due diligence," Lucas finally spoke. Maya blinked.

"Right…"

"They don't do gatherings, so this is their way of acknowledging that we're getting married. They're not going to come to the wedding." It was so straightforward, the way he said it, which just made it feel to Maya like he was receiving her questions and answering them but he was still way off in the back of his head. Looking out the window, she had an idea.

"Hey, let's stop in here for a minute? I need to pick up something. We've got time." Again seeming to respond to a request more than acknowledging her directly, he'd pulled the car up to the curb and parked. As soon as this was done, she swiftly reached out and took the keys from the ignition.

"Hey…" he blinked.

"What's up?" she asked, and there was no room for negotiation here. He looked at her. As much as she had those flare ups where her head could spiral out so far, just as she'd done not long ago with her teaching dilemma, he had this moment in his past that had rattled him so that, at times, he could still feel the aftershocks. By now, even if she didn't know what the shockwaves had done, she knew enough to see that look on his face and find the epicenter.

"After I got suspended, there were a lot of people around us who had 'things to say,' to my parents, to me…" he started. Maya nodded. She'd heard about that, more than once. Some of them were at one end of the spectrum, the Coach Wileys of the world, but while Lucas had him, and his friends, it was only a small percentage, buried under a lot of noise. It didn't take a lot of guessing to know where this was going, as far as Russell and Nicolette Walker were concerned. "My parents didn't talk to them for… like three years after that. Remember, once in 9th grade, I ended up spending the weekend at Zay's? We had that movie marathon the whole two days."

"I remember GiGi showed up at one point and sat with us. She kept asking questions and looking surprised," Maya recalled, smiling at the memory.

"Right, well, Great Aunt Nic had a stroke, and one thing led to another and my parents went up to visit and patched things up."

"You didn't," Maya guessed.

"I tried," he looked at her. "I really did, okay?"

"I believe you," she reached and took his hand.

"But whenever I see them, it's like I'm right back there. I remember everything they said to me, _about_ me. I'm polite, treat them as well as I would anyone, but in my head, it's the same thing again and again. And what's worse is I look at them and I know… they don't get it. They don't think they did anything wrong, no, so they have nothing to apologize for."

"Lucas… Why are we even going out there tonight?" she breathed, scooting up close and still holding his hand. "Screw courtesy, okay? They don't deserve it. You said it yourself, they're not going to come to the wedding, and honestly I wouldn't want them there to begin with. Let them stay up there if they don't want to come down. I'd much rather we had dinner in a restaurant, you and me and our fancy looking selves."

"It just feels like I'd be giving them the satisfaction," Lucas admitted. "Anyway, Mike and Keith and the kids will be out there because of me, for backup. We can't just send them in on their own."

"Then we're just going to have to rescue them out of there," Maya smirked. Lucas looked at her for a moment, considering, and finally he smiled. "You're going to need these," she handed him back the keys.

Whether it was chance or the universe giving them a sign that they were making the right call, they arrived at the house right on the tail of Lucas' uncle's car. While Maya stayed in the car, Lucas went out and over to the driver's side window to talk to his uncle. The window rolled down to present him with the smiling face of Michael Sullivan. He and his big sister might have been twins if not for the years in between them.

"You're looking way more upbeat than I expected to find you, this close to all of that," he nodded over to the house, getting a knowing chuckle out of his husband in the passenger seat. In the back, Lucas was getting some cheerful greetings from his three little cousins, all of them looking like they were trying to climb out of their seats to get to him. "Ladies, butts in your seats!" Michael addressed the trio in the rear view mirror. "I see you, go on," he pointed blindly over his shoulder, which sent the girls giggling as they did as told.

"So, change of plans," Lucas told his uncles. "Want to get out of here?"

Soon after, they all ended up a group of notably overdressed patrons taking up a table at Ma Maggie's. Uncle Mike had taken care of informing the Walkers that the dinner wouldn't be taking place after all. Whatever he'd told them, neither Lucas nor Maya were told, and they didn't care to find out. It wouldn't be hard to cut his great aunt and uncle out of his life, with what little of a role they already played in it.

"Let me just…" Maya reached out and loosened Lucas' tie from around his neck and then removed it entirely. "Better," she smiled. "One more thing…" she undid the top button on his shirt. "Even better." The smile on his face was made of all the love he felt for her in that moment, for having convinced him to reclaim this night.

"Lucas! Lucas!" the eldest of the three girls called from across the table. Her name was Lea, and she was ten years old.

"Yes, Lea?" he turned to her, matching intensity for intensity. She wanted to be an actress, though with her cousin she was more for hamming than acting. He tested her ability to keep a straight face at every turn.

"Can I be in your wedding?" she asked, with a directness she'd honed in from the age of two.

"What do you want to do?" he asked, intrigued for her answer. She had that all prepared already.

"I want to read a poem." Lucas turned to Maya, who was having her own struggles at keeping it together right then. She had to nod.

"Go for it," Lucas told her, and she practically pumped her fists in victory. When Lucas felt a tap at his arm, he looked to his side, where the smallest of the sisters sat staring up at him with big brown eyes her fathers called her 'hypnoteyes,' because you just wanted to give her everything she asked for when she turned them on you. "Yes, Lydia?" he asked the four-year-old. She'd been staring intently at the menu ever since they'd put it before her, and now she pointed to one of the pictures and looked back at him. "You want that?" She nodded. "Where'd your voice go?" he crouched in his chair to be a bit closer to eye level with her.

"Itches," she plucked at the tights on her short legs before turning to her papa, which was Keith. "Can I take them off?"

"They're bugging you bad, huh?" Keith asked, in his deep, deep voice. Lydia nodded. "Alright, come on, Hypnoteyes, let's go. No reason to give everyone a show," he led her off to the bathrooms.

"Hey, Lara, you're doing okay with all this?" Lucas turned to the last of his cousins here tonight, aged seven, or as she would say, the very middle child. An August baby, her older sister was three years and four months older, while her younger sister was… three years and four months younger. All of them having been adopted as newborns, Michael and Keith would say they couldn't have planned it that way if they tried.

"Sure," Lara shrugged, sitting primly in her dress and neatly combed hair like she always looked this way. She didn't. She was _usually_ dressed for sports, for outdoor play. Some would call her a tomboy; Lara hated the word. She wasn't a 'tomboy,' she was a… Lara girl…

"You sure?" Maya asked.

"Daddy said if I dressed up like this tonight I could go to soccer camp next summer," Lara simply stated, smiling brightly. Maya snorted at this, stretching her hand across the table in a fist, which the girl bumped with a grin.

"Alright, here we are, good as new," Keith returned, his youngest daughter held aloft until he could set her down on her chair. "As you were," he tapped her head before sitting in his own chair. Lydia turned to her cousin at once, climbing on to her knees on the chair so she could be taller.

"Is it true you're going to be a… animal doctor?"

"Working on it, yeah," he confirmed.

"Our neighbor, she has a cat, and the cat had babies! I want one, but Papa said we can't because they make Daddy sick. They said we could get a bird. What's the best kind of bird? I want a blue one. Or a green one… I want to call it Sheldon. Does it have to be in a cage all the time? What if it goes out a window?"

"Easy there, take a breath," Michael told her, laughing, as she turned to look at him. "Now, you two," he turned to his nephew and his fiancée. The only reason I even agreed to this song and dance tonight was to hear about this wedding. Five months, that is not a lot of time."

"Just because it took us a year…" Keith shook his head at his husband.

"It was not a year… Ten months, maybe eleven…" Michael casually brushed this off. "And that is without a single dress in sight, although given the chance, I could have put all those little brides to shame."

"Oh, I can believe that," Maya laughed.

"Have you found yours yet?" Michael turned to her.

"Uh, sort of. I'm, uh, designing it and getting some of the girls at the theater to help make it."

"You're doing what now?" the man sat up, his voice sounding like 'tell me everything and do you have pictures?'

Later, as they would drive on home, the proud owners of three new drawings, one from each of the Sullivan-Reyes girls, Lucas would thank Maya again for this change in plans. He had come away feeling lifted by this night with his uncles and cousins when he had expected to return like a man climbing a hill with a boulder on his back. It should always be this way…

"I need to remember to get Lydia this book I saw the other day at work."

"So Many Birds Of So Many Colors?"

"I don't think that was the title, but that was definitely the subject," Lucas laughed.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	52. Their Bonds to Houston

February 21st 2020

_Chapter 52  
Their Bonds to Houston_

When he had gone to tell his parents that he and Maya had gone to Ma Maggie's with David and Keith and their girls, they already knew. They had gotten a call from Nicolette Walker, Melinda's godmother. Thomas Friar had not heard exactly what the old woman had said to his wife, but it had been loud enough that he could catch the odd word if the general tone of voice hadn't been enough to convey the overall message. She was _not_ happy.

"Your mom will tell you that she was her usual well-mannered self," Thomas told his son and Maya, after she'd gone into the kitchen to get them drinks. "I tell you, I've known the woman over thirty years, I have only ever seen her unleash the dark side twice. Great stories, both of them, I'll tell you someday. This was number three, and it was a _beauty_. I might never have loved her more than I did right then. Knocked the high and mighty right out of Nicolette."

Going off Lucas' face, Maya had to guess he had never witnessed 'the dark side' of his mother, but he kind of wished he had. For her part, she had gone from a confirmed fan to a lifelong super fan of her future mother-in-law.

The next stop on what they had called the Friar-Sullivan Wedding Tour, unlike the first, did not involve a single shred of doubt or anxiety. They were on their way to Houston, for dinner with the Hillards.

"So, is she coming?" Lucas asked Sam as he walked into the kitchen that morning. The two of them were on their own for most of the day, while Maya was at the theater for Stage Ready. She would be coming home as soon as it was over and then they were off to Houston.

"No, she can't. She and her dad have this sort of every other week thing they're trying to do, him and her, and tonight's one of those," Sam explained. "She says to say thank you for the invitation though." The invitation for Cecilia to join them that night had in fact come from Pappy Joe, who'd met her when he and Patty had come over one weekend. He had become instantly attached to the girl, swapping stories of recovery and physiotherapy, where they had dealt with some of the same people.

"Oh, I didn't know," Lucas replied.

"It's only the second time they've done it," Sam told him. "They never really had a lot of family dinners, even before her mom passed. Her dad was working, so usually it'd just be her and her mom, and when he _was_ there, he didn't really talk much, or he'd eat in his office. I think since she'd been having dinner with us so much, she really put her foot down for him to make more of an effort." Lucas could sort of see it. She always looked so happy to be there with them, so much so that it got to the point where she was there almost every week night.

"Is it helping?"

"The first time started a bit… off… but it got better by the end. She's excited to see how it'll be this time around."

Maya had arrived like a gust of wind, through the door and up the stairs to get changed, so close to their 'do not leave any later than this or you have no chance in hell of making it on time for dinner' deadline that she'd told the guys to just go ahead and get in the car.

"I will be there in a minute!"

"She's kidding, right?" Sam turned to Lucas, who just shook his head at his brother and led him out the door and toward the car as requested.

It had not been 'a minute,' but it had been close enough to it that the guys were left to look impressed. Looking at her, you wouldn't know that she'd just come off a full day at the theater and would believe she'd just been here all day, casually preparing when the time came.

"Okay, let's go. Houston," she nodded, dropping into the passenger seat and shutting the door. Lucas blinked. "What?" Maya asked, then, "Oh! Sorry, I just… Sam, shut your eyes a second."

"We're going to be late!" he protested, almost diving for cover in the backseat, sounding like this 'warning' wasn't going to cut it.

"I was just going to say to buckle your seatbelt, but I'll take it," Lucas smirked as Maya leaned toward him.

"It's been a long day," she shrugged.

"Okay, let's go! Houston!" Sam muttered from the back.

The drive out of Austin went by surprisingly fast, mostly fed on Maya's stories from the day's Stage Ready session. It had been their most crowded so far and had included a real breakthrough from one of their regulars.

Even though they had been back in Houston a number of times since moving back to Austin, it still felt odd being back. Not _bad_ odd, just… This had been their home for four years, and it had been a great period in their lives, a period of so much growth… As happy as they were in Austin, and as much as it was absolutely the place they felt they belonged, a part of them still knew that they would have been happy spending their lives in Houston as well.

"You're here!" they were greeted by Maggie Hillard at the door. The seven-year-old was wearing big brother Henry's old Yoda hoodie, which he'd passed on to her when he'd regrettably grown out of it. She was vaguely aware of what it was about, because it was hard to be around her older brother and _not_ be aware in some part, but she didn't wear it for some love of the source material so much as she liked the ears sticking out of the hood.

"Hey, so are you!" Lucas pointed back to her, which made her laugh.

"It's my house!" she reminded him. "Come on!" she tugged at her cousin's hand so he'd follow.

Maya always loved seeing Lucas with his younger cousins. He had… like a thousand of them, and they were all younger than him, a lot of them children still, and they just… they looked up to him like he was the greatest thing in the world. She didn't exactly stray from that belief, but then they were something else. And Lucas would just fall into the role so magically, whenever he'd be around them, too.

The Hillards were a special case, of course. He hadn't known any of them until about three and a half years ago, when Hank Hillard had walked into that classroom, to teach a class which so happened to include his nephew. He hadn't seen these cousins grow up from babies like he'd done with the others, although he doubted either Henry or Maggie remembered far enough into their young lives to recall a time when he hadn't been around, which kind of explained a lot how their relationship felt closer to the ones he had with all those other cousins. This was not to say that he wasn't close to the three older Hillard children, not at all. Sarah and Evie, the might-as-well-be-twins, had bonded to him easily enough after he'd come into their lives. And Joseph… well, he'd adopted his cousin like the big brother he'd never had.

He was in college now, his first year. As tempted as he'd been to follow his best friend Rosa to Austin, he'd stuck around Houston, the better to be able to help his parents with his younger siblings where he could. On this, he and Sam had quickly bonded, as their paths had been brought to cross more and more, now that he lived with Maya and Lucas.

"Wait until you see his face," Evie Hillard had greeted her cousin and the others, sharing a giggle with older sister Sarah.

"What about his face?" Lucas asked.

"He's trying to get like Dad, and Pappy Joe," Evie explained, tracing an invisible beard over her face. "It looks so weird."

"Where is he? Is he here?" Maya asked, intrigued at once.

"He went to pick up Leigh," Sarah shook her head. "But look," she took out her phone and brought up a picture to show them.

"Oh, _buddy_, that is _not_ a good look on you," Maya gasped, while Lucas and Sam both about lost it. As well as Hank and Joe carried those beards, to the point where they would not have looked right to anyone who knew them if they ever shaved them off, Joseph Hillard, at eighteen, still had too much of a baby face going for him to effectively carry the look. It just looked like he'd stuck fake hair on his face or something.

"Didn't anyone tell him?" Lucas asked, still shaking off the rest of his laugh.

"We all did," Tanya Hillard appeared, looking exasperated with her eldest child. "But he's insisting that it just needs to grow in some more." She greeted the trio, whose jackets had been spirited away by the Hillard sisters.

By the time they all found themselves sitting around the dinner table, the discussion had quickly turned to the reason they had put on this dinner in the first place. As before, it all felt like everyone had forgotten that the two of them had been engaged for over half a year already. Now the wedding was just a few months away, and it was like everyone was jumping into the game in progress and acting like they'd come in from the top. It was more… funny, than anything else.

With how many people there were around the table, the one whose voice carried the most, as it usually did, was Pappy Joe's. He was quick to point out how long he had known Maya, and they couldn't take that one away, could they? Other than Lucas, he'd known her the longest, by a while, and that included Sam. He looked like he just couldn't wait to call for toasts at the wedding, the better to share stories of _Lucas & Maya: The Early Days_.

"I will _pay_ you not to tell some of what we used to do back then," Maya had joked, pointing at him.

"Please, you two were good kids. A little blind for a while, but clearly you saw to that or we wouldn't be here today, celebrating your upcoming wedding." He paused. "Then again, there was that one time, when I took you all camping and…"

"Twenty bucks, Friar," Maya gasped.

"Ten."

"That's not how that works, Pappy Joe," Henry Hillard informed him.

"One."

"That's not it either!" Henry huffed.

"One… One dance," Pappy Joe smirked. "One spin on the dance floor and I might somehow forget what I was going to say."

"Like I would have let you get away without one," Maya squinted at him. He laughed.

"If we're filling out dance cards, I'll have a turn," Patty Robinson raised her hand, tipping her head to the groom to be.

"Consider it booked," Lucas chuckled.

They could have stayed well into the morning hours, talking away with everyone, but they had a long drive home ahead of them, and so they had finally bowed out, loaded with promised dances to both young and old, and many requests once again to hear about Maya's dress.

"The way they talk about it, I have to ask, are you sure you can get it all ready in time?" Lucas asked as he drove. In the back, Sam was off in his own world, texting with Cecilia.

"Oh, yeah, don't worry about it." She could understand him wondering. She hardly ever brought it up in conversation with him, which was intentional. The least he knew, the most likely it would be that he didn't find how she'd been working on it a lot more than he realized. It was easy, when she spent so many of her days working in the same building as the people who had happily agreed to help with her project. He didn't know about all the sketches, and the fabrics. He didn't know she was to have a first fitting in a matter of days…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	53. Their Bonds to the Past

February 22nd 2020

_Chapter 53  
Their Bonds to the Past_

"So I had this idea for the venue…"

That was how it started, how they ended up here today. Sullivan Stables. This was the place his grandmother, Marianne Sullivan, his mother's mother, had built from the ground up. This was where she'd tended to horses young and old for many years. Even when her health had been on a decline, she could be seen being driven around the place in her wheelchair, so she might keep a look on the property, and on their most special guests, the horses. In the end, she had left the whole business to that very person who would be wheeling her chair about all the time.

The woman had been by her side since Marianne had hired her at age fourteen, a driven young girl looking for a job, anything she could do at first and then more and more as she grew. When the time had come, Juliet Stapleton had been like the heir apparent. Neither Melinda nor Michael were looking to take over their mother's business, though they maintained some stake in it and got involved where they could in the years since her passing. Juliet had carried on the spirit Marianne had put in this place. She had also brought to fruition one of the last ideas the former owner had been hoping to get off ground, which was to enable the ranch to host events… like weddings.

When Maya had put the idea to him, Lucas had just gotten this look on his face like for a moment he was right back there, as a boy, walking through the place with his grandmother. Granny Em had nurtured his love for animals, so much so that he'd told her one day that when he grew up he was going to be a veterinarian, and maybe he could come and help her with the horses. She had smiled at him and said the job was his. She had never gotten to see him grow up into the young man he had become, on his way to doing exactly what he'd told her he would do.

And now he was about to get married, and on his fiancée's finger was Marianne's ring, the one she'd left for him to give to… well, her, even if she'd never gotten to meet her. She might have done, if she'd been around three years more. But she'd been gone now for going on fourteen years, and while the rings were symbolic in their own right, to have the wedding itself at Sullivan Stables… Even after all these years, the place continued to just breathe Marianne's spirit, so if she couldn't be there in body…

So, he'd called Juliet and asked if he and Maya could drop by. She had invited them – and by the end of the conversation, Sam and Cecilia as well – to come and have dinner at the ranch house.

"Woah…" Cecilia was the first to react as they drove up.

"This was your grandmother's?" Sam asked, in equal amazement.

"Yeah," Lucas nodded with a smile. "It was her and my grandfather, in the beginning, but it was small. But he died, a year after they had my mom, and she really devoted herself to making it into something bigger. That's how she met her second husband, my uncle's father. They lived up there, all of them. By the end, when she was sick, and there was no one else left, Juliet moved in to look after her. Granny Em left her the house, so she still lives there. She couldn't even bear to change it all that much, so it still looks a lot the way it did when I was growing up."

"Does this mean I get to see that table you told me about?" Maya asked with a smirk that made him laugh.

"I think so, unless she's changed it since."

"What table?" Cecilia asked.

"Carved his name under it with a knife," Maya informed her. "He does that," she turned back to Lucas, who could only keep driving even as he chuckled to himself. "Your first vandalized table… What an honor," she teased him. "Can I add my name to this one, too?"

"Maya!" Sam gasped at his sister.

"Hey, it was romantic, you don't know," she pointed back at him. "On second thought, forget everything I just said, don't you two even think about it."

Maya had never actually been out here before, not in all the years she had known and then dated Lucas. It wasn't that he hadn't told her about it, he had, many times, but somehow the opportunity had never come up, especially once they'd moved out to Houston. But since she _had_ known about it, and she'd been thinking about the wedding so much, she'd been looking at her ring, thinking about the woman it had belonged to and there had been the thought. _I wonder if they do weddings._

She'd gone and looked at the website, and she'd discovered that they did. From there, the rest had just fallen into place.

The pictures did not do it justice, and they certainly couldn't contain the feeling that she got when they arrived and she climbed out of the car. This place… She was here, and it felt like home, it felt like… him. She looked over to Lucas, who was doing his share of looking around, too, and she could see it in his eyes, how happy he was to be here, all the memories it brought back to him… If they could book the place for July, it really would be perfect.

"You know, it used to be I'd have to hoist you up on to the horses, now look at you," a laughing voice called out and they turned around.

The woman coming toward them at an eased pace looked like, to Maya at least, what a younger, female version of Pappy Joe would be like, from back when she'd first known him anyway. It wasn't that they were the same, but they definitely that air to them where, if they were taken out of Texas, put anywhere like New York for example, they would still stand out enough that you'd know they weren't from around. Juliet Stapleton, with her thick, chestnut braid, and the hat, and the jacket, and the boots, and everything in between, looked right at home here.

"I think I can manage it on my own now," Lucas smiled, and Juliet laughed, jogging up until she could hug him.

"I'd ask how you got so tall, but that's genetics for you, isn't it? My goodness… Little Lucas, getting married…"

"And now she's going to call me that for a week," he cringed/laughed, turning to Maya, who was now looking back at him with a curious smile.

"I don't know, pretty attached to Huckleberry," she informed him.

"Oh, I _like_ her," Juliet told Lucas before moving up to greet his fiancée, going right for the hug because, as she'd once said, she could always tell if someone was a hugger or not, and she'd never been wrong. "Welcome to Sullivan Stables," she tipped her head and her hat with it, and Maya had to muster all the self-control in her body not to turn to Lucas and laugh, knowing at the very least that he would know she wanted to do it, and that was as good as actually doing it.

Juliet had been introduced to Maya, officially, and then to Sam and Cecilia, too. She wanted to give the newcomers a tour of the property, and they could tell she'd looked to Cecilia and factored in her crutch and how it would all be taxing on her in the end, so rather than singling her out she'd gotten them all into the sort of open truck they had, coincidentally, to take prospective wedding parties around. In this case, Lucas was explaining and pointing things out along the way as much as Juliet did, recalling some memory or another.

"If Dylan were here, he'd tell you that he nearly broke his arm climbing that tree," Lucas told the others in the truck.

"Nearly gave your gran the fright of her life," Juliet called from the driver's seat. "A lot of history with that tree. Couples love getting their picture taken in front of it when they're out here for their weddings. One couple even got engaged in front of it, did the whole initials in the heart and everything, if you want to go see for yourselves."

Maya looked to Lucas, wondering if Juliet meant… He looked curious, too, he _was_ curious. All he knew of his parents' engagement was how his mother would say that his father had taken her to a special place, and put into so many words the love he had for her and the dream he had of their future together, and he'd asked, and she'd said yes. To his recollection, neither had mentioned what this special place was, but if it was here, then it _would_ make sense. He got out of the truck, and as soon as he'd gotten up the others had moved to follow. They'd walked on over to the very large tree, and they had walked around it, until Sam proclaimed that he'd 'found it!' And it was there. TF + MS. Thomas Friar and Melinda Sullivan…

"You just stand right there," Maya told Lucas, placing him next to the carving before stepping back. She snapped a picture with her phone and quickly sent it off to her future in-laws, knowing they'd get a kick out of it.

The more they'd seen of the whole property, the more they knew, even if it wasn't for their history with the people and this place, they would have loved to have the wedding here. When it came down to it, they never even had to ask. Juliet had just looked at them as they were driving off toward the house, Marianne's old house and now hers, and she'd said what they had been thinking themselves.

"It would have made your gran so proud to see you two wed here."

When they pulled up to the house, Maya had to smile. She'd seen pictures of it over the years, more than once, inside and outside. There had been only minimal changes along the way, not so much that it didn't feel – to Lucas especially – like stepping back in the past, every time he came here. He wasn't here nearly as often as he used to be, when his grandmother lived, but there had been a few occasions along the way. One of them, maybe one of her favorites, had an identical copy displayed in prominence over the fireplace. It showed a smiling Marianne with her grandson of four years, perched on her shoulders and beaming proudly as he held her hat over his head.

"That was the first time, I think," Lucas pointed at it, looking to Maya, and Sam and Cecilia, and Juliet. "The first time I told her I wanted to become a vet, and how I wanted to help her with the horses here. And she told me I had the job." Sam and Cecilia both laughed, as Maya turned a grin up to her fiancé.

"Woman of her word, your gran," Juliet nodded.

"What do you mean?" Lucas turned her head toward her.

"It was in the documents, when she transferred it all to me, the business, the property… Your parents didn't say anything? It was in her will. 'To my grandson, Lucas Thomas Friar, if he should grow to hold his end of the bargain, I will hold mine. The day he receives his degree as a veterinarian, he is to be hired at Sullivan Stables, if he so desires.' Her exact words. I can show you."

Maya looked over to Lucas. She may have been stunned, but he looked completely bowled over, like he was about to cry. Even years after she was gone, his Granny Em was still looking out for him.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	54. Their Bonds to Tradition

February 23rd 2020

_Chapter 54  
Their Bonds to Tradition_

"Hey…" Maya came to sit on the bed after having gone to say good night to Sam. Once they'd dropped off Cecilia and gotten back home, they were all pretty wiped out, so it had been straight up to their rooms to get ready for bed. The night had been long and lively. Juliet might have in fact been a mix between Pappy Joe and Melinda Friar. She had kept them wildly entertained throughout dinner and the evening, and she had prepared them a fantastic dinner.

It had been easy to get lost in stories, and food, and good times, but once they'd left, Maya knew he'd be caught up in his head, in what he'd learned about his late grandmother's will. She'd gone so far as to convince him to let her drive, on the excuse that it was only fair they each had a go. He'd been spacey at best, all the way to Cecilia's house and then back to the lane and to their house. And now… Now he was sitting on their bed, staring at one particular spot on the wall. They had all those pictures on the wall downstairs, but they had plenty more on the walls of their room as well. Family and friends both adorned this space that was more theirs than any other place even in this house. And up on the wall where he stared was the twin to the picture on top of Juliet's fireplace.

Maya crawled her way over to his Lucas' side of the bed, until she sort of sat there next to him and could put her arms around him. They both stared at that picture now.

"I can really see your mother and your uncle in her," she remarked.

"They had different fathers and they look so much alike," he pointed out, smiling, which made her laugh.

"See some of you in there, too," she added as he leaned his head to hers.

"Never really noticed it myself back when she was alive, I was too little, but now… Yeah, I see it, too." He paused, breathing. "I can't believe she actually…"

"I can," Maya looked at him. "She believed in you. I know a thing or two about believing in Lucas Friar, and it's powerful stuff." That got another laugh out of him. "I think your whole motivational thing is rubbing off on me."

"Don't sell yourself short, you were pretty great to begin with."

"Witness the master at work," she intoned as he turned and she pulled her arms back down. "What are you going to do about it? The offer?"

"It's three years away, it's a bit early," he pointed out.

"For definitive answers, sure, but… what's your gut telling you right now?"

"Besides 'you shouldn't have had that third helping of pie?'"

"But it was so good…" Maya gasped, remembering the pie. "Sorry, gut talk, not about pies."

"It's saying…" he sighed, stopping to think, maybe to 'listen.' "It's saying not to make any decisions yet, one way or the other, because my grandmother wanted me to have a choice, and to make the one I wanted, without obligations."

"You've got time," Maya nodded.

X

A couple days later, the dinner tour carried on and took the trio on to the Cassidy house. Where the previous invitations they had received had been made by people they didn't get to see so much – by choice or by distance – this one was different. They saw a lot more of Lucas' Aunt Dot and Uncle Emmett and their kids than the others, in great part thanks to the help they'd provided in the work done on the house and some of the furniture, but maybe even more so for the friendship between Sam and Dora.

"Hi, Lucas! Hi, Maya!" Dora greeted them both before zeroing in on the boy at their side. "Come on, I found it!" she told him, with excitement which seemed to carry a number of words her cousin and his fiancée did not have access to but that Sam could swiftly decode, as his eyes went wide.

"You did? Where?"

"In a shop near my school, it's upstairs," Dora pointed, and Sam quickly got his boots off and hung his coat up before running along with her.

"Please, come on in, make yourselves at home," Maya intoned in some approximation of Dora's lilting tones, which made Lucas swallow back a laugh.

"Hello?" he called out. "We're here!" A moment later, Dot came from the kitchen, saw the two of them standing in the hallway, and breathed out.

"Ditched?" she guessed.

"I think she had something to show Sam," Lucas explained, as his aunt came up to greet him.

"Oh, I'm sure she did," Dot laughed, moving on to greet Maya. "You know, I've never really known how to discipline her, most times she doesn't seem to need it, but then other times I ask her to do one thing and she'll do the complete opposite, and I can't say a thing, she looks at me and I just see… Bambi…"

"Like the cartoon?" Maya smirked.

"Yes, the very one," Dot nodded.

"They'll come down eventually," Lucas shrugged.

"Exactly. I guess I should be thankful she's here at least. Junior had to work tonight, last minute, and Alex is at the library, working on a project for school, and asked to spend the night at his friend's house after they finish there. So it'll just be you two, _those_ two," she pointed upstairs, "And Emmett and myself."

"Do you need any help with anything?" Lucas asked.

"Oh, no, please, you're our guests. Besides, Emmett's got it covered, and when he starts in there, he usually doesn't like anyone else getting involved, it 'disrupts' the process," she told them.

"Oh…" Maya slowly nodded, and Lucas commended her for keeping a straight face, because was he ever struggling. Of course, he was already familiar with his uncle's ways in the kitchen. It didn't mean he wouldn't offer to help; his mother's alarms might go off, way back wherever she was.

"Tell you what, I think I might know just the thing to help pass the time," Dot looked them both, but Lucas had a feeling she was looking at Maya in particular here.

She took them through the house, stopping in the kitchen so they might say hello to 'the chef,' before continuing into the basement. Dot had her shop not too far from home, but she also had her personal work space in the house, usually reserved for personal projects and any particular orders demanding extra time.

"Dora mentioned you were looking to get into sculpting," Dot told Maya as the three of them went down the stairs. "Now I know you probably meant with clay, but I figure this might be right up your alley, too."

"Yeah, I did some of it in college," Maya told her. "Not a whole lot, but enough that I wanted to try and work at it some more whenever I had the chance, get better and all."

"The ones you did were pretty good," Lucas chimed in at this.

"Until that unfortunate encounter with the dogs?" Maya laughed. She'd brought her pieces home when that was all done, and not a week later they had broken to pieces when Trix, Lou, and little Peanut had been chasing one another. Trix had run into a table, it had buckled and… crash. Maya hadn't been too heartbroken over it. Mostly she just wanted to ensure the dog was okay.

"Yeah, exactly."

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they arrived in the Cassidy home workroom. The walls were lined with various tools, all neatly hanging, there were drawers, and shelves, and wood, and a large table with stools around it – enough for Dot and the kids whenever they'd be helping her. On the table, a number of small and medium sized pieces were laid out. Maya and Lucas both became interested in these, looking them over until they noticed Dot had taken hold of a box, which she was now filling with odds and ends, tools from one drawer or another, small pieces of wood, some carved, some untouched.

"What are you doing?" Lucas asked his aunt.

"Just hold on, I need to find… Oh, where did I… Yes," she moved to one drawer, looked through it for a moment and then extracted one more item for the box. When she was done, she slid it over to Maya. "Take this home, look it over, try it out, and when you have questions, just give me a call, yeah?"

"Wait, seriously?" Maya asked, straightening up in such a way that felt like that globe of light over her head had just turned on. Lightbulbs were just too small for the inspiration she could muster in that brain of hers, and it was one of the things Lucas loved most about her.

"Yes, seriously," Dot laughed. "You know, I must have been three years old, the first time my father took me into his shop and showed me everything. He started me on small things, of course. He wasn't going to just put a sharp tool in a child's hands, no matter how confident he was that it would be something I would be good at, same as he was." She had more than forty years under her belt now, by that count, and it showed in everything she made. Maya would never aspire to that, but maybe… she could make something of this new medium.

"Thank you so much," she looked to Dot, who was just as excited to share her own knowledge.

"That right there," the woman moved around the table to point to a high shelf lined with a number of wooden figures, behind a glass case. "My favorite pieces. The kids find it embarrassing that I've got their first completed carvings up on display like that. They can't help it, perfectionists like me, they look at those and think they're terrible. Alex is especially critical of his little dog up there on the end." Lucas and Maya both stayed quiet at this. "I know, I know, I can never decide if it looks like a fire hydrant or a salt or pepper shaker."

"Dalek…" Maya nodded now. "That's what it reminded me of…"

"Yeah, well, look at mine, over there," she pointed near the other end. "It was supposed to be a ballerina, looks like the poor girl had a bit of a proportion situation with her limbs," Dot laughed.

"Dora did that one, didn't she?" Lucas pointed to another. Next to the hydrant-shaker-Dalek dog made by Alex was what unmistakably looked like an owl. The details were minimal, but that was definitely an owl. He had been down there before, more than once. How had he never noticed those?

"Yes, that's her. Made that when she was six. Of the three, she was the youngest I felt secure to entrust with the tools. Always came naturally to her."

"That one doesn't look like a kid made it," Maya had become fixated on the figure on the left end of the shelf. It was a house, not this one, so finely detailed… Dot didn't even need to look at it to know, and she smiled to her nephew.

"My father made that one. It was the last one he did before he passed. That's eighty-some years of practice right there." As impressed as he was with this, with the long standing history of this family with this craft, he could just look to the side and see how Maya looked at it, her hands perched on the edge of the box Dot had prepared for her. She had her eyes on that house like that globe of light was ready to engulf her in brightness. That was the kind of thing she wanted in her life, maybe not in this particular medium but just something she would do, something she could look back on, years from now, as the accomplishment of her dedication and her talent. He couldn't wait to see it either.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	55. Their Bonds to the Future

February 24th 2020

_Chapter 55  
Their Bonds to the Future_

"Okay, so you know how you said you wanted to keep it relaxed tonight, just the four of us tonight, pizza, movies, because tomorrow's Valentine's Day and we're going out?"

Lucas had called Maya after finding a text from her, as he got out of class. _Call me, about tonight._ When she'd answered her phone, it was the first thing she'd said. The lack of a greeting had a way of putting things into perspective for her state of mine. It usually meant a change of plans at the last minute.

"Hey…"

"Hi, sorry…"

"So, are we having guests? Or are _we_ the guests?"

"Your parents, my parents," Maya told him. "Coming over for dinner. And my parents are leaving the kids with the Matthews tonight, so I don't know what to make of it except I do, and I'm thinking you do, too." Oh, he did, yes.

"They want to talk about the wedding."

"Bingo," she sighed. "I tried to find a way out of it, it's just your mother is very persuasive, and I… well, I was sort of… distracted."

"Busy day at the theater?" he smiled sympathetically, even if she couldn't see him.

"Yeah, you know how it is, a bunch of dramatic people and artists, Friday the 13th… It's just weird around here."

That was only a slight exaggeration, and surely her co-workers would forgive her for casting them in that role, the better to redirect the question into a safe place, away from suspicion. It wasn't Friday the 13th that was keeping her distracted when Melinda Friar had called her.

She had been doing her best not to move or breathe in any way that would create motion, and sound, that could reach the ears of her mother-in-law and make her guess what she'd been doing right at that moment. She didn't want her knowing she was standing in one of the back rooms of the theater, with the girls from the costume department. Already the three of them had needed to get back there as covertly as possible so that her own mother wouldn't catch on to the fact that they were working on her wedding dress. If Melinda Friar should hear the slightest rustle of fabric…

So, when the woman had asked if the four parents could come over that night, assuring her that they would see to the meal themselves, Maya had only one thought and it was to see the call come to a prompt end. She'd said yes, and after they'd hung up she'd finally allowed herself to breathe, letting a muttered curse fly off on the way. It was silly, maybe, but it was really important to her that no one would have any say on what the dress looked like but herself, and the costume girls, Denise and Ilsa. The way she say it, as much as it would come from a place of kindness, of wanting to help and offer advice, she knew it would only turn into her losing touch with the vision she had in her head. She _would_ show it to them before the wedding, she would, just not before it was absolutely done.

"I guess we should have seen this coming," Lucas told Maya. "We have been keeping a lot of the plans to ourselves, and they want to get involved."

"I get that, I do, and it's not like I _don't _want them to be involved, I just don't want it to become…"

"It is going to be _our_ wedding, the way we want it to be. We will make sure they understand. If there's anyone who can hold their ground, it's us, right?"

"Yeah, sure, but they know that, they know _us_. Their firstborn kids are getting married, your parents' _only_ kid is getting married. You don't think they're going to pull out the dirtiest tricks they have in their books?"

"I kind of hate that I don't think you're wrong," Lucas sighed. "But can't we just hope they'll surprise us and _not_ be all manipulative about it?"

"Oh, sure, sure…" Maya replied; she was going to stick with apprehension, just in case. "See you tonight?"

"As soon as I can," he vowed.

The whole of his last class that day, Lucas debated whether or not to make up an excuse so he could leave early. If it wasn't that he had to drive Robbie and Ramona back to Austin along with him he might have done it, too. Instead, he stuck it out, but he'd warned his friends and classmates, and as soon as they were dismissed the three headed to the parking lot, got into his car, and started for home. Having been through the madness of pre-wedding preparations not too long ago, his friends had told him to just drop them off at the first bus stop on his route home which would get _them_ home. He had done that, with many thanks, before carrying on his way.

It was to be expected, but still he frowned when he saw that the parents had arrived ahead of him. He just knew Maya would be in there, hoping he'd just get home already.

_Lucas: Knock knock._

Twenty seconds later, the door opened and Maya came bounding down the steps and over to meet him next to his car. He opened his arms and she came over to be held by him.

"How bad is it?" he asked, kissing the top of her head.

"The calm before the storm," she laughed. "They're waiting for you to get in there to start asking questions, but doing a terrible job of being discreet about it. Your mother looks like she's one second away from going through the drawers, notepads…"

"And you left her unsupervised?"

"She's not unsupervised, Sam's in there," she shrugged.

"Sam?" he gave her a look, doubting that her brother had it in him to hold up against Melinda Friar.

"_And _your father. The pro wrangler," Maya teased.

"Fine, alright," Lucas laughed.

"Anyway, dinner's nearly ready, which means…"

"Ready, set, go."

It was just as well that they went back in when they did. They'd gotten one look at Sam, and he looked like a deer in headlights before relief flooded in, seeing that they had returned and he could scurry off back to obscurity. Lucas was soon in the grip of his curious mother. How was school? How was the drive home, not too much traffic?

"Come, come, dinner is ready, you're just on time," she led him to the table, even as he turned his head to catch Maya's eye.

_"Our house, right?"_ he signed, leaving her to try and cover up her smile with her hand. "We really weren't expecting this," he spoke now, to his parents as much as hers. "Just the four of you, too."

"Yes, well, you two aren't kids anymore, are you?" Shawn told him. "So why not a night between adults once in a while?" Maya raised her eyebrow at him, pointing over to Sam. "What, he's in college."

"Wow," she shook her head at her father.

The seven of them were soon sitting to dinner, which started off with mostly standard fare, everyone inquiring about everyone's day, a bit of news, a bit of weather… The whole time, Maya and Lucas kept sneaking looks to one another, wondering when the mask would fall off and it would get all police interrogation-like.

"Hey, do you have that book you were telling me about?" Thomas turned to his son, coming off casual but almost overly so. Lucas looked at him, clueless but trying not to show it. What book? He'd never said anything about a book, why would his father… _Oh_…

"Yeah, it's upstairs… I think," he turned to Maya, hoping she was on the same page. She got there as soon as he looked at her.

"I'll go," she got up and headed toward the stairs.

"Wait, I got it," Lucas stood and followed. He arrived in their room and found her scouring a pile of books on her desk. "There's not really a book…" he whispered.

"Your dad was kind enough to give us a minute, do you want to sell him out?" Maya pointed out. "What about this? He's open, he might like it?" she held up a book.

"Sure, okay."

"Great, now… I think we should just to go in and take charge of the information, yeah? We give them what we want to give them, let them get lost in it, and then whatever we _don't_ want to give we can just sort of… keep out of mind."

"Yeah…" he nodded to himself, then to her. "Yeah, let's do that." They moved to head back, only to stop again, looking at each other with the same thought. _Okay, but what _do_ we want to say to them?_

"We still haven't told them about the venue…" Maya pointed out with a smile. It got a smile right back out of him.

"That could actually take the whole night."

It very nearly did. After having been gone for all of a minute, they came back down and returned to the kitchen with 'the book,' which was passed on to a very believably thankful Thomas Friar. Sam looked ready to climb under the table.

"Maya sent you the picture of the tree, yeah?" Lucas turned to his mother as he took up his fork again. Melinda's face lit up, sharing a smile with her husband.

"Yes, she did," she confirmed.

"A tree?" Katy asked, as lost as Shawn. Sitting at her side, Thomas showed her the picture on his phone. "Oh!" she saw the initials and understood. "Where's this?"

"Sullivan Stables," Maya told her.

"Oh, your mother's ranch," Katy looked to Melinda, who was still smiling as she nodded.

"Proposed to her in front of that tree," Thomas nodded. "I can still see the look on your face," he looked at her. Melinda smiled, taking his hand. "There it is."

"We went out there, Maya, Sam, Cecilia, and I," Lucas told Katy and Shawn. "Maya had never been, and I really looked forward to finally showing her around, to show her everything my grandmother created, and where my mother grew up. It was her idea for us to go though, and it was really… a great, great idea," he turned to his fiancée. Maya nodded along, catching to the fact that he wanted her to be the one to share her idea.

"I just know how much she meant to him, Granny Em," she told their guests. The Friars knew this very well, and they looked to their son, Melinda already growing emotional as she thought of her late mother. "So I suggested…"

"And I agreed…" Lucas tagged in.

"We're going to get married at Sullivan Stables," Maya revealed. As expected, the news was received with a lot of voices coming in at once, emotions running from happy surprises to overjoyed humility. Melinda had been quick to go and hug her son, who nodded over to his fiancée, reminding his mother that it had been her idea. She didn't have to be told twice, hurrying over to where she might hug Maya, too.

"I hope you know… how much this means…" she pulled back, holding her future daughter-in-law's face in her hands.

"More and more every day," Maya promised her. "Why did you never tell him?" she had to ask.

"Tell him what?" Melinda asked.

"The will, the job?" Maya explained. Melinda looked to Lucas, surprised. "Juliet told us. She thought he already knew."

"We just didn't want to put any pressure on him," Melinda shrugged, a simple truth. "We didn't want him to feel like he had to do it, had to do anything except what he wanted." She turned to Lucas. "We were going to tell you, at your graduation, like a… well not a reward, but a…"

"A gift," Thomas provided, and Melinda took it. _From someone who couldn't give it herself._

"So," Marianne's daughter looked to the bride and groom. "Tell us everything."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	56. Their Bonds to Love

**_A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_**

* * *

February 25th 2020

_Chapter 56  
Their Bonds to Love_

"I think that went well," Maya declared, after their guests had left and it was just her and Lucas and Sam and the dogs again.

Well, just her and Lucas really. The dogs were sitting off in their usual spot, quietly enjoying the return of peace, while Sam had gone right to bed. Both Maya and Lucas agreed this was so he could wake up bright and early in the morning and be all set by the time he went off for his Valentine date with Cecilia. It was more than alright though. After the unexpected turn of the night, with their parents visiting, they enjoyed this bit of cleaning up, just the two of them together. They'd had more than one offer for assistance from their mothers and fathers, but all they'd had to do was to point out that this was their house, and if they had been at either of their family homes, they would have been sent packing without touching so much as a dirty dish or utensil. Their parents had already done most of the cooking, and so they had to say good night and go home.

"Do you think we're too hard on them? Always assuming the worst?" Lucas asked as he scrubbed at one of the plates in the sink. Maya was putting the leftovers in containers, salvaging the odd little bite where she saw an opportunity. She looked at him now, chewing. He gave her a look.

"It's not that we're too hard," she insisted, after swallowing, shutting the lid on the container. "We… know them, and we know how they can get, so… we anticipate. Some people would call it prudent."

"Some people would call it making assumptions," he countered.

"You realize they basically ambushed us tonight, right? They wanted to know about the wedding, and they came out here, with barely any warning, so we'd be a bit out of sorts… _We_ controlled the information, remember? Because…"

"We anticipated," he nodded, and she tapped his arm. _Exactly._ "It _did_ go well."

"Yeah, it did. And it was fun. I know we've been keeping it all pretty close this whole time, so we could have everything the way we saw it and wanted it, but… I don't know, I liked seeing them get excited about our wedding…" she swept off to put the leftovers in the refrigerator. She turned back when she thought she heard him chuckle. "What?"

"I like seeing _you_ excited about it, too," he explained.

"Oh…" she smirked, moving back up to him. "They're practically _bored_ with it compared to me," she promised.

"Yeah?" he smiled, leaning in.

"Bursting at the seams over it," she stretched up to kiss him.

X

It would have been so much easier if he could have had the day off, but Lucas would be working at the bookstore until five, so Valentine's Day, for the most part, would have to wait until the evening. As for the part that was not the most, there was morning, the brief time before he had to go to work… also known as breakfast. It didn't take long for both of them to realize there was a small problem in their plans for the morning, their separate plans, which were in fact sort of… mutual.

They had both gotten it in their heads to get up while the other slept, heading down into the kitchen to prepare a surprise breakfast.

It might have led to a bit of a busted surprise if one of them had gotten up and the other had followed not so long after that everything wasn't ready, but instead… Instead, they woke up so close to when the other did that it could have been a photo finish. They'd only had to take one look at the other to realize they had both intended to do the same thing.

"Right…" he blinked.

"Yeah…" she trailed off.

"So what should we do?"

"Well, _not_ double the food, that would just be too much food… I think… Want to rock-paper-scissor it?" she asked, holding her hand up in a 'rock' fist.

"Can I call Huckleberry Law on this one?" he asked back, and she snorted.

"You just made that up, but I get what you're saying, so… Fine, go for it. I'll just have to find a way to make it up to you later." She paused, rethinking it over. "Not like that," she specified. "Not that there's not going to be…"

"I'm just going to go make breakfast," he hooked his thumb back to the door so she'd stop digging that hole for herself.

"Yeah, you go do that," she nodded.

"Okay." After a beat of just standing there, Lucas came back to the bed to kiss her, and Maya watched him with a laugh before letting herself drop back to the mattress.

Breakfast had come and gone, and soon Lucas was off to the bookstore, leaving Maya with the ability to bask in her role as big sister to Sam as he prepared for his first Valentine's Day, the first where he actually had a girlfriend. He and Cecilia had only been dating about a month, and it could have felt almost reasonable for them not to go all out, to maybe just get together and watch a movie or something like that. But he wanted to go for it, do the Valentine experience. Being Sam, of course, he had asked Cecilia, truly and honestly, what she wanted, if she thought it was too early, or if she wanted the big date. She'd chosen the latter.

_Maya: Do you need me to go and help with anything?_

_Cecilia: It's okay. I'm going to Dora's, we're going to get ready together._

Maya knew the girls were friends now, now more than ever, but sometimes there would still be this beat of hesitation in her, wondering if this would be a good idea, what with the mess that had been going on up until a month ago. She could just imagine it, the two of them talking, someone saying something she wasn't supposed to, and then so long happy Valentine… No, that wouldn't happen. This was fine, this was _great_. They were becoming friends, and she hated to say it but Cecilia could do with having more friends in her life. Maybe a part of her was also feeling like this small beat of her being like a big sister/maternal figure to her little brother's girlfriend had meant a lot…

"So… Where are you going?" Maya asked Sam as she watched him work on his hair in the mirror. He gave her a look that suggested he wanted to keep his plans to himself. "Come on," she begged, reaching her hand out 'threateningly' close to his head.

"Don't," he whipped his head back and out of reach.

"You're learning, young grasshopper," she declared. It pushed a smile on to his face, tearing him away from his weakly annoyed face.

"Dad used to say that."

"He did, yeah," Maya smiled now. She didn't know why it pleased her so much to know that she was aware of it, or maybe she did know, and she liked playing on the side of wonder and mystery. "Look, just promise me that, wherever you go, whatever you do…"

"It's not going to be another one of those talks, is it?" Sam stopped her.

"No, I'm pretty sure I got that one deep enough in your head that you couldn't forget it if you tried."

"I can't… and I've tried," he declared, with mock trauma in his voice. She laughed.

"I was going to say," she tapped his arm, like 'hey, listen.' "I just want to know that you two are going to have a good night together. Okay? Can I ask that without being branded the nosy sister?"

"You _are_ nosy," Sam pointed out.

"Do you _want_ me to mess up that hair?" she raised her hand again and he dodged. "Just say yes and this can be over, okay?"

"Yes," he sighed. "I want it to be good, I really do," he went on.

"Now was that so hard?" Maya shrugged before pulling her brother into a hug, which he reciprocated without hesitation. "Love you, Sammy," she kissed his cheek.

"Love you, too."

"Now where's _my_ chocolate?"

They would have played chauffeur to Sam and Cecilia again if necessary, but a solution presented itself, ensuring that the kids would be seen to, while Lucas and Maya could have their own night. This solution was called Rosa Del Vecchio.

"Admit it, you're loving this," Lucas chuckled when he opened the door and found his former co-worker and roommate standing on the doorstep in her best approximation of a chauffeur-like suit, complete with hat and gloves.

"I am totally dropping out of college to become a limo driver," Rosa nodded before turning and heading back down to stand next to her borrowed car for the night. It wasn't a limousine, far from it, but left in her hands it almost seemed like it could have been. Sam was quick to follow, and so they were off to pick up Cecilia.

"How come _we _don't get our own driver?" Maya joked, coming down the stairs to join Lucas.

"I can put on a hat, too, you know?" he smiled, trailing her descent.

"Can I talk like a fancy rich old lady? Can I call you Rupert?" she inquired.

"Rupert?" Lucas laughed.

"First name that popped into my head."

"You can call me whatever you want, in whatever voice you want."

"That is dangerous power to put in my hands, are you sure about that?"

"I'll risk it."

"Rupert, bring the car around!" Maya intoned, which immediately made Lucas burst out laughing. "Now, Rupert, where _are_ your manners?" she 'scolded.'

"Sorry, ma'am," he played.

"On second thought, if you're going to have to call me that, I'd rather be me, and you can just keep that invisible hat of yours," Maya returned to her own voice.

"You mean this one?" Lucas reached to the hat that was not on his head and tipped it.

"That one, yeah. Love that hat."

Getting into his car, they drove off from the house, both of them in the front now that 'Rupert' and his mistress had been dismissed.

"Is it weird I can't stop thinking about my brother?" Maya wondered aloud.

"If it is then that makes two of us," Lucas confessed.

"Okay, then let's say it's not weird," she nodded. "It's just, you know, it's his first one of these, and I know it's not because it's Valentine's Day that a date would be so different than any other, but well…"

"I get it," Lucas nodded. "Remember _our_ first Valentine's?"

"I remember you showed up on my doorstep that morning, with the first one of these," she tipped the single rose in her hand, a tradition he'd carried on from his parents. He'd given her one every year since.

"You had that red dress with the gold," he added.

"I miss that dress sometimes," she sighed.

"Me, too," he smirked when she giggled.

"And we had umbrellas, even though it was a really sunny day, because we weren't going to have it be a repeat of our first date."

"Nope."

"We did have our own driver though, like Sam and Cecilia do, except it was your grandfather. And we went to the museum, like our first date, only there was no rain… and no people either. We had the place to ourselves, thanks to your mom."

"And you, for having her do it," Lucas pointed out.

"My clearest memory is you and me, sitting on that museum floor, looking at 'our' painting for something close to a half hour. And when we left, we went back and had our own sort of outdoor cinema, just you and me and a movie… and a pizza. So, yes, I remember," she smiled. "I remember them all. You want me to tell you what we did the year after that?"

"No, it's alright. I remember it, too," he smiled back. It seemed impossible not to have some kind of a smile on their face at all times.

"So, you can see why I can't help thinking about the two of them out there tonight, not because I thinking something will go wrong, but because I really just hope it all goes so right as it did for us."

Sitting to dinner later on, Maya wanted to hear as many stories as he could give her, of customers coming into the store on last minute Valentine's gift runs. Between this first year here and the four he'd done in Houston, at Coleman's, he had his fair share. Most of them he had already told her on previous years, but she didn't mind hearing them again. They were like Christmas movies you watched every year, even though you'd watched them… well, year after year, after year… They never got old, almost got better each time they were pulled out of the backs of their minds and into the forefront, like old friends.

"I'm having so much trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that the next time we do this you and I will be married…" Lucas admitted, when they'd had to take a pause, laughing too much from one of if not their absolute favorite, from their first year in Houston.

"I know what you mean," Maya told him. "But in a good way."

"Yes, absolutely," he agreed.

"Anything you'd like to do on your last Valentine's as an unwed human?" she inquired, perching her chin on her hand, the picture of curiosity.

"Is there actually anything we won't be able to do anymore once we're married?" Lucas pointed out.

"Other than to say we're not, no, I guess not. Is it possible that marriage changes nothing? Wait until I tell Denise and Ilsa, they'll be thrilled they've been sewing all those…" She stalled at once, trying to hold back words while at the same time feeling like she had to laugh for the intrigued look on his face. "Rewind and forget the last sentence or two, will you?"

"What sentences?" he played innocent, much as he did really want to know what Denise and Ilsa had been sewing now.

"Right," Maya smiled.

"What will matter most to me will be to know that you and I made this vow to one another, in front of one person or one thousand or all the people in the world."

"That's a lot of people, should we just start now?" she whispered. He reached across the table, looping his fingers with hers.

"Five months," he reminded her.

"Not even," she reminded back.

"Four months and… twenty-six days and… fourteen or fifteen hours?" Lucas slowly counted. Maya smiled. She guessed she could hold on until then.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	57. Their Contract on Sisters

February 26th 2020

_Chapter 57  
Their Contract on Sisters_

"Doggy Tix!" Haley Hunter squealed, squatting to hug Trix as the dog happily gave the twenty-month-old girl kisses. It made her laugh, which in turn made her sisters laugh as they looked on.

"No, Haley, it's Trix," Nellie insisted, crawling toward her little sister. "With a R. Trix," she repeated, a couple times more, while the smaller girl just looked back at her and laughed, like it was the funniest thing. Meanwhile, the dog was growing confused as to why her name kept being called, like she didn't know who to attend, surrounded with the Hunter girls and their big sister.

"Doggy Tix!" Haley pointed to the dog, determined on the name.

"Can't argue with that," Maya grinned, scooping up the girl into her arms.

"It's okay, because she's little," Gracie insisted, looking to her twin, still determined that their little sister should be able to say the dog's name correctly. "Did we say the wrong names before, too?" she inquired of Maya.

"Uh, well…" Maya hesitated, debating whether anyone's pride would be harmed in discovering that they, too, needed to practice their ability for speech. "You used to call me 'Ya,' which was adorable. MJ did it, too."

"She does it, too!" Nellie pointed to Haley.

"Yeah, wouldn't have it any other way," Maya promised, kissing the top of her little sister, perched in her lap.

There had been some brief debate, when it had been decided that they would hold the very first of these sister sleepovers since the 'signing' of the contract in the previous year, stating they would have at least one every year from here on out. They had included Haley in what way they could at the time, even if she was still too little to even know or understand what a sleepover was. In all likelihood, they saw themselves including her only once she was about four or five, certainly not when she was still a few months shy of two.

But then when Maya had come to pick up the twins earlier that day, Haley had been teetering after them wherever they went and, for whatever she could or couldn't comprehend, she definitely got the impression that her sisters were going somewhere and she wasn't going with them. So, she'd reacted in what way a small child like her could. She'd started to cry, to holler until she was red in the face, clinging to her dad when he'd picked her up to try and calm her.

Gracie had been the one to turn to Maya and ask why they couldn't just bring Haley along. It was a sister sleepover after all, and she was their sister. Maya didn't have a problem with this, and one look to her parents had found them consenting. The only one left here who had to pronounce herself was Nellie. She looked doubtful for a moment, and Maya could practically read the thought playing in her mind. Haley was 'the baby.' Did they want the baby there, at their super sleepover?

Because she could no more say no to her little sister than the others could, she'd finally agreed, and Haley had been passed into Maya's arms, which appeared to start the girl understanding that the situation had changed. She might be going somewhere, too. By the time they'd gotten _her_ little bag packed, she was only sniffling, her blotchy face regaining its normal tone. And once the four of them had made it to the house she was back on track, running around and laughing as soon as she spotted the dogs. And now here they were.

Already it was the beginning of March, and their first year back in Austin was running away with them. Maya could practically hear Melinda Friar reminding her that 'time flies when you're having fun,' and she couldn't exactly contradict her if she did. The year had been a great one so far, teenage romance hiccups aside. It was still just on this side of peculiar to think of how they continued to delineate years on a fall to summer schedule, as they'd been made to do ever since they'd started going to school as kids. If things kept up as they were going, she doubted this would ever get to change.

She had a fairly good idea as to what was making the time feel as though it had taken an upswing since the start of the year. As far as the year that ran from January to December, this one had started with a decision. They were getting married this year, Lucas and her. Not just this year, this July. That meant they really needed to get the ball rolling as far as their plans went.

Their goal had been for them to essentially be ready by April. They didn't really believe it would be doable, and already they could just see themselves falling behind schedule, but that was fine. April had sort of been a soft target, to keep them focused and moving forward. They were definitely doing that.

The venue was locked, the menu was being seen to by the joint intervention of Rebecca and Chef Isabel, the cake by Ellie Beale at the Houston bakery where Sophie used to work, the invitations had gone out and were being responded to in clusters day by day, the entertainment… The entertainment was getting to feel like it would be half a wedding and half a music festival. TXNY and Weaver Kings aside, Maya had a lot of friends in both Austin and Houston's music scene. Between the shows they had done in clubs, and events, festivals… They had built up those relationships, and Maya had strengthened them with her words, penning a number of songs for most of them. As soon as they'd heard she was getting married, it all came easily that they would want to do something on the day.

The biggest bit of mystery – to the others at least – remained the wedding dress. No one, absolutely no one save for Maya and her two 'co-conspirators' had seen even a sketch of the thing, much less the physical thing they were working together to construct. This was getting to be something of a problem… for some people. They couldn't be blamed for wanting to see it, of course not. This close to the wedding, surely at least one person, from a mother of the bride or groom, or a maid of honor, or any one bridesmaid would have gotten to see it, no? They would have gone to a shop together, Maya would have tried on dresses, they would have seen it…

"Hey…" Maya had turned around to face Lucas, one night, shortly after they'd settled in to bed. "Can I tell you something?" she'd whispered. It wasn't really a question, and neither of them saw it as one.

"Yeah," Lucas had replied, smiling at this bit of secrecy.

"My dress is ready," she'd revealed. He would have been interested no matter what, but here he was unable to be anything but openly curious. He propped himself up on his elbow.

"Yeah?" he smiled.

"Yeah," she laughed. "Denise and Ilsa still look like they want to tweak it, and I get that feeling, I really do, but there's really nothing left to do. More alterations would just be kind of… overkill, or it might ruin things."

"Wouldn't want that," Lucas shook his head, and she did the same. "I wish I could see it… I know I will, eventually, I just mean…"

"I know," she nodded, smiling. Of course he'd want to see it. "Your patience will be rewarded."

"I know my mother will be thrilled to see it, too. I don't know if I should apologize ahead of time…" he mumbled, making Maya laugh.

"She might not be so thrilled," she confessed. "Not about the dress," she was quick to correct, after seeing the look of confusion on Lucas face. "I just… I think I might not show it to anyone before the wedding."

"Really?" he asked, unable to mask his surprise. "No one?"

"No," she shook her head. "That way it's just sort of… equal opportunity surprise," she told him. He looked at her for a beat, before finally pulling her closer, kissing her lightly… She guessed this meant the plan agreed with him.

So far, she had been keeping her choice, though she hadn't specifically explained that this was what she'd be doing. Whenever anyone would ask after the dress, she would try to keep the lying to a minimal, saying they couldn't see it yet. That much was true, wasn't it?

Even her sisters were aware that there was something special about this dress. They'd heard their mom and dad and a few others talk about it, to the point where they clearly had developed some version of it in their heads. That morning, the day of the sleepover, when the twins had asked if they could draw and she'd given them the materials for it, Nellie and Gracie had started to draw what looked to Maya like some kind of princess or fairy godmother. At six and a half, the two of them were becoming just a bit better at drawing. They might not have been on a level with their big sister, but they had a vivid imagination and they expressed it there on the paper.

"Who's that?" Maya asked, when they were both done and came to show her.

"That's you!" they'd both declared, so close to one another as to sound like a voice and an echo.

"Me?" Maya smiled, looking from one sheet to the other.

"When you get married," Gracie provided an explanation.

"Oh!" she understood now.

The doorbell rang, all of seconds later. The twins took off at once, followed by the dogs. Maya called after them to wait for her to be there before they could open the door. With Haley in her arms, Maya had moved from the kitchen to join her little sisters, making a very strong impression of the dogs whenever there were visitors, as shown by the pups at their feet. At least they didn't have to long to wait to be allowed to open the door. One look through the window had confirmed it was exactly who she'd assumed it would be, who they had been waiting on since they'd arrived here not two hours ago.

"It's okay, go ahead," Maya had told the twins, and the words were barely out of her mouth that the girls had hurried to do as told, like they were afraid she would change her mind.

The rush of giddiness that followed was kind of everything Maya could have asked for. She watched her sisters… all of her sisters… as they very nearly collided with one another.

There was just no way that any of this would have gotten to happen if she didn't get everyone together on this. The moment she'd tell the twins, their first question would be 'All of us?' and she would need to be ready to say yes. It hadn't even ended up being a question so much as a statement. All of us. So, when the matter of Haley's being here or not had happened earlier today, it had been on that same statement that she'd become part of the group. _All of us means all, the little and those who won't believe they count._

"It was so much fun!" Eliza would tell the twins. "We got to go on the plane by ourselves," she revealed, indicating herself, and Cara, and Emma Lane. "Well, there was the lady from the plane who looked after us, but that was it."

"Woah…" Nellie and Gracie intoned as one.

"Welcome, ladies," Maya stepped up now, setting Haley down with a smile. "Welcome to Sleepster 2026!"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	58. Their Contract on a Sleepover

February 27th 2020

_Chapter 58  
Their Contract on a Sleepover_

They had been preparing for this, for several weeks now. It wasn't easy to figure out a right time to send the kids out of Tucson, factoring in that they were all in school, and also to account for when Maya and Lucas would be in the ability to host them. But then the kids had a four-day weekend ahead of them, which fell in a favorable time for their sister, and so it had been arranged. The unaccompanied minors had been put on a plane in Tucson and picked up by Lucas and Sam in Austin, the girls dropped off at the house for their 'Sleepster,' while the boys were to be taken off to adventures of their own.

"Maya, look!" Wyatt came running for his sister when she walked out to say hello to him and Teddy Lane. He held out a small plane, about six inches long, identified with the airline and everything. Knowing her little brother's love for his 'ship' back home, this leap to airplanes did not surprise her.

"Wow, is that the one you guys flew on?" she asked, taking it when he offered it to her.

"Yeah! The lady gave it to me. Her name is Jodie, she's nice."

"Well, thank you, Jodie," Maya made like she intended to keep the plane, which resulted in the boy flinching like he was tempted to reach for it back but knew enough to doubt whether this was a genuine 'theft.' "Should I keep it safe here while you guys are out doing whatever it is you're going to be doing?" Her brother smiled at once.

"Okay," he nodded.

"Okay," she laughed. "Hugs now?" She got a good one, a real _oof!_ breath taker, as Wyatt threw his arms around her. "There it is," she spoke, exaggerating her breathlessness and making him laugh. He soon let go, hurrying over to Sam again, thrilled as he was to be with his big brother again. This left Maya able to go and say hello to Teddy. "You all got one?" she guessed, holding up the toy plane.

"Yeah," Teddy nodded. "I already told him he could have mine… So did the others."

"The scamp's got five planes and he won't give me one?" Maya 'gasped.'

After the boys had gone away again, she returned into the house to find what her sisters were getting up to. So far, everyone was fairly at ease. The story of the flight from Tucson was keeping the twins entertained, while Haley was being seen to by Cara, her biggest little sister getting a kick out of making her littlest one laugh. Cara had vowed, when it had become official that they were all coming, that she would help Maya keep an eye on all the others, being that she was the oldest next to her. She was the oldest in the house now that Sam was in college, and she took the role very seriously, especially when she'd be babysitting Eliza and Wyatt, and sometimes Emma as well.

Emma Lane looked at her when she came back into the house, and she just looked so happy to be here… to be included as one of Maya's sisters. It hadn't even required a second moment's thought, to be honest. When she'd made the call to Abigail, her pitch for the trip involved all three girls here, and both boys, too, of course. James and the kids were just part of their unit now. There had been rumblings of their trying to figure out a way that they'd all move in together, though as far as Maya knew they hadn't made up their minds yet as to who would move in with whom.

"Alright, the boys have gone, now it's just us," Maya informed the group, setting Wyatt's plane on a shelf out of reach from Haley and the dogs. "What do you all want to…"

"Can we see your dress?" Eliza cut in at once, causing an eruption of curious voices even as she left her host momentarily speechless.

"My dress…"

"For the wedding," Emma chimed in, tagging from her best friend.

"Yes, I figured that was the one," Maya told her. "I just…"

"I want to see it!" Nellie declared, never having met a plea she didn't support.

"I want to see it, too," Gracie put in, quieter as ever.

"Well, it's not…" Maya blinked, trying to come up with a valid response, knowing only one of those would do against this lot.

"Is it ready?" Cara asked, and Maya couldn't say for sure if this was meant to be an out that she was giving her, but she took it.

"Yeah, no, it's not, sorry," she told Cara and the others, who all looked as disappointed as a guilt trip had the power to make you feel rotten. "But, you know what," she thought of something quick, "We need to talk about _your_ dresses." Oh, she had them now.

"Ours?" Eliza asked.

"Of course, yours. You guys are all going to be there, yeah? And you have to be in the wedding, which means people have to know that you are." The girls looked to one another.

"What do we do?" Nellie asked.

"Well…" Maya came and knelt and then sat on the ground with the twins, looking to them and the girls on the couch. There were a lot of them, but that wasn't about to stop her including them all if she could. "The two of you would look great coming down the aisle ahead of me as flower girls," she told Nellie and Gracie. "You know, the same way you did at Zay and Nadine's wedding?"

"Yeah!" Nellie was all smiles now. She had _loved_ being a flower girl. "I'll do even better this time, because I'm going to be almost seven," she declared with pride.

"You keep getting older, don't you?" Maya chuckled. "What about you, Mouse Mouse?" she looked to Gracie. "You want to do that again, too?" Gracie's response was silent but definitive, giving a spirited nod.

"We need to practice," Nellie turned to her twin, then repeated it again to Maya.

"I don't have any flower petals right now," Maya told her. "But I'm sure we can come up with something."

"What about us?" Eliza asked.

"Oh, now you…" Maya looked up to the trio – and Haley – on the couch.

Narrowing down the bridesmaids already had been a difficulty, though only the kind of difficulty one might call 'a good problem to have.' She had so many girl friends to think about, to the point where she didn't know how she was supposed to decide who would and would not be a bridesmaid, because how many could she realistically have?

The contenders… Well, Riley was her maid of honor, and that was all, but after that, who did she have? Her bandmates, current and former… Nadine, Isadora, Rosa, Kayla, Willow. Her former roommates, Sophie and Chiara. And Rebecca, couldn't leave out Rebecca. Already, if she restricted it to what she felt were the core of her close girl friends, that was nine bridesmaids. And now she had her three young sisters to think about. She _had_ been thinking about them. Some of the others, if she didn't pick them, for some valid reason, they would understand a whole lot better than the girls would, at their age. She didn't want them feeling left out. A dozen bridesmaids, while a nice sort of number, did feel on the excessive side.

Of all the people she might have consulted on this, she'd ended up figuring it out on a call with Willow. She was due to give birth to baby Obi number three in just a couple of months now, another boy to follow the soon to be big brother, Sekani. After having been pregnant, as both she and Maya had previously stated, for the better part of the last few years, it finally got to feel like she'd had enough and would be glad to be out of that whole cycle once this last baby was born. With three kids four years and under, one of them all of two months, by the time the wedding rolled around, Willow was respectfully taking herself out of the running for bridesmaid.

"Alright, well that's one less… It'd all be so much easier to make cuts if people kept doing it themselves…"

"Too many people?" Willow had laughed.

"It _was_ a dozen, now I've got eleven… What's a good number?"

"Whatever number works for you, Maya, come on, it's _your_ wedding. And we're all going to be there anyway, so might as well do what you want."

"Alright, that's… Yeah, that makes sense," she'd nodded to herself, feeling just a bit of that weight lifted. "Okay but now I'm down to eleven, and I did kind of like that even dozen."

"I'm sure there's someone else and you're just not seeing it yet."

As of yet, she had not had this supposed revelation over who she might call up as her twelfth bridesmaid, and it was starting to give her anxiety like she was forgetting someone and it was about to smack her in the face it was so obvious.

It couldn't be Leona, unfortunately. Even before she'd started to consider who she would have as her bridesmaids, she had told her former co-worker about her wedding date and the girl's face had fallen at once. She was to spend the summer abroad, an opportunity she couldn't turn down. Maya had understood, and seeing how much it pained her friend that she wouldn't be able to make it was sign enough that she cared.

Whoever this twelfth would be, for the time being she had three of them right here with her, and it was high time that they knew.

"Right, so, I was hoping that you all would be part of my bridesmaids," she told Cara, Eliza, and Emma. Their responses fell along the line of giddiness, and surprise, and complete shock.

"Me, too?" Emma Lane asked.

"Yeah, you, too," Maya tapped the girl's leg. "If you want to, I mean…"

The way the girl rushed down to hug her, in a flash, finally got Maya to figure out who she'd been missing. _Shae_… She had to ask Shae, or… _Oh, Franny! _How had she forgotten… Oh, now this might have been too much. Here she'd thought the problem was solved, but now… For the time being, it couldn't be solved, not today. She would have to focus on what was important now. She would just hug the Lane girl, which led her to doing the same with Eliza, and with Cara, and the twins… Looking to all of her sisters' giddy faces, she felt once again just so thankful to even have them in her life.

"Okay, troops," she breathed, brushing tears from the corner of her eyes. "Should we go look at dresses for everyone or should we practice what we're all going to do?"

The answers flew at her from all around, and they varied. Some preferred doing one thing first, others wanted another. After sorting everyone out, she could sort of discern that it was a split vote. Nellie and Cara wanted to look at the dresses, Eliza and Emma wanted to know what being a bridesmaid meant, and Gracie sat there with a look on her face that said 'I'll do whatever everyone else does.' Haley played with Cara's braid.

"Look, we're going to do both, it's just about deciding what we do first. And we're not going anywhere, just looking on the computer for the dresses, yeah? So what should we do?" There was silence now, as the girls considered their options. Finally, Gracie raised her hand. "Yes, Mouse?"

"Well, I just thought… If we know what our dress is going to look like, maybe we can practice better after?" she quietly explained. Maya grinned. That was her Mouse Mouse, always thinking along even when everyone else was talking over one another.

"That sounds fair," Maya nodded. "Everyone on board?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	59. Their Contract on the Night

February 28th 2020

_Chapter 59  
Their Contract on the Night_

When the whole Sleepster plan had started to come together, Lucas had foreseen his part in the event even before Maya ever did. Still, he waited until she got there by herself: What about the boys? Sure, the whole thing was meant to be a get together for the various clusters of Maya and her sisters, but were they honestly going to have Cara, Eliza, and Emma flown out, and then leave Wyatt and Teddy back in Tucson, or MJ at home to miss out on some fun? Absolutely not. So when Maya had finally gasped, and stopped, and turned to him asking…

"What about the boys?"

… his answer had been ready and soon dispensed.

"I'll take them."

With the girls having dominion on the house, both Lucas and Sam were left to lock down a venue of sorts, for them to go and take Maya's other brothers. He could have taken them to his parents, knowing they would have been most welcome, by his mother especially, but then he'd had an idea. It was a bit out there, all things considered, but they had all gotten to a point where they could feel confident in asking.

He had reached out to Sophie, back in Houston, casually floating the idea and asking if she believed her mother would be willing to have Sam, Wyatt, Teddy, MJ, and him over at the house. The place was the closest thing to a hotel they could ask for, with the pool, and the mini theater, and the grounds out back…

"She's out of the country at the moment, won't be back until May, so the house is close," Sophie told him, momentarily deflating his plans. "But I can get it open for you."

The boys had moved from Sparkles the minivan – their ride from the airport – on to Lucas' car, and off they'd gone toward the Zvolensky house. As they got nearer, and the houses only started getting more impressive, Lucas could see the boys grow a bit more saucer-eyed, which inevitably amused him.

"This is where Sophie grew up?" Sam asked, blinking. He knew her pretty well by now, but clearly he had no idea she came from this.

"We're staying here?" Teddy was in disbelief.

"Yes, she did, and yes, we are. Everyone's going to be careful, right?" Lucas asked the passengers, receiving a resounding promise for best behavior.

They were received by the woman who looked after the place while Mrs. Zvolensky was away. At first glance, she'd seemed like one of those strict people who didn't like children because they were sticky and loud. But as she led them into the house and up to the guest rooms designated for them, they came around to the belief that while her exterior came off as cold stone, her interior was nothing but gooey caramel. It dawned on Lucas now that this must have been Mrs. Carlton, who had been hired on, years ago, after Sophie's father had passed away, to help look after the traumatized girl, while her equally traumatized mother attempted to cope and recover from the loss.

"Right this way now, gentlemen, right this way," she led them along, having taken the little ones by the hand, MJ on one side and Wyatt on the other.

"What's your name?" MJ asked her as they climbed the stairs.

"You may call me Angela," Mrs. Carlton informed him. MJ's eyes went wide.

"You're an angel?" he whispered, and the stone melted just so, into a smile.

"Maybe I am. Now let's keep that between us, shall we?" she spoke in a half whisper. MJ nodded quietly.

The boys were led to their rooms. Lucas had one, which he would share with MJ. Teddy had one of his own. Sam, to no one's surprise, shared his with his younger brother, Wyatt.

"I want to go swim in the pool!" the youngest Hart pleaded, dashing into Lucas and MJ's room with his trunks in hand. "Sam says there's a pool, can we go?"

Minutes later, the boys climbed down the stairs, ready for a bit of swimming. They passed Mrs. Carlton, who sat in the library, reading a book, and carried on down into the basement, where the interior pool had been prepared for them as well. Before they'd come down, as the little boys were changing out of their clothes and into their swimsuits, Lucas had pulled Sam and Teddy aside, so the three of them might devise a course of action. They would ensure that both MJ and Wyatt would always have someone near them, so no one was harmed in any way. It would be a sort of rotating lifeguard service which would also allow the three of them freedom to swim around every now and then.

"Alright, you ready?" Lucas looked up to where MJ Hunter stood near the edge of the pool, in his floaties, looking very much like he was reconsidering his previous desire to go for a jump. He looked to Lucas now with those wide eyes and he did not look ready at all.

"Uh-huh…"

"You sure? You don't have to if you don't want to," Lucas promised.

"MJ, come on!" Wyatt called out, presently splashing up a storm as he paddled his way around, while both Sam and Teddy tried to dodge the spray.

"Only if you want to, okay, Matty?" Lucas reasserted this, not wanting him to be pushed into anything, even if, in all likelihood, he would be fine once he did it for the first time.

MJ looked at him again, thought long and hard. Finally, he walked around to the corner with the steps leading into the water, where he climbed down, holding to the rail, before swimming over to Lucas, who caught him with a smile.

"Don't want to jump anymore," the boy declared.

"That's fine," Lucas nodded. "You're a pretty good swimmer, you know that?"

"I know," MJ nodded confidently, making his big brother laugh.

When the boys had had their fill of the water – or in all likelihood, when they were so hungry for a snack that they decided they were done swimming for now – they returned upstairs. Having predicted the need, Mrs. Carlton had set them up with something to eat. The boys dropped on this at once, and Lucas spent several minutes ensuring that Wyatt Hart and MJ Hunter weren't about to stuff their faces into oblivion.

While this was all going on, he could sort of see the way Teddy and Sam were talking in vaguely hushed tones in their corner of the kitchen table. It looked to Lucas as though Teddy was relaying something on to Sam, who received the information with some surprise.

"Everything alright?" he went over to talk with them, once the little boys seemed to have gotten a handle on things. The older boys turned to him, then to each other, like they were debating whether or not to tell him anything.

"I overheard my dad talking on the phone, while I was packing to come here," Teddy told Lucas. "I think they're waiting until they come down here the day after tomorrow to take us home, to tell us when we're all together."

"Tell you what?" Lucas automatically asked.

"They're engaged. My mom and Mr. Lane," Sam revealed. Lucas was surprised, and it showed on his face at once.

"Wow, I mean…" he looked from one boy to the other. He was almost sure that they'd be okay with this. They mutually got along with the parent that wasn't theirs, same with the other kids who would become their siblings in a more official capacity… But there was still the matter of those parents they had lost, Sam's father, Teddy's mother… Would the marriage feel like too much all of a sudden?

"Relax, this is a good thing," Sam tapped his arm like he'd sensed the uncertainty.

"Yeah, yes, absolutely," Lucas nodded.

"Dude, you looked like you couldn't breathe," Teddy chuckled.

"I'm guessing no one else knows yet? The girls?"

"No," Teddy confirmed. "I wanted to tell Sam first, now we're not sure if we should tell the others or let them be surprised."

"Right," Lucas replied. He could see why it would be a tough call to make. Did they feel like they needed to prepare the other kids, in case they didn't react so well? Did they want to preserve the surprise and let Abigail and James tell their news with as little foreknowledge as possible? "And you're sure none of the others know either?"

"Emma doesn't know, I'm sure," Teddy scratched at his neck, his way of saying that the Hart kids _may_ have overheard something, too, but if they did then they didn't say anything to him.

"We thought maybe if we told Maya, she could tell if they know, but if we say it then she'll probably think we're worried or we don't want it," Sam followed.

"Yeah, I can see that," Lucas agreed. "So maybe I should do it," he offered after a moment. "If that's okay with you guys."

_Lucas: Need to ask you something real quick._

"You're not plotting to pull off any pranks today, are you, Huckleberry?" Maya asked when he answered her call. He smiled.

"Well I wasn't going to, until you mentioned it."

"Assuming that's not the real reason you called, what's up? Everything okay at Casa Z?"

"Oh, yeah, it's snacks and cannonballs over here. Not in that order, I swear," he replied. "But, hey, are you with the girls now?"

"Sort of. They're all sitting around the laptop right now, looking at bridesmaids' dresses, so I stepped back a bit to call you. Do you need me to get out of earshot, what's going on?" The longer he would be vague about this, the more opportunities he would be opening for her to let her mind wander, and now all he could think about was 'What if _she_ doesn't take it well?' He had no choice though, and the sooner it was out there…

"I overheard Sam talking with Teddy, who overheard his dad talking about how he and Abigail were possibly going to announce their engagement when they come to get the kids this Sunday." It was the closest thing to the absolute truth he could say while keeping his word to the boys at the same time.

Maya didn't respond right away, which he guessed was to be expected, upon hearing the news. Lucas turned his head, finding Sam and Teddy 'casually' spying from nearby.

_"Don't just stand there, go see what the little ones are doing," _he signed to Sam, who tapped Teddy's arm and led him off to find MJ and Wyatt. The last thing they needed was for them to make a mess here.

"I kind of figured that was where they were headed, it's still… wow," Maya finally replied.

"Look, I have no idea if any of the girls are aware right now either, I just figured maybe a heads up could be useful," Lucas told her.

"Good call," she agreed. "Thanks for letting me know."

"Sure," he told her, trying not to sound like he wanted to know if _she _was okay.

"I can _feel_ your brow creasing from here," she warned, making him chuckle. "Go have fun already, Huckleberry. I got this."

"Figured you would," he smiled. "See you tomorrow."

"Missing you tonight, Big Spoon."

"Same to you, Little Spoon."

Returning to the kitchen, Lucas came upon the four boys, all of them to be his brothers in law in a matter of months, all crowded at the windows to look at the grounds beyond. They all wanted to go out and play. Seeing as they had just been eating and he did _not_ look forward to any incidents having to be cleaned up by Mrs. Carlton, Lucas first directed them all to go and get dressed for outdoors, as they were all still in post-swimming towels and robes. Off they went, these brothers of his, while he consulted Mrs. Carlton on ideas for 'digestive activities.'

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	60. Their Contract on Connection

February 29th 2020

_Chapter 60  
Their Contract on Connection_

By the time they had left their adventures in dress shopping, Maya knew her sisters would be happy to hear that part of the reason why Abigail and James were coming to collect them in Austin on Sunday was so that they could all go shopping for said dresses together, while they were all in the same place. It would have been just as easy for her Tucson sisters to do this back home, yes, but Abigail had wanted to enable them to share in this experience. Maya was eternally grateful to her for that chance. She also fully expected this to turn into some kind of attempt to get her to show them _her_ dress, but she wasn't going to give in on that one.

Of course, now she was discovering that some of them might be in the market for not one but _two_ dresses. Abigail and James were getting married…

She didn't have any details, only the fact that it _was_ happening, according to Teddy, but even for all that… She could only be happy for the two of them. After the losses they had both suffered, the fact that they had found one another was truly just wonderful. She wished them nothing but the best.

Maya was glad that Lucas had told her about it though. As much as she felt well-adjusted to the news, she saw the need just as he did to check in with her young siblings, to see how they'd do with it. Maybe they would do just fine, but maybe they wouldn't. Everything she had seen of them after their father had passed away… Cara's fights, Eliza's silence, Wyatt's clinginess… She didn't want to outright say 'hey, did you hear, Abigail and James are getting married!' If she could preserve the surprise, that would be better, especially if it would make them happy. All she could do for now was keep attentive.

"So, did we pick a color yet?" she asked, as the group headed down the stairs. She had Haley in her arms, her littlest sister sound asleep and holding on to her.

"Everyone wants a different one," Cara informed her. "I want blue, Eliza wants red, and Emma green, then Nellie wants yellow and Gracie purple."

"Wow, so literally a different color for everyone," Maya chuckled. The truth of the matter was, even if she picked one color and told them all to get a dress in that color, even if it hadn't been the one they had originally wanted, they would be happy anyway. That was one way of going at it… She had another one. "Okay then," she nodded.

"Okay what?" Eliza asked.

"Okay, do it, wear your colors," Maya told them, very nearly causing a collision on the stairs. The peril to many little limb had been stopped thanks to Cara, at the head of the pack. Once the squealing had ceased, ending in Haley's waking up in distress, they'd all looked up to their big sister. "You okay?" Maya asked, trying not to laugh.

"I can have my yellow dress?" Nellie asked, hopeful.

"Yeah," Maya let that laugh out now. "My Sunny in yellow."

The collected sisters were very much on the upbeat side as they continued down the stairs and ended up back in the kitchen. They still had the practice portion of their plans to get to, but for now it getting on toward dinner time, and they had a choice to make: ordering or cooking. It had been a quick debate. They wanted to make something. Taking a page out of Chiara Mantovani's book, Maya decided to show them to make pasta. It was sort of a go-to, just as she'd done once when… _Oh…_ She had a thought now, and with a smile she told the girls to go and wash their hands before they started.

"Cara, can you get them all covered with something?" Maya asked her sister, thinking they really needed to equip themselves with smocks or aprons…

_Maya: If you're free tonight, would you like to come over for dinner? There's some people here you should meet._

Trusting in the fact that it would take some time just to get the girls ready, _and_ to decide what kind of pasta they would make, Maya was pleased to find that they were only just about to start when the doorbell rang.

"Still won't use her key…" Maya mumbled to herself as she went to answer the door.

"Who's that?" Nellie asked, moving after her big sister, which led Gracie to follow, and then one by one the rest of the group, too.

When the door opened, there stood Cecilia, startled upon finding so many faces staring back at her.

"H-hi…" she blinked, looking to Maya with curious confusion. Maya could just see the thoughts working themselves out in her mind. She knew the twins – who knew her, too, and were thrilled to see her – and she knew Haley – ditto – but then there were three other girls… and one of them looked like a younger Maya, another bore a strong resemblance as well, while also appearing to be the same age as the black girl at her side. Therefore… "You're… Sam's other sisters?" she asked, looking to Cara, Eliza, and Emma.

"Is that his girlfriend?" Eliza whispered – poorly – tugging at Maya's arm.

"Okay, come on in, this is just weird now," Maya waved their new guest into the house and shut the door after her. "Everyone, this is Cecilia Winstead-Jones," she made the introduction. The trio out of Tucson smiled at once. That was definitely their brother's girlfriend. "Cecilia, you know my sisters here, here, and here," Maya indicated Haley with a nod to the girl perched in her arm and the twins with a tap to the top of either of their heads. "Meet my sisters there, there, and there, or as they're more commonly known, Cara and Eliza Hart and Emma Lane.

Some shy hellos were exchanged, before the 'awkwardness' of the unexpected meeting was broken, of all people, by Gracie. She loved Cecilia very much, ever since they'd met, by chance, one afternoon as the twins had been coming from ballet class. Cecilia had told her how she used to do ballet, too, so much in fact that, a few years prior, she had been cast and performed with a touring company of the Nutcracker. Neither Maya nor Lucas had known about this, though by the look of him Sam clearly had. The Nutcracker had been Gracie's introduction to ballet, the reason she'd been taking lessons for over two years now.

"We're making pasta, want to help?" she asked Cecilia.

Soon, the group was reconvened to the kitchen, where they kicked off their session of pasta making. To be honest, Maya had been just a bit concerned as to what line of questioning her Tucson sisters would employ upon meeting Sam's girlfriend. They were sweet girls, but they could be overly direct about some things, and the last thing Maya wanted was for them to start interrogating Cecilia about things she might not have been at ease discussing. They'd known the girl for nearly half a year already, and she was sure they'd only scratched the surface on a lot of what made Cecilia who she was.

"Hey, we're good, yeah?" Maya quietly asked her, when the opportunity came up. "I'm sorry I just sprang this on you, I just thought…"

"It's okay," Cecilia nodded with a smile. "Really. I was hoping I'd get to meet them, and the boys…"

"Oh, they're in the city, you can meet them over the weekend," Maya revealed. "And they've been okay with you?" she tipped her head to where her Tucson sisters were making gnocchi like they wanted to see who could do the most and the most perfectly shaped.

"Yeah, of course," Cecilia blinked, like she didn't see why they would be any other way. "Cara said I was 'definitely going to visit in Tucson soon.' I don't know what that means, but whatever it is, that's a good thing, right?"

"That… Yeah, it's a great thing, uh… Can you excuse me for a second?" Maya carefully stepped back, wiping her hands before approaching the girls, passing the twins. Nellie would roll, and Gracie would line up the finished product with the others they'd already made, carefully reshaping when she thought there was something out of shape. "Sorry to interrupt the competition," she told Cara and the others. "Need to talk for a minute."

They went into the living room, where the dogs were lounging on the couch.

"Right, so… You mentioned something to Cecilia about her maybe going to Tucson?" Maya asked Cara. The thirteen-year-old had little to no poker face. It was amazing to look at her sometimes, her mini-me. She was the same age she'd been when she moved out from New York, and it really was like looking into a… slightly altered picture of herself at the time. "This might not have anything to do with your mom and James, would it?"

"How do you know?" Cara gasped.

"How do _you_ know?" Maya cut in, her big sister status apparently enough to gain priority on having that question answered.

"I was there when he asked her… sort of. I was supposed to be in bed, but I was thirsty, and I went downstairs. I was trying to be discreet, because I could hear them talking, and then when I looked to see if they could see me, he was, like, on one knee and everything. I didn't know what to do, so I ran back upstairs as quiet as I could. Mom didn't say anything about it the next morning, so I didn't say anything either."

"Okay…" Maya nodded. "You didn't tell anyone? Eliza? Emma?" Cara shook her head. "Are you okay about it?" She knew it had been hard on her sister to adjust to her mother dating again, moving on from their father, but that was a while ago now, and she got along great with James…

"Yeah, I think so," Cara replied. "We kind of figured it was going to happen sooner or later, with them wanting to move in together. I think they should be moving in with us, I mean there's more of us than there are of them, and we just moved in not that long ago, I don't want to have to pack everything all over again… Emma can stay in mine and Eliza's room, they can get bunk beds like they wanted, and Teddy can have Sam's old room. It's not like he's going to move back in when he finished college."

"Got it all figured out, huh?" Maya smiled.

"It was weird in the beginning, but now it's just normal," Cara shrugged. "We all just want the same thing. They want us to be happy, and we want them to be happy, too. We're good now, so… they should get to be good, too, together."

"Makes sense to me."

"Can I go back now? I know they probably kept going without me…"

"Go, get it done," Maya offered a fist and got it bumped before her little sister jogged back to the kitchen.

Returning there as well, Maya looked to the girls, her sisters, working on their gnocchi. Cecilia was right there with them, right where she belonged. It was sort of early to think of it like 'she and Sam are together, so that sort of makes her my sister,' but one way or another, ever since the girl had come into their lives that was exactly what she'd felt like to Maya, like a little sister. Her being here tonight felt just as fitting.

"Hey, Cecilia, you want to stick around tonight?" she asked, and the girl looked up, even as Gracie voiced a great desire for her to do so.

"I, uh… I'll check with my dad," she replied, smiling. "Thanks."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	61. Their Contract on Truth

March 1st 2020

_Chapter 61  
Their Contract on Truth_

"Did she write back? What did she say? Did she talk to them?" Sam asked as they sat to dinner at the Zvolensky house.

After they had gotten to play outside for a while, they had all returned to the house, where Mrs. Carlton requested that they all went and got cleaned up ahead of dinner, which she had prepared for them. None of them would dare suggest in any way that she didn't need to do it, and that they would have been satisfied to just order a pizza or something. They didn't think she was going to eat them or anything, but if the lady wanted to cook for them, who were they to say no? They would have offered to help, if they weren't sure she would have found _that_ more insulting than anything, suggesting she couldn't do it on her own and with great skill.

"She didn't, not yet, but you need to relax, okay?" Lucas told his brother.

"No, I know, I do, it's just…" Sam awkwardly replied.

"It's your sisters, I get it," Lucas assured him. He knew how much being far from them could be difficult at times, especially when there was anything going on where he thought they could have needed him to be there and he wasn't. Back in December, they'd heard all about how Cara had gotten asked out by a boy in her class, and she'd said yes and gone out with him. It hadn't been a disaster but it hadn't been good either, and she'd been upset, afraid that it would make things weird back at school. Sam had gone around for days looking like he was one update away from trying to buy a plane ticket back to Arizona so he could be with his little sister.

To make matters worse, Lucas' phone had buzzed with an incoming text just as Mrs. Carlton was coming with dinner. She'd made him put it away, on penalty of having it taken away if he tried to take it out again during dinner. They could have tried to explain, but they doubted it would have made much of a difference. So the phone, and its message, was put away for the time of the meal. Sam looked like he was this close to just wolfing down everything on his plate as quickly as possible so he might be excused and allowed to take the phone with him. Lucas shook his head at him. It wasn't going to work and they both knew it.

"Lucas!" MJ whispered, sitting at his side.

"Yeah, buddy?" Lucas turned to him. The boy had his hands set on his knees, sitting up straight in his chair and looking just a bit uneasy. Well, maybe a lot uneasy.

"Can I move?"

"Of course you can, why wouldn't you?" In response, MJ pointed in the direction of Mrs. Carlton, looking like he was afraid she'd turn around and notice. "Right. You know, she used to look after Sophie when she was about your age." MJ smiled at this, momentarily forgetting his concerns. He knew Sophie, he loved Sophie. She might have been one more sister to him, the way he would run for her when she was around. That much was true for a lot of Maya and Lucas' friends, the ones who'd lived at the house in Houston especially, but Sophie was a special case. She claimed it might have had to do with her red hair… and the fact that she was a police officer. That practically made her a super hero in his book.

"Yes, I did," the woman's voice made MJ jump. It might have made Lucas flinch just a bit, too. They both looked to find she was standing nearby, filling plates. "She used to startle as well," she told MJ as she loaded his plate. He kept staring up at her, mystified. When he earned himself a small smile from the gray-haired woman, he blinked, like she no longer fit the image he had conjured in his four-year-old head. Was she actually not scary? "She was no taller than you are now, and she would hide all the time."

"Like hide and seek?" MJ asked, perking up a bit.

"Something like that, only she did not wish to be found. And in a house like this, the places to hide were not lacking."

Looking around the table, Lucas could see how Sam and Teddy understood what this meant, while the little boys just assumed Sophie was really good at hide and seek. They understood it had been _her_ reaction to losing a parent, something those two had both experienced. Her father had been taken from her so suddenly, there had been no way of preparing her like _they_ had been, with Mr. Hart and Mrs. Lane's illnesses. He'd been there in the morning, and he'd never come home in the evening. How was a four-year-old supposed to understand that?

"I did find her though, sooner or later, every time," Mrs. Carlton went on. "I think it reassured her in the end, that someone came and found her."

"She speaks very highly of you," Lucas told her as she finished her service. It produced the most open of smiles they'd yet to see on the old woman.

Mrs. Carlton left the boys to their dinner, disappearing off to her own home, a small house adjacent to the Zvolenskys'. She was a fantastic cook, no doubt to it. Lucas had heard as much from Sophie, and now that he'd had the food he could almost say that Sophie had undersold the woman. And if dinner was good, dessert was off the charts. MJ and Wyatt had been fans especially, and it was left to the others to keep them from making themselves sick from excess.

They ended up in the home theater once dinner was well and officially over, which meant that Lucas' phone and any potential messages back from Maya were now free to be looked after. Sam and Teddy were both looking this close to prying it out of his hands if he didn't hurry up, so he looked.

_Maya: Don't believe Eliza and Emma know, but Cara does. She saw the proposal. She's talking about rooms and bunk beds, I think she's okay with everything._

Lucas showed the boys the message.

"So, are we good?" he asked them. "Are we relaxing now?"

"I'm relaxed, he's the one who kept making the ground shake from bouncing his knee back there," Teddy gestured back toward the kitchen. Sam looked like he wanted to protest but, on second thought, had to concede that Teddy had a point.

"Sorry," he mumbled. "I'll let it go, I swear." Lucas smiled, giving his shoulder a tap.

"Alright, come on, we gotta pick a movie."

"They have a real popcorn machine?" Teddy stared in awe.

"Check out the seats," Sam told him, pointing to where MJ and Wyatt were already running around, trying to decide where they were going to sit.

"Dude, we gotta lock up that candy shelf before they see it," Teddy whispered.

"After we raid it a bit?" Sam guessed.

"How big are your pockets?" Teddy pulled him toward the candy. Lucas chuckled, joining the little boys to keep them occupied before hitting a sugar high. Of course, the others would share, but they didn't need to know just how much of it was stocked in the room ahead of their visit.

Keeping the presence of all the candy was only tricky if you didn't know how to handle MJ and Wyatt, but then these were their brothers, and they'd had practice. The two of them were set right up front, with their very own reasonable stash of candy, and once the movie started they were in their own world, while the others had the row behind them, with their own stash at their disposal. Teddy revealed himself a pro at sending M&M's flying high in the air before catching them with his mouth, which made Sam laugh, though less so when he tried and nearly vaulted out of his seat and failing to catch his own target. The challenge extended to Lucas, he revealed he had some tricks of his own.

"How do you even…" Sam blinked.

"Before your sister and Nadine came along, it was just me and Zay and Dylan and Asher," Lucas shrugged. "There was a lot of 'I bet you can't…' going on."

"Be cool!" Teddy muttered, and the candy disappeared in a flash, just before the faces of Wyatt and MJ appeared over the top of the seats in front, as the boys stood up on their knees.

"What's up?" Lucas asked. The boys pointed to the popcorn machine.

"What about the candy?" Sam asked, but the answer was clear. They'd already eaten everything they'd been given. "Seriously?"

"Wait until later in the movie, deal?" Lucas reached out with one hand, keeping the other and its candy bag out of sight. MJ and Wyatt shook it in turn before disappearing back into their seats.

"Can we do two?" Wyatt called out.

"Two movies?" Lucas asked back, and they said yes. It would make sense for them to want to spend as much time as possible in this place, wouldn't it? "If you think you can stick it out, sure."

"They're not going to make it, are they?" Teddy guessed.

"Not a chance," Sam shook his head.

"Hey, so if our parents get married soon," Teddy thought aloud, "And then you and Maya are getting married soon, too… Are you guys going to have like a double wedding?"

"Uh… I don't think so, no," Lucas chuckled. "Everyone deserves to have their own day, you know?" Teddy and Sam nodded; that seemed fair. "But you guys will get to be involved in both ceremonies."

"I hate wearing suits," Sam confessed.

"I look good in suits," Teddy countered with a confident grin, taking a sort of distinguished pose that made his (soon to be official) brother laugh.

"I think Maya would say… Wear the suit for the ceremony, wear whatever you want for the party," Lucas told Sam, who smiled. She _would_ say that. "So you'll be bringing Cecilia," Lucas tipped his head to Sam, who confirmed. "What about you though?" he turned to Teddy. "Planning on a plus one?"

"I don't know," the boy shrugged. "It's only March. Don't have anyone right now, but four months is a long time," he smirked now.

"So we'll just keep a seat for 'insert name here' then?" Lucas guessed.

"I know what her name is," Sam declared with a look of mischief in his eyes.

"You do not," Teddy challenged.

"Don't I?" Sam asked, sounding like his big sister had just possessed him. By the look on Teddy's face, it became clear there _was_ a girl, and he might be very privately wishing to make something happen with her by the time July rolled around, much as it remained an uncertainty for the time being.

"Who is she?" Lucas played along.

The fourteen-year-old Lane boy looked just on this side of shy for the first time, though he hid it under big 'Sam, don't you dare' eyes. For a brief, awkward moment, Lucas feared he might have been harboring feelings for his soon to be stepsister, Cara. But then, taking up his courage with both hands, Teddy told him about 'the girl.' She was called Lina, and she worked at her mother's salon. She was his age, but went to a different school. Teddy would see her whenever he'd take Emma there, for an appointment, or to meet their aunt, who also worked there. He would do errands for her, too, and make some extra money for it.

"How long have you known each other?" Lucas asked.

"Kind of always," Teddy admitted.

"Ah… It's one of those…"

"Afraid so," Sam confirmed with a nod. Clearly, Teddy must have told him all this in confidence, as the two of them had come to bond, as brothers to be. And now, by virtue of two weddings linking them all, making them all brothers, he had one more person to confide in, and that just might have been the best anyone could ask for.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	62. Their Contract on Games

March 2nd 2020

_Chapter 62  
Their Contract on Games_

"Don't! I'm gonna fall!" Gracie squeaked as she was lifted to sit on her big sister's shoulders. Sure, a moment ago she'd been wanting to have her turn, but the moment her feet had left the ground she'd gone into 'I regret everything!' mode.

"Now, Miss Grace Marie, Mouse Mouse, do you think I would ever let that happen?" Maya asked, redirecting the lift until she had the six-year-old perched in a more familiar hold. "Me? Drop _you_?" she asked, setting her forehead to her little sister's. "Ever?" she whispered, wrestling a small smile from the girl, who shook her head. "Now that we've got that figured out, you know you don't have to do it if you don't want to, okay?"

"Don't want to," Gracie whispered back.

"Okay then," Maya moved to set her down, but Gracie shook her head. "Alright, staying up here, not a problem, I _like_ hugs, especially from my Mouse Mouse."

This turn did not surprise her one bit. Much as her sisters were growing, faster every day it seemed, they were still little, all things considered. And Gracie, more so than her twin, was one for being held, and they had never tried to make her into anything else than who she was. The whole thing here had come as, upon taking a trip outside, at the basketball hoop, Nellie had tried to throw the ball and declared herself too short.

Maya had remedied the situation by pulling her up and sitting her on her shoulders. From here, not only was she taller than the both of them separated, but she also had the benefit of her big sister's skills in making her approach for the net. It was slightly hindered by the added weight of a child on her shoulders and the attention given so not to drop said child, but Nellie didn't seem to see any problem in it. She had made her throw, the ball had gone _swish!_ And the 'crowd' went wild as 'Nellaya' made a celebratory circuit of the 'court.'

After a few more throws, Nellie had finally agreed to be let down, much to the relief of her ride, and at once she'd turned to her twin and suggested she might want to give it a try. It used to be that Gracie was much more decisive. When she was smaller, and someone would attempt to make her do something for the first time, more often than not her response would be a simple 'nah!' Now, as she'd gotten older, this had changed, and it might not have looked like a good thing, but in a lot of ways it was. She was starting to think more for herself, and in doing so she was giving more consideration to exploring the unknown. Whether she actually followed through, as she didn't that day, was another matter. But already that she thought about it…

"Want to try it anyway?" Cara looked to Gracie, offering her the ball she'd been waiting to give her once she was set on top of Maya's shoulders.

"Knowing her, she just might get it," Maya smiled, turning to her little sister like 'what do you say?' Gracie shrugged, but she took the ball from Cara nonetheless. She received many pointers from this one or that one, which really got to feel like too much for her.

"Stop it!" Nellie called out. "Let her do it!"

It didn't go all the way and through the net, but it grazed the board, and to Gracie that was pretty satisfying.

"I love it here…" Eliza declared, breathing out as she looked around from where she stood.

"Yeah, it's pretty great, isn't it?" Maya agreed.

"I wish we could be here all the time. Arizona's pretty great, and it's closer than New York was, but it's still far." She wanted to be able to just come and be with her big sister just because she wanted to, without having to make it a whole trip. Maya understood that, felt the same way… too often to count.

"We see each other more often than we used to," Maya pointed out. "And if you hadn't gone to Arizona then your mom and Emma's dad would never have met, and then you two wouldn't have met, or us," she turned wide eyes to Emma Lane, who laughed.

"Can we do the wedding game now?" she asked.

"The wedding game?" Maya asked, imagining an old TV game show.

"We did the dress shopping before, now we can practice, like you said."

"Oh! Right! Okay…" she looked around for a beat, conjuring up… "Let's say the tree over there is the altar, yeah?" Her sisters nodded. "Okay, now go and find some rocks and some branches?"

The girls were more than up to the task, most of them dashing off to do what they'd been asked. The only ones remaining were Cecilia and Haley, as Sam's girlfriend sat nearby with the sleeping toddler in her lap. Before long, there was a bounty of materials, which Maya began to place on the ground in order to create two long lines, making an aisle that led up to the tree/altar.

"Great, okay, now… Cecilia…" she turned. "You wanna be…"

"Officiant?" she guessed before looking to the girl she held. "Is that supposed to be Lucas?"

"No, that'd be weird," Maya shook her head, as though this whole thing wasn't already odd.

"What about the ball?" Cara offered.

"Slap a cowboy hat on that and you've got it," Maya laughed, as the officiant and the 'groom' took their places. "And so now…" she turned to the others. "Here we have chairs, with my family, and his family, and our friends, guests…" Even just playing pretend, in her mind it was all looking much more real, and she only wished they all could see what she saw. She could hear music… "Bridesmaids…" she pointed ahead of herself as they stood past the end of the aisle. Quickly, the three of them who were here now stepped up, like soldiers at attention. "I don't know for sure if you'll be walking with someone or on your own on the day, so for now let's just say you're by yourself, yeah?"

"Flowers, we need flowers," Eliza told her.

"Yes, you do," Maya pointed at her and looked around. "I could really do with a garden," she mumbled to herself before getting back on track. She grabbed the leftover branches they had collected and fashioned them into a trio of very sad looking bouquets. "Just pretend, yeah?" she told Cara, Eliza, and Emma as they took them, laughing. "You're going to walk up with the others, ahead of me. Not too fast, not too slow, just like this…" she demonstrated, finding it very hard not to exaggerate and just be serious, which showed in how she still got her sisters laughing.

"What about us?" Nellie asked, indicating herself and Gracie.

"Oh, you two," Maya jogged back to them. "My flowery flower girls," she breathed. They gave her a look and she knew… "The flowers, yes, I know, let's just not use those, okay?" she indicated the leftover rocks. "If it was fall we could just have used the leaves…"

"We can make believe," Gracie declared.

"Okay, good, good," Maya breathed, thankful not to have to conjure up some petals for them to throw. "Do you remember how you did it last time?"

"Yeah, like this!" Nellie looked to Gracie and the two started to walk and throw their invisible flowers. "And I'll have my yellow dress?" Nellie stopped and turned to Maya.

"Yeah, you will!" Maya called back with a laugh, making the six-year-old grin before carrying on with her stride. "Come on back now, we don't have much time before you guys have to go to bed." This did not agree with any of them who were concerned with this announcement, namely the twins, Eliza, and Emma.

"But the sleepover…" Eliza protested.

"Yeah, it's got sleep right in the name," Maya pointed out. The little sisters didn't find it nearly as funny as she did. "Oh, come on, you haven't even seen where you're sleeping yet."

The intrigue had settled just as she'd hoped it would, and so after they'd done their brief mock-wedding walk, everyone had back into the house. The ones who would be headed to bed had gone to their bags to dig out their PJs and get changed. Cara had volunteered herself to get Haley changed, promising she was a pro, thanks to Wyatt, at getting a sleeping little kid into their pyjamas. This left Maya to wait out in the upstairs hall with Cecilia. After their adventures outside, all she could think now was that she had still way more contenders for her bridesmaids than she knew what to do with.

"Ready!" Nellie appeared, in her favorite PJs, her elephant PJs. She had a pair of hair ties in her hand, suggesting there were braids to be made with her long brown hair.

"We have to wait for everyone else, too," Maya reminded her, inviting patience before her little sister got it in her head to go and make everyone else hurry. Soon, the sisters were together once more, questions in their eyes. What were they doing out here? Emma was the one to figure it out first. They were going into the attic.

It was a great place to be, no matter the time or the situation, but for tonight, for Sleepster 2026… It was going to be better than ever. The trap door had opened, the stairs were brought down, and as they climbed in, the girls came upon the many sleeping bags, pillows, and other cushions laid over the floor, and under the glowing illumination of several strings of light set about the walls and the ceiling, making the place look like it had been inhabited by so many fireflies. Between this and the skylight, they could have been outside, camping.

"They're never going to fall asleep now," Cara whispered, just as amazed as the little ones.

"Yeah, but it's a sleepover. If you just go down and fall asleep right away… are you even doing it right?" Maya smirked.

"Which one do you want?" they heard Nellie ask Gracie, who looked around, considering this very question. Eventually, she pointed to one, and so Nellie went and picked the closest one to it. Eliza and Emma soon picked ones near the twins' spots.

"I can do your hair?" Eliza asked Nellie, who happily held out her elastics.

"If you want, I can take Haley back downstairs for now," Maya told the four girls sitting on the ground. Emma had volunteered to do Gracie's hair. She favored just the one braid instead of two.

"We can keep her with us," Eliza volunteered gladly. "We'll look after her, she's already sleeping anyway." As Cara would reveal to Maya and Cecilia after leaving the attic, there had been some debate among the siblings back in Tucson whether Abigail and James were going to have any new kids together. If that was the case, then Eliza led the front in wanting to be prepared, She'd been too young when Wyatt was born to really remember what it was like to have a baby around, to look after, so really any practice was good preparation, just in case.

"Wait until she finds out about you-know-what," Maya told Cara with a smile.

"Am I allowed to know… what you know?" Cecilia asked, pausing to rearrange the words. She was told about the engagement, and the upcoming revelation of said engagement. "Oh! So I guess it means they'll be cool with it, yeah?"

"Think so, yeah," Cara nodded.

"I can't even think about my father… He hasn't met anyone since my mom, I think. Not that he would have had time, I guess, but even then…"

"It'll be weird at first if he does," Cara told her. "But if the person's right for him, then it'll get better." Maya smiled, watching the two of them talking, her sister and her brother's girlfriend, making friends… No doubt they would have both preferred to bond over something other than the loss of a parent at an early age, but from another point of view, it might have made the bond that much more valued to each of them.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	63. Their Contract on Girls' Night In

**_A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_**

* * *

March 3rd 2020

_Chapter 63  
__Their Contract on Girls' Night In_

"Is it… Does it hurt, when you go up and down the stairs?" Cara asked Cecilia as they arrived back in the living room, Maya and the two of them. Maya wasn't sure how the older girl would respond to this. She hadn't gotten around to asking those questions, though she did wonder at times, especially after that day of shopping for that first date outfit. She hadn't wanted anyone, not even Maya, to see her scars, so what was or wasn't off limits for her? Cara asked it though, and it came with such openness and care. Cecilia didn't hesitate to reply.

"It did a lot more in the beginning. My father had my room moved into his office downstairs and his office into my room while I was recovering, so it'd be easier, but it's back the way it was now, so I do it every day. Mostly it's just… If someone felt it for the first time, they might call it hurt, but me I've gotten so used to it, and… and I've felt so much worse, so I just call it uncomfortable. Some days are worse though, like I can really feel it. I usually sleep on the couch on those days."

"Our dad would sleep on the couch, the last few months he was alive," Cara shared, her voice showing the ever present pain for the loss, but also the comfort of just remembering Kermit. Even in the bad times, there had been some really good times, too. Maya shared the feeling. "It was too hard for him to go upstairs. We would all try to make it sound not as bad as it really was, for Eliza and for Wyatt, but we knew."

"He and I spent a lot of time talking over Skype, when he couldn't sleep," Maya recalled now. "We'd watch shows together."

With the younger girls off to bed, somehow it had never been what Maya envisioned for the rest of the evening. Here she thought she'd be plunged back in the fare of sleepovers of old, with her and her friends back when she'd just moved to Texas. Instead, they ended up talking about dead parents for a while. Maya and Cara talked about their father, how he'd been young when Maya was born, and he had left her and her mother, eventually meeting Abigail and making a family with her, turning things around in a lot of ways except for the one that involved his firstborn child. They spoke about how they had been brought back into each other's lives, by chance, when Maya and the band had given a show at Sam's old school, how the siblings had all been getting to know each other for a while before Kermit's illness came around and really gave him the wakeup call he needed to really go and start patching things up with Maya. She spoke about that whole journey, right up to when he passed, and Cara shared some of what she and her siblings had gone through from losing him.

Cecilia spoke of her mother. In all the time they'd known her, it hadn't dawned on Maya or Lucas that this had been none other than Audra Jones, a bit of a local celebrity from when she'd been little, a renowned ballerina and teacher. The accident, her death, had been on the news, and Maya recalled now the mention of her daughter having been in the car as well, but she'd never made the connection. Instead, now, she was presented with so much more of a picture of Cecilia's life, of the girl who'd grown up wanting to follow in her mother's footsteps… dance steps… only to lose both her _and_ the dream.

That she finally spoke of it now… Maya knew just by looking at her that she didn't talk about it often, if at all. She might have told Sam by now, no way to tell, but Maya was near certain she'd never talked about this with anyone that wasn't her father, or Sam, or the psychiatrist she'd been made to see since after the accident. Cara mentioned how her mother had wanted to get her and her siblings into therapy after they'd lost their dad, and how she didn't want to go, to the point where she wanted to come and live here, with her older sister. She asked Cecilia what it was like, and Cecilia told her it had helped a lot, and how she hadn't wanted to go at first either. She hadn't been given a choice, unlike the Hart kids, which had led to a lot of uncomfortable sessions in the beginning, but it had gotten better in the end, and now she was glad for going. Cara looked like she was filing away this information, just in case…

"Can we do something else now?" she sighed after a few beats of silence.

"Sure," Maya smiled at her. "Movie?" she offered, looking to both girls. She got two resounding nods in response. "Time to break into the secret stash," Maya whispered, holding a finger to her lips.

Three oversized ice cream sundaes crafted in the kitchen, the trio had settled in on the couch, six feet propped up on the coffee table in an array of colorfully mismatched socks. Much as Maya would have loved to include the little ones as well, they would all have paid for it the next day, so instead they had this smaller group here, while upstairs…

"You don't really think they're sleeping up there, do you?" Cara asked.

"Oh, not a chance," Maya laughed. "They will though, soon enough. And until then, well they can have their own thing going, too, with the lights, and the stars…"

They were able to enjoy this part for themselves when they finally went up into the attic to settle into sleeping bags themselves. The others had fallen asleep by then, as predicted. At some point, it seemed, Haley had ended up with Gracie, with the twin holding her little sister near. Maya, Cara, and Cecilia went and climbed into their own bags.

Maya was the last one to go to sleep, feeling very happy with how the whole day had turned out for herself and her sisters. The next day, after the boys would return and they could all spend the day together, she would spend much of the evening immortalizing some of that sleepover in her sketchbook.

On Sunday morning, the last before the Tucson Harts went home, everyone got dressed and packed into the minivan and the car as they went off to Ma Maggie's for breakfast. As soon as her siblings had started coming to Austin, Maya had started to cultivate their love for the restaurant, and it was now well within their hearts. Where else would they be on this day?

"Mommy!" Wyatt gasped, bolting out of his chair when he spotted Abigail and James coming through the door. They'd all still been looking at their menus, and Maya and Lucas were both happy to find they had timed it just about right. Abigail was just as happy to receive her youngest into her arms, lifting him off the ground. In no time, the Hart and Lane children were crowding at their parents, talking over one another as they relayed the story of their weekend in Austin.

"Maybe we need to send you guys away more often, if this is the welcome we're getting," James teased, keeping his daughter good and close as he hugged her and she hugged him.

Once they had all gone to sit at the table, looked at the menu, and made their orders, the various threads of their weekend stories finally came untangled to be shared with Abigail and James. The girls talked about how they had been looking at dresses for Maya and Lucas' wedding – which they could _finally_ go and shop for after breakfast – and how they had practiced doing their walk outside the house. The 'aisle' of branches and rocks remained mostly intact back there, just in case they needed to use it again. They also talked about how they had made pasta with Sam's girlfriend, ensuring that their parents would nag him just a bit even as he awkwardly blushed, and how they'd played basketball. Finally they told all about the lights and the stars in the attic to close out the day. Meanwhile, the boys had plenty to say about staying at the Zvolensky house, with Mrs. Carlton, and all the rooms, and the grounds, the pool and the theater, the dinner and the giant beds…

All the while as they listened to their children's lively tales, Maya and Lucas both could just see the parents smiling so bright. All of them had been having a wonderful time in Austin, which was already the best they could ask for, but beyond that… they had been having a great time together, the Harts and the Lanes, Hunters, too… They all cared deeply for one another, it was plain to see, and it was good, with what they were about to reveal to them all… Most of them, anyway. The surprise was less of a surprise to some of them, but that wouldn't stop them from acting as though it was when, finally, they confirmed and announced that they were engaged to be married.

If they were expecting any resistance from any of their children, they got none of it. Instead, they found happy faces and excitement all around, with another volley of questions piling on top of one another. When would it happen? What were they going to wear? Where would they live and would there be bunk beds?

For answers, Abigail and James gave what they could. Primarily, they stated that they were not looking to have a very big wedding, either of them, just something simple, with the people they loved the most – mostly everyone at this table – somewhere in the months to come. As to where they would live, the question had been explored deeply, and it came down to James asking Teddy and Emma if they would be alright with moving in with Abigail and the Hart kids. They were, completely.

"Yes, you can have bunk beds," Abigail smiled, when _that_ question came up once again. Eliza and Emma were very happy to hear it.

After breakfast, the group moved on from Ma Maggie over to the store where the girls were to find their bridesmaid/flower girl dresses. They were met here by Katy and Shawn, so they might be there to buy the twins' dresses and then take them and Haley and MJ back home when all was said and done. There was some surprise at first at the news that everyone would be getting different colored dresses, but then they could see how it made sense, with who the bride would be. They went in to that store with the images printed out from their search back on Friday, and by some chance everyone came away with what they had hoped to find. To see them all running around with their dresses, like a rainbow on the loose, there was no denying this had been the right call.

With this errand done, much as none of them looked forward to it, the time had come for everyone to say goodbye and head on home, whether that was here in Austin, or a flight away and back to Tucson. It had been most difficult for Sam, to see his family going away again, and for those departing Tucson Harts and Lanes as well, none of them eager to part with both Sam and Maya, and Lucas either. But finally it was done, and as Sam went off to spend some time with Cecilia, Dora, and Adam, all that remained was for Maya and Lucas to head back for the house, driving the now passenger-less car and minivan.

"It's always way too quiet around here when everyone goes," Maya sighed as they arrived and went into the house. Almost to prove her wrong, Trix and Lou were there, waiting and barking at the door. "Hey, ladies!" Maya crouched to scoop them up at once. "Are you ready for some special snacks because your humans are emotionally weakened right now?" she asked in cuddly tones. "Yeah, you are, aren't you? Yeah, you are…"

"This might be me being…"

"Emotionally weakened?" she repeated, and Lucas chuckled.

"Yeah, that. But I was thinking… maybe I'd like to go and take a trip to the shelter, see if maybe there's any dog there who might be needing..." Maya turned back to him at once.

"You had me at shelter. How about, you two? You want a little brother or sister?" She received many kisses from the pups, which she took as a yes. "Say it, don't slobber it!" she laughed.

They decided to take Trix and Lou along with them as they went to the shelter. Maybe they would be able to sniff themselves out a new friend. They were well known there at this point, and this soon led them on the path to leaving with not one but two dogs to join the ones they already had, although one would be to keep and the other would be to foster for a few weeks, until he was ready to be taken to what would be his home. This one was called Max and looked eager to go as soon as he was taken out to meet his hosts. The other, who was to join Trix and Lou as members of the Friar-Hart family, was still just a pup, small and fragile after having been found abandoned with his brothers and sisters, all of them already adopted and gone. Given the proper love and care he would grow bigger than Trix and Lou combined.

"We're going to need to find you a name, huh?" Lucas smiled, holding the puppy in his arms as Maya led Max and the others toward the minivan.

"Imagine if we'd done all that before they went back to Arizona," Maya told him, imagining how they would all have crowded in much as they'd done back at the restaurant. "We'll see what Sam has to say when he gets home later. Right now we need to get this bunch back there. Want me to drive?" she asked, smiling as she watched Lucas with their nameless new buddy.

"Probably a good idea, yeah," he nodded before looking to their foster friend. "Don't know how he's going to do in the car though."

"There's no rush," Maya assured him.

When Sam would return home shortly after dinner, he would be surprised by both Max and the puppy. To see the grin on his face might have been the perfect capper to their sleepover weekend. When he was handed the jittery pup and offered the task and privilege of naming him, Sam grew thoughtful at once, observing him as though attempting to discover his soul.

"Archer," he finally pronounced himself, pausing to see if he liked the sound of it, then smiling when he found he did. "That's his name."

"Archer it is," Lucas nodded, as he and Maya both took their turn at welcoming little Archer to the family.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	64. Their Fear For the Sound

March 4th 2020

_Chapter 64  
Their Fear For the Sound_

It was 2:57 in the morning. Lucas had barely managed to register this as he got his hand on the phone ringing on his nightstand. The caller ID said it was Asher calling him, in the middle of the night… No matter who it would have been, the hour would have injected some amount of apprehension in him, but then he'd seen his friend's name, and his sleepy brain had one immediate hypothesis… He didn't want it to be correct.

"Ash?" he mumbled, willing himself to sit up even as Maya started to stir at his side. "What's going on?"

"So sorry to do this to you guys right now, I know… I know it's late, but you gotta get up here, okay? If you can, you gotta…" Asher's voice sounded so strange, just… collected but also distant, distressed.

"What happened?" Lucas asked, reaching to wake Maya all the way.

"Who's that?" she spoke, still half asleep.

"We don't know… We barely know… They didn't tell her much, except…" Asher paused, and Lucas could just hear the background noise, telling him that his friend was in a car. _They didn't tell her much. _Her…

"It's Sophie, isn't it?" Lucas asked, his dread rising, and now Maya's as well, as she sat next to him, staring at him with those eyes wide awake all of a sudden.

"It's bad, Lucas. All we got out of Chiara is that she was involved in an incident on the job, and she's being rushed off to surgery. She's a mess right now, we can barely get any English out of her, and we can't keep up with her Italian right now."

"We'll get there as soon as we can, what hospital?"

Maya was out of bed and moving to action even as he was getting the information. Her head felt too small to contain the bursts in her brain as she thought about what they'd just been told. Sophie… Sophie was hurt, critical… in Houston… Their friend's bright face kept flashing through her mind, and she'd do her best to keep hold of that image when she was smiling. She wasn't about to give one inch to the other image trying to burrow its way in, the one where her wild imagination could come up with all kinds of injuries for her friend to suffer.

"Sam… Sam, wake up," Maya shook her brother's shoulder, standing over his sleeping form. There was the puppy sleeping at the foot of his bed, and little Archer woke now, yapping, even as Sam startled and opened his eyes.

"Maya? What…"

"We have to go to Houston. Are you okay to stay here with the dogs until morning?"

"I… Why are you…"

"Something happened to Sophie, we don't… we don't know much, just…"

"No, I get it, I-I'll be fine," Sam told her, his face a burst of shock. Maya doubted he'd be getting back to sleep for the rest of the night.

"You go to school, you call me, keep me updated, got it?"

"I promise. You, too, okay?" She was just on automatic, moving forward, not letting herself stop, and think too much, but in that moment she felt her shield weakening, her face trembling. Sam grasped her hand, gave it a squeeze, and she took a breath.

"Will do," she promised back, hugging her brother and kissing the side of his face, maybe more than she needed to, but right then it felt like the whole world had been tipped sideways, and someone she loved was in danger, so all she could do was hold to those others she loved so they might be reminded, just in case.

Back in their room, she found Lucas had already gotten dressed while she was out talking to Sam. As she went about doing the same, she listened in to his side of what she realized was a new call. He was talking to Dylan.

"Right. No, we'll come and get you guys. Yeah… Yeah… She's, uh…" he trailed off, and even with her back turned, as she yanked on the same shirt she'd worn earlier that day, Maya knew he was talking about her. The question had probably been 'how's Maya handling it?' She'd just paused and realized she'd gotten her shirt on backwards and inside out, and she'd let out a grunt that suggested she could have ripped the damned thing off, so Lucas could have painted quite the picture in response to Dylan's question. He decided instead to go with: "No better than the rest of us." Maya let out a breath. "Okay, be there soon."

When he hung up, she turned around, shirt still inside out, and moved toward him. His arms were open and ready to receive her and she folded herself right in to be held even as she held him. Neither of them said a word, or did anything except to hold the other, for a few seconds, and then they had to go. Maya finished getting dressed, Lucas checked in on Sam, and then they were out the door and climbing into the minivan on their way to pick up their friends.

The first few minutes went by in silence. Lucas was focused on the road, and Maya was looking out the window, trying to make herself focus on something, anything that would prevent her from thinking about Sophie and the possibility that she might lose her. The other thing she kept thinking about was a short-lived debate in her head. Finally she'd just shaken her head and grabbed her phone, putting in a call. It was coming on three thirty in the morning, and if it hadn't been a pleasant wake-up call for Lucas and her, it wouldn't be any better for her parents either.

"What's wrong?" her father answered, and Maya let out a breath. Of course he'd know.

"Lucas and I are on our way to pick up the others to go to Houston," she told him, finding she was gripping her phone a bit tight, as though it would permit her to feel like her father was here, holding her. "It's Sophie, she's… I-I don't know what happened, but she's hurt bad…" She could hear her mother's voice in the background and, after Shawn repeated what he'd just been told, the phone must have been passed on, because Katy's voice came on the line.

"Maya…"

"We left Sam back home with the dogs, can one of you just go and check on him, maybe stay with him until he goes to school?" she cut in. Her mother only had to say her name and she'd felt like she might cry… She couldn't do that, not now.

"Absolutely, yeah. We'll figure something out, don't worry about it, alright?"

"Yeah… Yeah, thanks, Mom," Maya ran a hand through her hair, feeling that hand shake as it raked through. She squeezed it shut in her lap, trying to will it to grow still again.

"Has her mother been told?" Katy asked.

"Uh… I-I don't know, I guess so. She's… Oh, she's not even in the country right now, she'll have to fly back… I'll write when I know more, okay?"

"Please do. I love you, baby girl."

"Love you, too, Mom," Maya nodded to herself before hanging up. As soon as she'd done so, she'd just felt so stifled… She opened the window to let air in. The roads were almost empty, enough so that Lucas allowed himself to reach over and touch her hand for a moment. "I'm…" she started to say, only to come to the realization that this was really not one of those times where she could just say 'I'm fine' when she wasn't fine. "I'm scared…" she admitted instead.

"Me, too," he replied, and if nothing else, it kept them both going as they made their way to the apartment.

When Lucas had spoken to Dylan, he'd learned that Asher had called him already, and that he'd seen to calling Zay. He and Nadine would already be waiting with him and Riley and Rosa, so they could all get into the minivan and leave for Houston as soon as possible. There they all stood, as they approached. Five figures huddled together on the sidewalk, the sun still waiting to rise. As they pulled up to the curb, Zay was up front to open the door, and then they were all climbing in, each with a face full of fear and confusion. As soon as they were all settled in, Lucas pulled them back on to the road and they were off. He wasn't looking to go over the speed limit, but he would be keeping as close to that limit as possible, to get them to where they had to be.

It was the most quiet ride they'd ever had on that long road from Austin to Houston. It was silent, save for the ambient car sounds, nearly the whole way. They were all too lost in their own heads. Everyone was on edge, their bodies feeling like they should have been exhausted, attempting to sleep, but never getting anywhere close to where they might have believed themselves able to fall asleep.

"Oh…" a voice emerged from the back, small, and it took Maya and Lucas a moment to find it had been Rosa.

"What is it?" Riley asked her.

"I-I tried to see if I could… if there was any mention of…" Rosa replied, holding up her phone.

"Did you find something?" Nadine asked.

"Nothing official, so I don't know if this is her…" Rosa explained, and oh how she had never sounded as small as she was. "But there's something on here about some people who… who heard gunshots, a-and sirens, and then something about a chase…"

The car fell silent once more, as they were left to imagine that this was exactly the situation having led to their friend's life being put in peril. It forced them to remember, once more, how Sophie existed in this part of the world where danger was just much more of a possibility. She never shied away from it though, did she? From the very beginning, she had plunged headlong into this career because it was what she felt she was made for, where she belonged. She'd told them once how she'd wanted this, ever since she was very little, since the cops had come up to her house to tell her mother about the accident that took her father's life. She had already done so much good in the short time she'd been out there, as an officer. This couldn't be the end, they refused to think that it might be.

_Katy: Picked up Sam, brought him and the dogs back to the house. Any news?_

Maya looked to the screen, feeling just the slightest sense of relief. It was small, but it was something. She'd just hated having to leave him like this, but it simply had made no sense to bring him, and they couldn't leave the dogs, the little one especially, and Max… Max, who was due to be picked up in a couple of days…

_Maya: Nothing yet. We're nearly there._

_Maya: Thanks, Mom._

After a moment, she went to her messages with her brother and wrote again.

_Maya: Hey, Sammy, hope you're alright out there. I didn't want to leave you on your own._

_Sam: I know. I'll be fine. Do you think you'll be coming back tomorrow? Your dad said I could stay as long as you're in Houston._

It was an odd sort of reality check, but it made sense. They knew nothing of what was happening with Sophie, and one look around the minivan made it plain to see no one here was looking to be anywhere but near their friends for… who knew how long. This long, sleepless night might be the beginning of several uneasy days.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	65. Their Fear For the News

March 5th 2020

_Chapter 65  
Their Fear For the News_

Driving through Houston, getting closer to the hospital, the passengers inside the minivan all looked like they'd never been so unhappy to be in this city. And when they'd reached the hospital lot, when they'd spotted a number of cop cars parked side by side, they thought they knew what they'd be coming to find in that ER… It really didn't prepare them for the actual sight of it though, all those other officers packed into the place… _They're here for her, too._

"Hey…" There was Ray Choi, waiting for them near the front, sticking out in the middle of all those uniforms. He hugged Lucas, and Maya, a quick greeting all around before he could lead them through to where they might find the others.

As they went along, they recognized some of the faces, from when they'd attended Sophie's birthday party the previous fall, and hers and Chiara's wedding anniversary in the winter. The officers recognized them, too, and as their eyes would meet, all Maya could think was how all of them who'd just driven over in the middle of the night had been Sophie's family for years now, but these people here were growing to be like a third family for her as well, and if she didn't recover tonight… No, no, couldn't go there.

Sitting to the side, they first came upon Sophie's friends and fellow rookies, Hannah and Eloise, sitting with a man they knew to be Officer Randall, Sophie's partner and former training officer. The usually so composed Eloise was just wrecked, and Hannah did her best to comfort her, even as she looked so distraught herself. Beau Randall was holding both her hands in his, looking shaken as well and… Oh, was that blood on his sleeves? It sent both Maya and Lucas reeling just a bit, as though they hadn't already been shaky on their feet.

And then, further back, they'd found Chiara and Asher.

They had all been aware of just how much the fear of anything happening to Sophie on the job had weighed on Chiara. Maya maybe most of all had been a willing ear often called upon. As they'd all been driving up from Austin, even as she felt her own fear coursing through her, Maya just had this feeling in her like she could sense Chiara's fear in her as well. It didn't prepare her for the actual sight of her any more than those cars outside had prepared them for the presence here inside the hospital.

Chiara looked pale, like she was a hair's breadth away from passing out. Her hands were locked together and her lips moved just barely perceptibly, enough to suggest she might have been praying silently. She was in another place, hardly aware of her surroundings, so much so that she didn't notice the new arrivals until Asher made her aware. He was sitting at her side, his arm around her like he wanted to ensure she wouldn't tip over. Looking at her, it might not have been a bad idea. He set his hand over her own and she flinched, concentration broken. She looked at him, and he nodded ahead of them.

Seeing them all there, Chiara looked as though she'd been granted part of her mind back, and the strength sufficient to get her to stand and move toward them. Maya had been the first to reach her, and the two friends and former roommates embraced tightly. Much as she'd been doing her best to remain focused, not to go and sink into those feelings, that fear, to hold Sophie's trembling wife in her arms, Maya couldn't help but feel a sting at her eyes, a choking of her breath, and a drum at her heart…

_"I was so afraid it would happen someday, Maya…"_ Chiara's voice was all of an Italian murmur. _"I was afraid, but I tried to tell myself, I tried… It wasn't going to… She would be alright… What if she's not? I can't… I can't lose…"_

Maya didn't know what to say. She didn't try to come up with anything. The state Chiara was in now, it wouldn't matter near so much as just having all of them there around her, and she had that. When she had finally let go of her, Chiara had found herself in more embraces, with more friends' arms there to give over what courage they could give. As she'd stood back, Maya had turned to Asher, who had gotten up to say hello to everyone. She hugged him now, and he hugged her back, with that same sort of helplessness she had been unable to put into words up to now.

"I'm sitting out here and all I can think about is 'I owe her twenty bucks.' I know it makes no sense, but that's the last thing she told me when I saw her this morning, and now…" Asher shook his head, at a total loss for logic of any kind.

"Tell me what you know?" Maya asked him, hoping to direct him back into what was actually happening. He looked at her, sniffing back the start of tears with a nod.

What Asher knew was this: Sophie had been working tonight, a temporary change to her schedule. If she got back to the station and then left on her way back home on time, she would have been home no later than two in the morning. She'd called home around midnight, checking in with Chiara, telling her to go ahead and go to bed instead of staying up to wait for her, as she was prone to do. Asher and Ray had tried to be good friends/roommates and convince her to do the same. But Chiara was stubborn on the matter, so they'd ended up in front of the television, with the guys planning to wait until she fell asleep before carrying her upstairs. Instead, all three of them had fallen asleep.

They were awakened by the doorbell, around two thirty. They'd all been just a bit confused, half-asleep… But then they could see the lights flashing outside, the blue and red… They'd all known then, they'd known something must have happened to Sophie, just not what exactly. Chiara had been so transfixed where she sat, and finally Ray had been the one to go and open the door. There he'd found Hannah, Officer Whittaker, looking completely beside herself, so much so that for a good ten seconds they'd been certain Sophie was gone.

It had taken Hannah's partner coming in after her before they'd been reassured – to a degree – that Sophie was still alive. As comforting as this might have been, one look at the two women's faces could only add the part they weren't saying. Yes, she was alive, but her life was also in danger.

"They wouldn't even tell us what happened to her. I'm not even sure they know, they weren't there. But Hannah heard about the incident and she wanted to be the one to come and tell us, didn't want it to be a stranger," Asher told Maya, who was looking back to the where Hannah sat, with Eloise and Officer Randall. She must have been so upset with herself for how she hadn't managed to say the words in the end.

"What about here, a doctor, a nurse, anything?"

"They just say she's still in surgery and someone will come and find us when they're able to tell us anything, but so far there's been nothing. Chiara doesn't actually mind that, I think. I'm pretty sure that so long as they come back and say Sophie will be fine they can take all the time they need."

"And him?" Maya nodded to Officer Randall. He was with her when it had all happened, wasn't he? "I-Is that hers? On his… on his sleeve?" she quietly asked, feeling just a bit like she was about to be sick. Asher looked back, too, and going off the look on his face, Maya had to guess he hadn't noticed the blood stains. The man looked like he'd been hurt, too, though on the whole his injuries appeared superficial, nothing that would have led to his sleeves looking like… like…

"I… I think so," Asher spoke, and now he looked like he was going to be sick, too.

"What did he say?" Maya asked him, bringing him back around.

"He, uh…" Asher blinked, willed himself to remember. "He didn't say much. I don't know if it's that he's not allowed to say, or he doesn't want to worry us more than… we already are… He mentioned something about a, uh… a domestic call that… that got out of hand, and then going after the guy when he tried to get away… She stopped him. Sophie. She caught the guy, but then…" he shook his head. He didn't know what had happened after, and in all likelihood he, like Ray, like Chiara, had been left to fill in the blanks in his head. "Don't think he wanted to tell us even that much, but Chiara was just staring him down," he explained, with something like pride in his voice.

"Any word from her mother?" Maya tried to sound like she wasn't seeing things she didn't want to see in her all too creative mind. Asher looked notably paler all at once.

"I'm the one who called her," he revealed, and Maya could only curse under her breath. "Yeah," Asher shuffled his feet a moment. "She's in… She _was_ in London, and I guess they'd worked it out, Sophie and her, so she'd call her when she got home, since it'd be morning out there and she'd still be at her hotel. I used the landline to call, the numbers were all right there by the phone, so…"

"So she thought Sophie was calling," Maya guessed.

"I thought she might have passed out when I spoke up. How could it be anything good if one of her daughter's friends was calling her in the middle of the night?" If she imagined Diana Zvolensky's face right now, she had her daughter's eyes, and those eyes were filled with pain. "She said she was taking off right away for the airport, so she should be here soon," Asher shook his head, guessing. "I think she put in some calls about getting a surgeon friend of hers to come in and help Sophie if she could, but we didn't hear anything, I don't know if she's in there right now…"

They'd been sitting out here all this time, while Maya and Lucas and the others had been driving in. They'd been sitting here, and they hadn't been hearing a word about Sophie. That'd be enough to drive anyone mad, but then what could they really do about it?

"I'm going to go and make a coffee run for everyone," Maya told Asher. He looked at her like he knew what she was really saying. Yes, she meant it about the coffee, but maybe more than anything she needed to separate herself from this space, this moment, just for a couple minutes, just to allow herself to process everything she'd heard.

"That'd be great, actually."

Moving to find Lucas, she caught his eye as he'd been speaking with Officer Randall. He excused himself and came over to her.

"Coffee run?"

"Yeah, come on," Lucas agreed at once. They made sure to go and see Chiara, to tell her where they were going. Now that she'd said hello to everyone, she was back to where they'd found her, back the way they'd found her, too, unlikely to have a care for the world until she got news about her wife. So, Maya and Lucas stepped out of the ER, back into the March air, It hit them like a winter chill, with dizzying accuracy. Maya slowly took it in as they walked toward the minivan, walking past all those police cars again. Lucas had her hand, and she was going to hold on to it as long as she could.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	66. Their Fear For the Wait

March 6th 2020

_Chapter 66  
Their Fear For the Wait_

They couldn't say for sure what it was, between the looks on their faces as they'd come up to the coffee shop's counter as they asked for enough coffee to serve about two dozen people, or the fact that they were not too far from the hospital, or the unintended revelation that they were awaiting updates on an injured friend who was a cop… Maybe it was all of it. Whatever it was, Maya and Lucas had left the place a few minutes later with coffee, sugar, cream and milk, and a few boxes of baked goods, and they hadn't put down a dime.

Returning to the hospital, they found helping hands in distributing everything to the waiting party, with Rosa and Zay assisting them. They ended up having far more than they'd needed, so they had offered up what remained to others who were having a bad night of uncertainty and exhaustion.

"I'm sorry, I tried," Nadine reappeared, taking the coffee and muffin Zay had saved for her.

"Tried what?" Lucas asked.

"I figured it wouldn't hurt to do the whole 'hey, I'm a med student, can you tell me anything about my friend' thing, I mean I know people who work here, but none of them are around, and even if they were I would probably have gotten the same answer I got now, I know. They can't tell me anything. They sympathize, but they just can't."

"What if Chiara says it's okay, she's next of kin, right?" Zay asked.

"Right now, I think it's best to just let her do what she's doing," Nadine shook her head. They looked to their friend, still unmoved from where they'd left her. Dylan sat with her now, keeping watch over her cup and her Danish.

"I should call Bishop, let him know I won't be in class tomor… today," he corrected himself.

"My mom will let them know for me at the theater, I guess," Maya sighed, digging at the hole in her cup's lid. She'd drained the whole thing already. She still couldn't stop thinking about Sam, at her parents' house. She hadn't brought him because she knew how he felt about hospitals since their father had passed. She wasn't too crazy about them either. But then sparing him that had also meant that she and Lucas had been forced to leave him on his own, after being awakened in the middle of the night like this… There just hadn't been a way to do it right that night.

"Who's that?" Rosa asked, nodding past them, and they turned to find an old woman who looked like she was coming toward them. She didn't look like she worked for the hospital. As the only one of them who'd met her, only very recently, Lucas could say for sure that she did not work for the hospital, and the reason she was coming toward them was because she'd spotted him.

"That's Mrs. Carlton, the Zvolensky caretaker," he informed them before moving up to greet her.

"How is she?" the woman asked, anxious.

"We don't know," Lucas told her. "She's been in surgery since before we got here, no one's come for an update, we tried." She accepted this summary with a tip of the head before moving toward Chiara. She sat at her side, and she joined her own prayer to the concerned young woman's.

As simple as the old woman's arrival into their vigil had been, it was another matter as Diana Zvolensky came along in search of news on her daughter's condition. They could only imagine the nightmare percolating in her heart, having opened the door to news of her husband's passing, back just about twenty years ago, and now to have gotten this call regarding her little girl… They also remembered how the declaration that Sophie wanted to become a cop had caused some amount of discord between mother and daughter. Mrs. Zvolensky had come around to it in the end, not that Sophie would have changed her mind one way or the other, but now… They could easily see her going back to her original opinion on the matter, regardless of all the good Sophie had done since she'd finished the academy.

"Do you think she'll be able to get them to tell us what's going on with Sophie?" Zay quietly asked as they watched Diana step up to a nurse who possibly had the misfortune of walking in the woman's line of sight. With the way people's attitudes seemed to shift at the mere mention of the woman's name, it was easy to imagine she would be the kind of person to throw her wealth and her power around in order to get what she wanted. She wasn't. Diana Zvolensky, née Baker, was a self-made woman, and that was part of what made her who she was today. Part of that rise came from not thinking herself above anyone, because more often than not someone who thought this way would end up suffering a spectacular fall from grace. No, she knew who she was and who she'd been, and she was usually cautious of how she chose to utilise this power she'd been granted.

When it came to her daughter… That was the only time when she did not mind throwing her name around. In fact, if she could help Sophie, she would do everything, spend anything, even if it meant leaving herself penniless. Still, it had to be done with courtesy. Tonight… this morning, her courtesy was challenged, and no one would fault her for being of a shorter temper. The nurse had first pointed toward the waiting area, where Sophie's mother finally noticed the other officers along with her daughter's friends. Maya, Lucas, and the others who'd been watching her all raised their hands in a weak greeting. The nurse went on to point another way, and then she was leading Mrs. Zvolensky off somewhere. The group froze, watching the two women disappear down a hall.

"Did she do it? Where are they taking her?" Nadine blinked. Were they actually about to get news about Sophie? They wanted to let Chiara know, but at the same time they thought it might be best to wait and see. They didn't want to build up her hope for nothing.

It really came off somewhere down the middle. A few minutes later, Diana had returned, walking alongside another, older woman, who did not look like a doctor or a nurse and more like an administrator of some sort. From a distance it was still easy to see that the two of them knew one another. And even before she came around and joined them, they could also tell that she hadn't gotten exactly what she'd hoped to get.

She briefly greeted them all, thanked them for being here, from the officers to her daughter's friends, no one was left out. But, now that she'd said hello to everyone else, she could go to the one who needed her attention the most, the one who loved her daughter the most, right up there with her. Angela Carlton had gotten up from where she'd sat since her arrival and, after a brief hushed conversation between the two, she'd stepped aside so that Diana Zvolensky could sit at her daughter-in-law's side. She set her hand to Chiara's shoulder and the young woman flinched, taken from her thoughts. The way she'd looked up into the woman's face, they could just feel how for a moment she'd picked up every last trait she shared with Sophie, so much that this might have been her… But then it wasn't her wife; it was her mother-in-law. She let out a strangled little sob and Diana looped her arms around her, pulled her near.

When the sun had started to blend into the room, filling it with its new light, it left them all feeling oddly out of place. They'd been here for hours, some more than others, but they had arrived in the dark and, considering what they were here for, they couldn't see it being any more appropriate. In daylight, it felt as though they should have been giving themselves over to hope but… could they? Surgeries went wrong in the daytime, too, didn't they?

They had only found out what Mrs. Zvolensky's conversation with the other woman had been about from overhearing her conversation with Chiara. Well, maybe not a conversation. Chiara mostly stared at Sophie's mother and listened as she spoke. As far as she'd been told, with the extent of Sophie's injuries, and the repairs this entailed, it meant going after what was most critical first, but also seeing to the rest, and unfortunately it meant a lot of work which became taxing on the already weakened system. Chiara kept looking at her mother-in-law, and her eyes said it all. _Was she going to die?_

Diana Zvolensky would keep assuring her daughter-in-law that Sophie was in the hands of some very talented surgeons, and to hear what felt like a party line from the woman… it said plenty without saying it. Mostly it said that she didn't know the answer to Chiara's question, and all she could do in the meantime was to give faith where she felt she could give it for the time being, hoping that it would keep her believing her own words as much as it would give comfort to those who needed it, too. For now, she just needed to keep it together, for Sophie.

Lucas' phone vibrated in his pocket. When he pulled it out and saw it was his mother, he breathed out. He didn't know how she'd found out, but he was sure she had found out. He excused himself and stepped outside. His voicemail had picked up before he could, so he called her once he stood outside, past the ambulance bay.

"I just got off the phone with Maya's mother," Melinda Friar declared, missing any kind of 'hello,' though under the circumstances he wasn't about to point it out to her.

"Sorry I couldn't answer before, I had to get outside," Lucas replied as he attempted to rub exhaustion off his face.

"How is she, what have you heard?"

"Not a lot. She's still in surgery as far as we know. Her mother arrived from London not too long ago, she managed to talk to someone but we didn't hear much."

"Right, now I'm about to get in the car, is there anything in particular you would like me to pick up on the way?"

"Mom…" he tried to argue against this, but he already knew it would be a losing battle.

"Don't you 'Mom' me, Lucas Thomas Friar, I am coming up there. One day you'll have children of your own and…"

"I know, I do, but it's not…" She needed to do this. She needed to help in some way. She felt for Diana Zvolensky, and she needed to do something. "I don't see anyone leaving here to grab breakfast, in case we finally get any updates…" he suggested, and he could practically feel his mother give a relieved nod.

"Consider it done. How many of you are there?"

"Uh…" he stopped to count. Some of the officers had left, not because they wanted to but because they had to, but then more had shown up to take their place. Between all of them and the friends and family from near and far… "Thirty-something."

"A mix of egg breakfasts, some waffles and pancakes, fruit, potatoes… I'll work it out and I will see you in a couple of hours. "Hug everyone for me, will you?"

"I'll do my best," Lucas vowed.

After they hung up, he remained where he stood for a minute more. He closed his eyes, breathed in the morning air. They had been here plenty of times in the years they'd lived in Houston, primarily for good reasons, for births, for the occasional ride to a check-up… It all felt different now. Now this place stood between whether or not Sophie Zvolensky would continue to exist in the world. Much as he tried not to let that thought get to him, Lucas walked back into the ER with so much apprehension in him, it was no wonder he and Maya had been sticking so close to one another the whole time they'd waited. This feeling in the air, it left them nothing good, and they needed to counteract it, with all their might.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	67. Their Fear For the State

March 7th 2020

_Chapter 67  
Their Fear For the State_

Melinda Friar had had sufficient time to drive out from Austin, reach Houston, and text her son to let him know she was picking up breakfast for everyone before a doctor came along – at last – with news on Sophie's condition.

Everyone in the waiting room remained so on edge, waiting for the moment when they'd finally know something, anything. They would watch as doctors and nurses went by, following each one's path in hopes that any one of them would make their way to them, to Chiara and Mrs. Zvolensky, and every time when they'd go off somewhere else, or when they'd approach another person waiting out here with them, it would always leave them to deflate and wait again. The cycle would just keep going on and on, hope and deflation, again and again.

And then, finally… A woman came striding through double doors, and as they'd looked up and zeroed in on her, they barely had time to go from 'Is she the one?' to 'Wait, wasn't she at Sophie and Chiara's wedding?' before Diana Zvolensky rose to her feet, pulling her daughter-in-law from her prayers once more to indicate the doctor definitely headed toward them.

Her arrival seemed to rob many of them of breath in their lungs. She carried with her the thing they had all yearned to hear and dreaded all the same. Couldn't she give some sign, one way or the other… preferably the way that meant that Sophie would be alright?

"Gwendolyn…" Diana addressed the woman, her voice tinged with a plea they all carried.

"Can I speak openly?" the doctor asked, taking note of all the people standing by and watching her now. Diana and Chiara both nodded. "Right, well, we've got her stable now, but I can't say she's out of the woods yet, I…" She'd been silenced as Chiara took two steps forward and embraced her.

Around this hold, the meaning it carried could only settle like a wave of relief over the gathered men and women. She was alive… The danger was still not completely gone, they'd heard that, too, they had, but they'd been given good news along with that caution, and they needed to cling to that, even for a little while.

Lucas had been standing behind Maya when the doctor had come toward them, and he'd put his arms around her, almost to brace her for whatever they'd find out. When they'd been told that Sophie was stable, he'd felt his fiancée just… quake, for a moment, like she had allowed herself the smallest crack in her composure, to let out some of the pressure of everything she'd been keeping bottled in since the call had come. For his part, he couldn't help but hold to her a bit tighter. Thinking about what Chiara had been going through all night, he kept thinking about how he might have felt if it had been him, with the woman he loved in peril. It was not an easy thought to navigate, but then he had her, right here, and he wasn't going to let her go.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Chiara let the doctor go, stepping back as she pulled herself a bit more upright. "You must be tired, I'm sorry." It was the most English they'd gotten out of her all night, and it still came off far shakier than they'd ever known her to speak it. But she'd been given that small glimmer of hope and it translated in this way.

"Please, don't apologize," the doctor assured her with a small smile. "I can only let the two of you in to see her for the time being, and it will be a little while longer before you _can_ go, but I wanted to come and give you at least what information I could. I know all of you have been left to be patient these past hours," she addressed all of them now.

By the time Melinda Friar rolled up to the hospital, calling on her son for help bringing in the breakfast bags, Chiara had been whisked away along with Sophie's mother, off to go and see the recovering young officer. This left the rest of her vigil to hang back and wait for their return, for more news of her condition. It proved difficult not to shift completely into relief mode, when they had to remember what the doctor had said. Yes, she was stable now, but there was still a chance that this would change, and if that happened…

"My mom's here with the food," Lucas told Maya when he saw the message on his phone. "Be back in a minute?" he gave her a smile before leaning to kiss her forehead.

"You better," she smiled back.

Collecting Asher, Ray, Rosa, and Mrs. Carlton, who insisted on helping, Lucas went out to find his mother waiting by the car. The bags waited all along the passenger seat, front seat, and in the trunk. As the others started to grab what they could, Melinda told them what each of those contained before turning to her son and wrapping her arms around him like she'd been wanting to do it ever since she'd gotten Katy's call. It may not have been her kid who was in danger, but it was close enough that she needed to feel that he was alive and well.

"Thank you for the update," she told him as they pulled back. All of them who had parents out there who knew Sophie had found out about the incident by now, and so when they'd gotten their update, as small as it was, they had obviously sent out the word to their families. Lucas had texted his mother, Maya had done the same for her parents and for Sam, Riley to her parents, and so on. And then there was also…

"Uh, Lucas?" Rosa came to tap his arm and pointed to a car rolling up behind them. It was just the kind of car they had taken whenever they had flown anywhere by courtesy of what they referred to as 'Air Zvolensky,' and when the passengers climbed out, they knew that was exactly how these people had arrived.

Chiara's mother and father, all the way from Italy…

"Mr. and Mrs. Mantovani?" Lucas jogged toward the couple. Of course, it was very like Diana Zvolensky to have flown out her daughter-in-law's family, so they might be there for Chiara in whatever happened next, good or bad. Mrs. Mantovani was the spitting image of her daughter, and right now she seemed to echo her worries as well as the rest, which Lucas rightly assumed to be due to the fact that Sophie's mother had been the only one to know they were coming, and seeing as she hadn't had the chance to get in touch with them since the moment where the doctor had come back to them with an update, they still only knew what the rest of them had known through the night.

"How is Sophie? Has there been any news?" Chiara's mother asked, pulling him into a quick hug in greeting before doing the same for Rosa as she came to join them. The Mantovani family had essentially grown to consider the girl as one of their own, and to offer themselves as a connection to her Italian roots, where her own late father had been unable to provide it.

"She is out of surgery and recovering," Lucas nodded, much to the couple's relief. "The doctor said that she's not completely out of danger yet," he was forced to add before they assumed that they were in the clear or that the worst was behind them. "Chiara is with them, along with Sophie's mother."

"When she called us, she was already on the plane," Mr. Mantovani explained. "She told us what happened, and she was simply… out of sorts. She realized only after she had left England that she might have seen to all three of us flying together, but I told her she made the right decision. She needed to be with her daughter as quickly as possible."

Already, as Lucas and Rosa had been with Chiara's parents, the others had started to bring the bags into the hospital, where Maya, Dylan, Riley, Nadine, and Zay pitched in with distributing the food. It was greeted with as many thanks as the coffee and treaters earlier in the morning hours. When those of them inside had learned of the Mantovani's arrival, they'd had more or less the same reaction, a mix of 'wow, really?' and then 'right, makes sense.'

"Take over for me for a minute?" Maya asked Asher as he brought a load of bags and the news of the new arrivals with them. When he nodded and moved to do just that, Maya moved to talk to one of the people at the nurses' station. "Excuse me? Sorry to bother you, our friend, Officer Zvolensky, her wife's with her in recovery, I guess? Her parents just arrived from Italy, are they allowed to go back there to find her?" Chiara had just had a hell of a night, and she'd finally been able to go and be with Sophie, they couldn't possibly pull her away now.

Mr. and Mrs. Mantovani had been led off back to find their daughter, as the others huddled up together in the waiting room for breakfast and the nourishing of that quiet hope for Sophie's recovery.

"Is it bad luck if all I can think about right now is… memories of her? When we met her, and… when she became our friend?" Zay asked as he bit into his waffle, not even cutting it, just biting a chunk off the thing.

"I don't think so," Nadine reassured her husband with a smile. "We're keeping her in our thoughts, Sophie as we know her."

"I just can't stop thinking about her, when we were all in dance class together," Zay indicated himself and Lucas, who smiled and nodded. "Man, were we ever that small?"

"We've been smaller," Lucas pointed out.

"Yeah, not you," Asher waved his fork at him, making the others chuckle, just barely.

"You remember the look on her face when we told her we knew them?" Zay asked Lucas, nodding to Maya, Riley, and Nadine. "Girl looked like she was gonna leap off like a rocket."

Maya looked to her bandmates, the three of them out of the original lineup. They remembered plenty about the time when Sophie had come into their lives. She used to be so shy around them, like they were genuine celebrities, and that somehow made them something other than normal girls her age. It had taken a while before she'd managed to make the transition, to realize that they were her friends, plain and simple.

"The first thing I always think about is the day she came to camp, when we were counselors in the summer. She came up, and it was the morning after she'd found out about… her cousin, what he did," he stole a look to Maya, who quietly leaned her head to his shoulder. "She figured out what really happened, and she decided she was going to get me to Philadelphia, to find Maya, to straighten things out with her parents. I'd never seen her like that, like nothing was going to stop her from doing what needed to be done."

They were quiet for a time after that. That was always her, wasn't it? Doing what had to be done, no matter the cost… And now here they were, because she'd done exactly that, to her own life's peril. Suddenly, their exercise in memory, in life… only felt like it brought them back down again. She had to get better. It couldn't end like this.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	68. Their Fear For the Girl

March 8th 2020

_Chapter 68  
Their Fear For the Girl_

As the day had progressed, the vigil for Sophie had continued to shift. There were always some of her fellow officers with them, though they came and went as the need arose. The rest of them, Sophie's friends, her old caretaker/nanny, Lucas' mother… they were mainstays. For the time being, they didn't mind there not being any updates. If all remained as it was, it meant that Sophie was still back there, holding it together.

With the morning came the start of the day for the rest of the world, and that meant news reports, and articles, the current events… One of them was about her, their friend. She wasn't named as of yet, but they knew it was her, they knew… her. And to read about the event that had landed her here…

One of the officers who'd just arrived had gone and shown his phone to Officer Randall, and when he'd read it he'd looked upset. It left them with an impression like something had been printed that shouldn't have been. The group had looked to one another, with a question left unsaid between them. Should they look it up, see for themselves? In the end, the reasoning became that they were going to find out sooner or later. Rosa had once again been the one to dig it out for them, and it hadn't taken long for her to find what she figured had to be the thing that upset her partner and former training officer.

"She was undercover," Rosa whispered.

"What?" Maya blurted out, as did Riley, and Asher, and a few more of them. It hadn't been more than a whisper, but collectively… They froze for a moment, looking around, before looking to Rosa again.

"Why would she…" Lucas shook his head.

"I guess since she's newer, no one knew her yet, better for a cover?" Dylan offered. It made sense, but even then… All they could think was how impossible it all felt. Their friend, their Sophie, out there, undercover…

Rosa read on, and so the story came together. An unnamed undercover officer had been sent in to help pull a witness into hiding, only things had gone sideways, and the officer and the witness had been made to get into a car. There had been a chase, between the assailant and another officer – Beau Randall, they had to guess. The details grew fuzzy from that point on, except to say that there had been a crash, and a standoff, and in the end the witness had gotten off with barely a few scratches. The assailant had been superficially injured, and caught. As for the undercover officer, all the article said was that they remained unidentified and under care for life-threatening injuries.

"Is that why they're here?" Riley spoke in a smaller whisper than ever, looking to the cops in the waiting room. "In case someone comes after her?"

None of it felt real, none of it felt possible. It felt more like something out of a TV show, not their lives, not Sophie's life. Except it was…

"I know that she couldn't have said anything about it, but… We live with her," Ray looked to Asher at his side, as stunned as he was. "That couldn't have just happened today, could it?"

They'd tried not to get caught up on everything they'd read, what was probably true and what might not. It was hard to think about how, even if Sophie pulled through this, she might still not be able to tell them what had happened to her out there. As for right here and now, there was very little they could do but wait. They could have been anywhere else, more at ease, at someone's home if not their own, but who were they kidding? They'd be doing more or less what they were doing now, here, except they'd be doing it out there. And if they stayed here, well, when the time came where they'd be able to see their friend, they'd be right here.

"Maya…" She looked up when she thought she'd heard…

"Sammy?" she almost bolted to her feet, the quicker to pull her little brother into a hug. "How are you here?" she asked, her voice sounding more like 'I'm so glad you're here.'

"How do you think?" Sam told her, turning even as she looked up to find Shawn Hunter standing there, complete with flowers. "I made it through one class and I couldn't focus. I went back to the house and he offered to give me a ride."

"How are you like this?" Maya moved from her brother to her father, and he gave as good of a hug as she did.

"Hold on, I got another one of these from your mom," Shawn renewed the embrace. "She wanted to come, but it would have been difficult, with the kids…"

"No, I get it," Maya promised him, taking a deep breath, letting it out. She didn't even know what time it was anymore, but it didn't matter. She was just so happy to see them.

"How's Sophie?" Sam asked.

"She's…" Maya started to reply, even as she tried to find what she was supposed to tell him.

"Awake." They turned to find Mr. Mantovani standing there, smiling at them. "And asking for all of you. We promised to obey, on the condition that she pace herself and go little by little."

"Is she… I mean, is everything okay now?" Riley asked.

"There's been no word as to that," Mr. Mantovani replied. "But the doctor said this was all the more reason for her not to outdo herself on the visitors. The group looked to one another. Who would get to go first?

"I think you two should go," Nadine spoke up, looking to Maya and Lucas. They both looked surprised, ready to turn down this offer, but one look around the room showed that the vote was fully supported by everyone else.

So, Maya and Lucas followed Chiara's father out of the waiting room. Without a word, Lucas took Maya's hand, and she gave it a squeeze. One look at him said it plainly. He was as frightened as she was at the thought of seeing Sophie, seeing what state she was in. All day they had been left to consider just how she'd been hurt, and what kind of surgery they had to do on her. No matter what they came up with, would it be better or worse than what had actually been done to her?

All they could hear as they approached her room was the sound of the heart monitor, and then as they came closer, they could make out the sound of Diana Zvolensky's voice, in a low hush, joined by that of Teresa Mantovani. When they got to the door, Chiara's father told them to wait a moment. He went into the room and, a few seconds later, his wife and Sophie's mother emerged from the room.

"You go on ahead," Diana told them. She looked better than she'd done when she first came into the hospital, which they had to take as a good sign, a showing that Sophie might have been out of danger. "Much as I'd rather stay with her, I know there are others who need it as much as I do." After a beat, Maya came forward and hugged the woman, who gladly returned the gesture.

"My father drove up with my brother, he sent these," Maya told her, holding up the flowers.

"They are lovely," Diana smiled. "I'll see about finding a vase."

With that, the three parents moved off down the hall, leaving their daughters' friends standing there to look at one another. This was it.

"Are you going to make me wait all day, I know you're out there…"

Sophie. That was her voice, her perfectly Sophie-like voice. It was a bit weak, but all things considered…

Walking into the room, they first saw Chiara, sitting in a chair she had pulled as close to the bed as possible, as though she might have crawled up next to her wife if not for fear of causing her pain of some kind. She looked a lot less stressed than before, but the stress still very much existed in her brow, and to see the figure in the bed, they could see why.

Their pale, freckle-skinned friend looked as though she'd been showered in broken glass, for all the cuts they could find on her arms, her face… A bandage had been applied which kept her right eye covered, and despite the covering of a gown over her body and a blanket over her legs, they could spot signs of more bandaging under there. Still, for all that, what they could see of Sophie's face said she was just so happy to see them. Between painkillers and everything her body had been put through in the last day, their friend looked positively loopy, and they would wholeheartedly take Loopy Zvolensky after the day _they'd_ had.

"Don't I look drop dead gorgeous?"

"Sophie," Chiara frowned.

"She doesn't like my jokes…" Sophie hummed.

"Hate to break it to you, but it's not working much better here," Lucas told her as Maya came up to the bedside, trying not to let any shakiness seep into her voice.

"You look like hell." Sophie looked at her, a miniscule smile lifting her face.

"See, she gets it."

"Don't you ever do that again, Zvolensky," Maya spoke quietly.

"Yes, Miss Hart, I'll do my best."

"What's the verdict on hugs?"

"Maybe just take my hand for now," Sophie suggested, so Maya took her hand. "Talk about complicated family reunions."

"Word of advice, as I'm guessing you're on a heap of drugs right now, you might want to be careful about what you say around your mom and her folks, yeah?"

"Got it," Sophie breathed.

"Any news about… I mean, are you still…" Lucas struggled to ask, coming to stand by Maya's side.

"They can't make promises," Chiara told him.

"The golden rule," Sophie confirmed.

"They will know more over the next few days," Chiara went on.

"Please, don't spend all that time here. It's bad enough _I_ have to," Sophie insisted. "Go, live your lives, go to school, go to work. You have a wedding to plan for, remember? What is it, four months away now? It's still March, right?"

"Last I checked, but I don't even know what time it is anymore, so who can tell?" Maya nodded.

"Right, well, I'd tell you to go home, but I know you won't do it, so at least go to our house. You know the one?"

"Familiar, yeah," Lucas smiled.

"Go, get some rest, then come back later and tell me what the world looks like? I don't think I'm about to see it again any time soon."

So, with both their friends' blessing, and the promise that their old keys would still work, Maya and Lucas vowed to return the following morning and left the room. Walking down the hall, neither one of them said a word. They let the others know where they were going, which also meant that Melinda Friar, Shawn Hunter, and Sam Hart followed them out, while Asher and Ray went up to have their visit. Leading the trio of cars, Lucas drove them out of the hospital lot.

"I can't decide if her making jokes is a good thing," he spoke after a minute.

"I know," Maya replied. On the one hand, they could see it as 'good old Sophie, back the way she's supposed to be.' But the other hand, and the one they found themselves leaning to… that one said something more like their friend was deflecting, trying to present herself as being good, because the alternative was to show that she was anything but fine.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	69. Their Fear For the Future

March 9th 2020

_Chapter 69  
Their Fear For the Future_

The first time they'd visited their old house in Houston, once the five of them who'd moved out and back to Austin were gone, after Sophie and Chiara had gone about making the place fully their own and soon also Asher and Ray's own as they had – temporarily – moved in… it had been odd. That couldn't be denied. Even so, it felt even odder on this day, as they made their way up there, on their own, with his mother, and her father and her brother, while the rest of them were at the hospital.

"You know, they will be spending a lot of time up in that hospital, and while I would not speak ill of the efforts of their kitchens, I think what they could do with is some home cooking," Melinda Friar declared after the three cars had come to a stop in front of the house and the five passengers and drivers had come to meet on the sidewalk. "I will make a run to the market, and then we will get to it. Would you two care to join me?" she turned to Shawn and Sam.

It was almost too obvious that, while her statement was absolutely true, her motives might have had something to do with giving her son and his fiancée some space to themselves, if for a little while. And for it being that obvious, both Maya and Lucas looked to their families, who'd driven all this way to be with them, and the truth was… Yeah, they could use that little time to themselves. So they didn't say anything to the effect of 'We'll go with you, it's fine.'

"That'd be great, actually," Maya slowly replied.

"Yeah," Lucas agreed.

"Sounds good," Shawn nodded. "I need to pick up some diapers anyway." That was probably a lie, but well-meaning and equally accepted.

"And we should get some dog food, too," Sam chimed in. That… might not have been too much of a lie. Between Trix, Lou, foster dog Max and growing puppy Archer… it might not have been a bad idea to have extra.

Melinda left her car there and got in with Shawn and Sam, and then they were off, while Maya and Lucas turned and made their way up to the door with the number that had been their address for four years. Maya pulled out her keys, finding her old house key, there among their current house's keys, and the theater keys, those to the minivan, and _his_ car, and her parents' house, _his_ parents' house, the Chuckles' apartment, and Zay and Nadine's, Abigail's up in Tucson… So many keys, so many threads of their lives…

Walking in, the place in a lot of ways still felt like their old place, but in other, almost more significant ways, it was so very different. It was Sophie and Chiara's home, not theirs anymore.

"It feels like…" Maya started, unable to come up with an explanation.

"Like we're breaking in?" Lucas offered.

"Yeah," Maya sighed. She looked to the couch, their old couch… They'd helped pick it out, they'd moved it into place, spent countless nights sitting here with their roommates and other friends, sometimes ended up sleeping on this couch… She walked over and let herself sink into it, as she used to, and with her eyes closed she could almost… almost…

The tears came on to her without warning. It was just them now, and it had been such a long and terrible day. She couldn't hold it in any longer. She burst into tears, and soon Lucas was there with her, pulling her close. It felt like she'd been keeping her hand on a charge all day, working relentlessly to keep it from exploding. All day, she'd kept a firm grip on that switch, never faltered, kept it contained. But now she had no more strength in her to keep that switch down. It was okay, no one would feel its touch here except the two of them, in their old house, on their old couch.

Sophie had nearly died… For all they knew, she still might… She couldn't stop seeing her in that bed, couldn't stop imagining what those bandages they saw or didn't see could have kept covered. And she kept hearing the rhythm of that heart monitor, which her brain seemed intent on making her turn into that long, sustained note, the one that said…

"Talk to me, tell me something, anything," she asked Lucas as he continued to hold her. She needed a distraction, and he knew it.

"Right, okay," he took a breath, thinking of what he might talk to her about.

The thing was that, while her reaction, bottled up as it had been, resolved itself in these deep, almost bone-shaking tears, he wasn't exactly unaffected in all this. It was easy for everyone to forget, but before she'd been any of the others' friend, Sophie had been his, back when they'd taken dance class. For a few weeks, she'd just been this presence in his life, this bubbly girl who made those classes even more fun than he'd anticipated. It had been easy to forge this friendship with her, and in time the rest of them had gotten to see what he'd seen.

"All day when we were at the hospital, I kept having the same memory replaying in my head. Started out thinking about that day at the camp, like I said, but when Zay brought up the day when we told her we knew you and the others in the band… It got me thinking about how that all even started. I didn't ever tell you, did I?" Maya shook her head. "Sophie didn't either?"

"I don't think so," Maya sniffled, wiping tears on her sleeve.

"We were talking about music, the songs we wanted the teacher to put on. We'd say silly things, like… the theme to Spongebob Squarepants, or the Monster Mash. And then Sophie, she said she wanted something from TXNY. She asked me if I'd ever heard of it, and it just caught me off-guard that she brought it up that I just sort of kept staring at her, and she must have taken it as me saying I didn't know about the band. I'll never forget, she just said 'Oh, they're this amazing group, all girls, and they're like our age,'" he recited, in an impersonation of the then sixteen-year-old Sophie that left Maya unable to keep from smiling. "'They write their own songs, and I know they're from around here, I would _love_ to go to one of their shows, even if I'm pretty sure I'd pass out if I saw the lead singer in person, she's so pretty...'"

Maya stared at him, her hand moving to cover her mouth, unsure what expression would have emerged. She'd heard all about this infamous 'awakening' crush of Sophie's. To find out she had sort of inadvertently confessed it to Lucas, first, and of all people…

"She just looked at me like she was surprised at herself for saying it, but at the same time she didn't regret telling me."

"She trusted you," Maya smiled.

"She barely knew me, but yeah," he nodded. Maya remained leaned to him, half aware that she'd stopped crying. "So, at that point, I kind of didn't have a choice. "I told her 'yeah, she is,' and she looked so happy that I did know you after all, and then I just said 'she's actually my girlfriend, she goes here.' Her whole posture just shifted so fast, like she realized 'oh, she's _in the same building as I am' _and she wondered what she looked like." Maya chuckled at this. She could absolutely picture it. "After that, that's when I called Zay over, and he confirmed that what I said was true, that the three of you went to our school. And the rest…"

"… is history," Maya breathed.

"If it wasn't for her, I hate to think what would have happened that summer, and after you came back from Philly… _If_ you came back. I was terrified your parents would want to move you back to New York or something. But Sophie came through…"

"Air Zvolensky, the maiden voyage…" Maya told him, her voice drifting on thoughts accumulating in her head.

"Yeah…" Lucas nodded, kissing the top of her head. After a moment, after thinking it a few more times over, she'd slowly detached herself from his side, sitting up and turning to face him.

"I don't know how this is going to come off, but hear me out, okay?"

"Okay," he nodded, unsure where this was going. Maya let out a breath, searching her words.

"We don't know how long Sophie will be in the hospital, but everything tells me it will be weeks. And after she gets out…" She paused, trying to block the words 'if she gets out' from finding a foothold. "After she gets out, she's still going to be recovering for a long time… well into the summer." Another pause, another breath. "You said it yourself, if it wasn't for her… The way things are shaping up, she won't be back on her feet, not really, by… by July. I… I hate to even suggest it, but it wouldn't feel right…"

"You want us to push back the wedding," he said it, seeing as how she kept inching toward the words, setting as much padding as she could, to soften the fall.

"I don't _want_ to," she shook her head, and now the tears were returning. He reached over, holding her face in his hands so he might brush the new tears back.

"Hey, hey, I get it, okay?" he promised, closing her into another hug. "And you're right. For all she's done for us, over the years… I'm with you, all the way. It'll be a good thing. We get more time to prepare… We can make it even bigger. Get some fireworks, get a _trampoline_…" A laugh broke through her crying. "See? It'll be good."

They weren't going to be making any more decisions or even thinking about anything like cancellations and refunds, rescheduling… There would be time for that… until whenever they settled for their new wedding date. As for today, and the days to come, they decided together to keep this decision to themselves. All that mattered for now was Sophie, and ensuring that she got out of that hospital and back on her feet.

By the time Melinda, Shawn, and Sam returned with their bounty from the market, there was no more sign of tears on Maya's face. She and Lucas joined in the effort of cooking up some meals for their friends and their families. Eventually they would be joined by others. Asher and Ray would return, along with the rest of their friends, and Mr. and Mrs. Mantovani. In no time, they had found that Chiara's abilities to rule a kitchen had come right down from her mother. Teresa Mantovani became a fit ruler for the activity, and even Melinda Friar soon deferred to her without question.

"So what's the plan, are we going to be shuttling back and forth from Austin, or are we bunking around here?" Zay asked as they all sat to dinner that night.

"Maya and I figured we'd go and stay with Pappy Joe and Patty," Lucas revealed.

"Joseph's dad said I could stay at their place, and them, too," Rosa added, indicating Riley and Dylan.

"You two can stay here with us," Asher told Zay and Nadine.

"Do you think you'll be okay to go back to Austin, go back to school?" Maya asked her little brother, smiling when he gave her his bread roll.

"I guess so. But you'll call, you'll write?" Sam asked, earning himself a good sister hug.

"You will get tired of me for how much I will write you."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	70. Their Fear For the Reality

**_A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_**

* * *

March 10th 2020

_Chapter 70  
Their Fear For the Reality_

For how slowly the minutes and the hours had seemed to go by on that first night, it felt like a trick had been played on them when they realized a week had gone by. They'd just fallen into this rhythm, being out here on this extended and unplanned 'vacation' away from Austin, and work… not so much school. Much as he didn't feel he was much in the spirit for class, Lucas knew he couldn't take all this time off and fall behind in class. He may have looked at Sophie like she was family, but the university wouldn't see it the same way. Besides, his school was roughly halfway between here and home, so he'd only have to drive about as long as he normally did. Bishop had already insisted on driving him, and so he did, every day he'd gone since. On that first day, he'd been brought his books by Robbie and Ramona, who'd picked up his bag after being let into the house by Sam.

In the meantime, Maya was finding it all too easy to make use of her time in Houston. Sophie had made her promise not to spend her whole days at the hospital with her, and so she'd held up her end of the bargain. She would be there though, twice every day. She'd show up in mid-morning, and she'd stay there through lunch, courtesy of the speed round of cooking they'd done that first night. After that, she'd go and spend time with Pappy Joe, or she'd meet up with some old classmates… She'd visited Shae, and the Hillards, and of course had dinner with their hosts every evening, along with Lucas, when he'd get back from school. And then, in the evening, they'd be back at the hospital so that Lucas could also spend time with Sophie and Chiara.

It had taken until day three before Doctor Gwendolyn Barrett felt confident enough to declare that all tests and examinations showed Sophie to be out of danger. If she continued to be seen to, and if she did as she was told, she could well make a full recovery. As to whether this recovery would mean she could get back to work, Dr. Barrett could only say that this would be up to the doctors who would continue to oversee Sophie's case once she returned to her own practice in San Francisco.

"This is great news, right?" Chiara had been beside herself with joy after the doctor had left the room. It was just them two and Maya at the time, setting up for lunch.

"Depends," Sophie smiled at her. "Can I make my bad jokes now?"

"Why do you do this to me?" Chiara shook her head, though she was still smiling.

"I can't help it, being cooped up in here, poked and prodded morning, noon, and night, the beeping… I can either be a bad patient, or I can make light of my near demise…"

"You know, it's a real shame…" Maya had spoken up from where she sat. Sophie and Chiara had turned to look at her. "If it was Halloween you'd make a killing with the trick or treaters." Sophie had given her such a smile at this; Chiara couldn't even be mad at it.

"Fine, fine, make the jokes, give me a heart attack, go ahead," she'd raised her hands in 'surrender.'

"Well…" Sophie had started, hesitated, and turned to Maya with a one-eyed look like 'you do it.'

"Better in a hospital than anywhere else, right?" she'd gladly taken the hit, making Sophie laugh, much as it hurt for a few beats, she would have deemed it worth it.

Now as the week had gone by, Lucas was at the hospital with Maya on the 'big day' when the bandage had finally come off from over Sophie's eye. It introduced the presence of some still healing bruises, but on the whole it wasn't nearly as bad as they had imagined it. Whatever it had looked like in the beginning, they never had to know.

"How's the vision?" Maya asked, after she and Lucas came back into the room. They'd stepped out while they'd taken off the bandage and checked everything out.

"I just spent a week with only one eye working. It was hard at first, now it's almost the other way around…" Sophie frowned. "And I'm going to have this scar now, see," she pointed as best she could, which was just a bit off for the time being. "Tell me you see it, my aim's a bit off right now," she frowned.

"But it'll get back to normal," Maya promised before her friend could veer down a path where she'd start worrying about what this might mean for her ever wearing that badge again. "And I do see the scar, here," she took Sophie's hand and helped her point it out.

"I want to scratch it so much…" she sighed. Chiara said nothing, but she made a noise that suggested she'd been dealing with these flights of fidgetiness of her wife's for days now. "I won't, I won't," Sophie promised, letting her hand back down. "I don't actually feel like creating any reasons to extend my stay here," she turned a loving smile to Chiara, who could not hold up against that and leaned in to kiss her and mutter something in Italian that made Sophie laugh.

"Didn't catch that," Maya teased.

"Catch what?" Sophie played innocent. "Alright, come on, I've got another itch to scratch and this one won't involve risks of infection or bleeding. What's going on with you two? I know this week hasn't been ideal, but any updates on the wedding?"

Maya and Lucas looked to one another. At this point, they had to wonder. Should they tell her, tell them both?

"What's wrong?" Sophie asked, seeing that turn like a giant 'uh-oh.'

"We actually decided to… postpone the wedding," Lucas revealed. Sophie and Chiara stared back at him, wide-eyed. They looked to Maya now, like they needed her to confirm it.

"Next summer, not this year," she nodded. It was hard for either of them not to sound disappointed about it, even though they'd made the choice for their own very valid reasons, reasons they did not regret.

"But why?" Sophie shook her head, even as Chiara seemed to understand. She looked sad, but also just thankful, too.

"Because you need time to recover fully, and we'd rather wait a year than to not have you there at a hundred percent. We both agreed that it wouldn't be right otherwise, not without you," Maya explained. Sophie opened her mouth to reply, but she had no words. She reached out her hand so Maya would come over and, when she did, Sophie carefully sat up, just enough that she might – very carefully – hug her friend.

"This is madness… Thank you," she whispered.

It had been their last day in Houston. Oh, they would come back, of course, as often as possible, they would, but now they needed to go back to Austin, to get back into their lives. They'd made the drive back, stopping back at the house to drop off their bags and to shower and change, before going on to the Hunter Hart house. They couldn't very well just pick up Sam and the dogs and head back again, no. They were expected for dinner at her parents' house, and _his_ parents would be coming over, too.

"We're going to have to tell them, aren't we?" Maya had asked as they drove up the lane. "About the wedding…"

"Yeah…" Lucas had sighed. Maya had been quietly seeing to making the phone calls they needed to make, the cancellations… They hadn't figured out the new date yet, so they couldn't even see about rescheduling yet.

It had felt as though they'd been away for a month instead of a week as they walked back into their house. Up in their room, they could still find their PJs from that night where they had been dropped in order to get dressed as quick as possible.

"Maya, guess what!" Nellie was there to greet them when they arrived at the Hunter Hart house later on.

"You missed me?" Maya guessed, snatching up the six-year-old, to a chorus of giggles she could have listened to for hours.

"No!"

"No? What do you mean, no?" Maya tickled her sister, to more giggles.

"I mean, yes, but that's not what you had to guess!"

"Alright, I don't know then, what is it?"

"We get to keep Max!"

"Wait, what?" Lucas asked, about a second before Maya was able to say the same. "What about the people who were supposed to pick him up?"

"They couldn't take him anymore. But he's happy here, so Mommy and Daddy said he can stay!" she beamed.

The girls had been so upset, the previous fall, when they'd had to put down two of their dogs. Maya had been even more so, after having raised them from puppies. They'd lost Queen and then Ghost, two weeks in between. Poor Tuck had been the saddest of all, to see his brother and sister go. But as both Shawn and Katy would tell it, having Max around – along with Trix, Lou, and Archer – had been lifting the eight-year-old dog's spirits day by day. The proof was right in how he'd come up to greet Maya and Lucas that day. Just like that, one potential misfortune for Max had turned the other way around, for him and many more.

For happy dogs, they could not have outdone Trix and Lou. The two of them had come bolting toward their humans, who'd been gone for so long, and they had jumped and circled and jumped some more, throwing in enough kisses to make up for lost time. It had been impossible for them to get away from them – not that they would have wanted to – until the Friars had arrived and they had soon found themselves around the dinner table.

As was to be expected, the first topic had been Sophie and the progress of her recovery. She would be left bedridden for some time still, due to the conflict of her injuries preventing her from walking unassisted, or from assisting herself in said walking with the aid of anything like crutches. She could only get around after being – very carefully – helped into a wheelchair, which she could not push herself. Her mother had rearranged her work schedule so she might be on hand to look after her, short of moving her back into the house over in Austin. Much as the proximity would have been helpful where her friends were concerned, Sophie was determined to convalesce in her own home. Her mother would not argue with this. Instead, she would simply see to it that Sophie was provided with what assistance she required. This could only happen once she left the hospital, of course, and that wasn't happening just yet.

"Why do you keep looking at him?" Gracie asked Maya at one point, and of all the people she could have suspected to be busted by, it was not her Mouse Mouse. But now that she'd said it, and everyone had overheard, they suddenly had many more eyes aimed at them.

"Maya?" her mother asked, with a tone like 'is everything alright?'

She looked to Lucas at her side. He gave a small shrug. They were either going to be understanding or they wouldn't for some reason. They really didn't see it going badly, but they just weren't looking forward to questions, and they were definitely going to get a lot of those. They had spent most of the ride over here tonight trying to lock down how to start the conversation smoothly without being abrupt or saying anything that might lead their parents to thinking they were about to become grandparents. 'We have news' or anything along those lines had been stricken off the options in two seconds flat.

"Because of what happened with Sophie… because of the kind of… timetable we're looking at with her recovery," Lucas started them off.

"And because she really means that much to both of us, together and individually," Maya added with a nod.

"We decided to postpone the wedding," Lucas told the people around the table.

"For a year," Maya dropped in the last part, to an already speechless audience.

When they would start back for home later that evening, with Sam and the dogs along for the ride, Maya and Lucas would be left to laugh off how they had sort of predicted the outcome of the announcement, at least where their own summary of the reactions was concerned. It had gone somewhere along the lines of 'well, it could have gone worse, right?' They _had_ been understanding, yes, how could they not? But at the same time they had been looking forward to the day, had made plans that now needed to be unmade and remade a year later… But they understood… Yeah…

There was so much to be said for going to sleep in their own bed again. As comfortable as they had been made at his grandparents' house, this was _their_ house, and _their _bed, and no one would fault them missing it. Still, for all that, they both had trouble falling asleep that night. Eventually, Maya had turned around to face Lucas.

"Do you think she'll get to go back again? To be a cop again?" Maya had to ask. Lucas sighed. He'd been considering this as well, how could he not?

"Leave it up to her, and you know she will," he declared, and Maya nodded. "Except… it's not just her choice, is it?"

"No, it's not," Maya let out a breath, tracing the line of his shirt collar with her finger. "What's going to happen to her if they can't clear her, if she can't go back?"

It was going to crush her, plain and simple. She'd wanted it for the better part of her life, and she was finally doing it. And she was _good_. They were already noticing her, already looking to her like someone who had a bright future ahead of her on the force. To have it be taken away from her so early on… They didn't want to think of what it would mean.

"Whatever comes next, we're going to be there," Maya declared after a few moments.

"We will," Lucas agreed, smiling and brushing hair from her face.

"Maybe I'll suggest doing some more sessions in Houston with Stage Ready… Or even branching out, to one of the theaters out there…"

"Or even that," he nodded. "We'll find a way. She's never let us down, and we're not going to let _her_ down either, not now."

"Not ever," Maya vowed, smiling up at him as he leaned in to kiss her.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	71. Their Day of Caring

March 11th 2020

_Chapter 71  
Their Day of Caring_

The weeks that followed quickly revealed themselves to be something like… one stress replaced with another. It didn't feel right to put it that way, but it was the truth, wasn't it? They had replaced the pressure of deciding very suddenly to get married in a matter of seven months with helping a friend recover from what might have been life ending injuries. No matter what, in both cases, the stress had just been… acceptable… It would all be worth it in the end. They would have the wedding they had been dreaming of, since they'd been… probably kind of young to even be thinking about any of that. And Sophie… They were as determined as she was to ensure that she would be a cop again.

"Oh, I can't wait to meet him," Sophie laughed, looking at the video on Maya's phone, showing Archer the pup. The little Australian shepherd, with the piercing eyes that got him his name, just trailed after Sam, staring up at him all the while, like he might have had a treat hidden on him somewhere. This would lead him to trip over himself and stumble, only to rise again, yapping up at him like he was his favorite human and that counted for something, that something being food… or scratches. Scratches were good, too. "He reminds me of Eloise's dog, Chico when he was a puppy. He's gonna be huge isn't he?"

"Well I don't know about huge, but next to Trix and Lou, yeah, definitely," Maya smirked, sitting at the foot of the bed.

It was just the two of them that morning. Much as she would have preferred to stay there with her wife every day, eventually Chiara had needed to go back to work. Where they were concerned, it didn't matter that Sophie's mother had a fortune… and her fortune had a fortune… They had always worked to live off their own means as much as possible. The fact that Diana Zvolensky was footing the bill for her daughter's care and recuperation was simply out of their hands. They couldn't have kept her from doing it if they tried, but that was all. The other bills still needed paying, and besides Chiara loved her job and it would be good for her to get back to it.

"So… Any word yet?" Maya asked as she was handed back her phone. Sophie sighed, leaning back against her pillows.

"No, and I swear it's because they're waiting for my mother to be here to say it. Twenty-four years old, married, living out of her house for nearly five years now, a _cop_… and I still can't get out of here until they tell my mom it's okay," she declared with clear and earned frustration. "They know she's not going to be there with me all day, right? I told her, she needs to go back to what she was doing before this all started. The best way I'm going to get better is if I can do it my way. I want to be home, with my wife, and our roommates. I'll be good, I'll do my exercises, I'll go to my check-ups… I just can't stand it here anymore."

"Oh, I get that. Couldn't imagine being in here for weeks like you have," Maya looked around the room. As comfortable as they'd made her, it was still a hospital.

She looked a lot better than she'd done that first morning Maya and Lucas had seen her, when she'd finally woken up and asked to see her friends. Her eye had healed up, save for the scar curving around her right eyebrow and dipping toward the bridge of her nose, though it was a neat enough line that it didn't disfigure her in any way. And her vision was as correct as it had been before, which was one less thing to worry about for the young officer. Between her eye, and all those small glass cuts having disappeared, and the fact that she wore actual clothes instead of a hospital gown, her red hair pulled into a lengthening ponytail, she could almost appear completely healed.

Except, of course, those clothes hid what was still happening underneath. It had all been under covers the first day, but over time, and as she'd found herself helping her friend move around, or get changed, Maya had seen it all. As awful as it was to see any of it be on her friend, the way she looked at the whole thing, she didn't mind seeing the bruises as they healed, the cuts as they scarred, the dressings and the cleaning… Every time she saw them, there was less, and that meant Sophie was getting better.

By now, a lot of what remained was everything knitting itself back together, inside and out, and it was also about pain and discomfort, and about Sophie doing all she could to keep moving in what ways her body allowed. She still couldn't bear weight on one of her legs, and the state of her arm was just one of the things preventing her from getting around in spite of that.

If you asked her, of course, this would not prevent her from being left alone at home all day whenever Chiara, Asher, and Ray were all out. There had been some talk of having Mrs. Carlton stay with them for a while, but Sophie wouldn't have it. The woman was getting too old to carry her around and they both knew it. Unfortunately, much as they wanted to put their trust in Sophie's confidence, they only had to look at her as she'd attempt to get out of bed on her own and it would become clear that she really couldn't be left to her own devices, not yet.

"What are you going to do if they do say you can go home?" Maya asked, looking back at her stir crazy friend. Sophie continued to look at her like she was very simply the person she could speak most openly to, cutting no corners the way she might around her mother or her wife, out of a need not to make them uncomfortable or overly concerned. Maya grasped her sense of humor, and she'd be straight with her, too, where others just might not know how to say what needed saying.

"I almost made it to the bathroom on my own earlier," she pointed to the small room inside her room.

"Yeah, almost, and if I'd come five seconds later you would have fallen on your face. And speaking of your face, it really didn't believe you when you said you were fine." Sophie stared back at her like she wanted to argue against this, but there just was no way, was there? She sighed, closing her eyes for a moment.

"You and I, we're so good with finding solutions, making things happen… There has to be a way, and we have to find it. Please?"

"Okay," Maya crawled up until she could sit side by side with her. "Move over, scoot."

"I can't _scoot_," Sophie pointed out, much as she tried and had to be helped.

"Good, so we've established that already," Maya told her.

"Rude."

"Impatient patient." Settled next to her now, Maya looked to Sophie with a smile. "Truth time?"

"Yeah, fine," Sophie sighed.

"You can't be on your own."

"Yet," she insisted on the specification.

"Yet," Maya agreed. "But only for mobility's sake."

"And so I don't break something out of stubbornness…"

"Oh, are you stubborn? Chiara will be so sad she missed the great confession…" Maya pressed a hand to her heart. "Wait, I can record it, say it again."

"You seem to be under the impression I won't shove you off this bed," Sophie countered with a grin. Maya laughed.

"Oh, Willlow…" she thought all of a sudden.

"She's like eight months pregnant, she can't lift me!" Sophie protested.

"Was not suggesting that, please," Maya raised her finger at her. "But she's a nurse, and she's local…" Sophie mimed a huge belly. "_And_," Maya insisted, "She has to know people, she could find you someone to help you out…"

"Yeah, my mother already offered that, I told her I didn't want it. Already had enough of strangers handling me over here…"

"Right, I get that," Maya nodded. She'd definitely seen it in action. Much as she would work with whoever was helping her at the time, Maya could see that Sophie was just more at ease when it was her or one of the others helping her instead, and that was not a reproach on the care she received, it was just a matter of personal comforts. "Okay, then we'll just take shifts," she suggested. Sophie looked at her.

"Shifts?"

"There's enough of us who'd be willing, it'd be easy for all of us to pick a day, or even half a day, and be at the house with you. It'll be much better than you having to be on your own all the time. You look so relieved whenever any one of us shows up."

"See, I told you we could figure this out," Sophie smiled, a glimmer of hope rising up at the prospect of her finally getting out of this place.

They spent much of the next little while with a grid being drawn up on a sheet of paper. Maya would fill it in as they both figured out who might be able to come when. It really wasn't all that hard. In the end, it was like Maya had said. There were a lot of people around Sophie, people who might just be able to make this happen for her. As proof, once the grid was filled out, Maya had taken a picture of it and sent it to all those whose names had been entered, asking if they would be able to be there at the house, with Sophie, in the weeks following her release from the hospital. In a matter of minutes, they had confirmations across the board, along with some alternates in case of scheduling conflicts.

By some miracle, as though the universe had just been waiting for Sophie to have a solution that did not involve her attempting to manage on her own when she could not, her doctor had come to look in on her not long after. She'd examined Sophie, looked over her most recent results, and she had said the words the young officer had been waiting to hear for a long time. She could go home. Everything would soon be in order, so all she had to do was pack up her things and get dressed, and she would be out of here. Sophie took one look at Maya, eyes round with a plea.

"We're going to need to get a sweater on you. I think the weather qualifies as 'nippy' today," Maya smiled at her.

"See, now you're just doing it on purpose," Sophie laughed.

Acting as she believed her friend would want her to, Maya had seen to the packing in what could only be called the 'I'll sort this out when I get home' method of shoving everything as quickly and securely as possible into the suitcase and bags she had on hand, only leaving out what Sophie would need to get changed. This happened with all the care and caution both of them could give, until finally Sophie Zvolensky sat in a wheelchair, her latest flowers held protectively in her lap, ready to go.

She said her goodbyes to the nurses who were currently on the clock, thanking them for all they'd done. Now that she was actually going, she almost looked like she didn't want to go, like it was all happening too fast and she wanted to get to talk to everyone. But now she was being wheeled off down the hall, and into the elevator, and finally… finally, they were outside. It wasn't like she hadn't breathed fresh air in all of the last several weeks, but this time it felt different. This time she was going home.

"Ready?" Maya asked her.

"I'd think I was dreaming, except my body is still a mess and this is definitely real." The smile on her face was so pure, and for having come so close to never seeing it again, Maya never felt more sure that she and Lucas had made the right call about the wedding.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	72. Their Day of Packing

March 12th 2020

_Chapter 72  
Their Day of Packing_

"Okay, wait, what about this one?" Maya came walking back into her brother's room after having replaced her previous choice of a dress with another.

Just as she'd made her turn into the doorway and seen into his room, just as her eyes had still needed to process the image of her brother and his girlfriend sitting on the edge of his bed, kissing, Sam and Cecilia had immediately bolted apart. Cecilia tried not to laugh, while Sam looked mortified. Innocent as it had all been, it was the first time Maya had actually witnessed her brother kissing… well, anyone. It was… It was what it was, and she knew that she could go on and on about how she trusted the two of them to make the right choices, but if she treated this moment as something more than what it was, something she herself had done countless times with Lucas when they'd been their age, then what would have been the point?

"Well?" she finally spoke. "The dress?" After the couple had stared back at her for a few silent seconds, she made a show of turning around so they could get the full effect.

"I-It's nice," Sam managed to speak, though his voice came out in a squeak, which made Cecilia work overtime to stifle a laugh. "Didn't… Didn't you already pick one, what about… what about the one you just had on before?"

"Also nice, but I can't help it if I like having options. Just like _you_ can't help… You know," she gestured to the two of them. After a beat, Sam scooted a few inches further away from Cecilia.

"I kind of liked the other one better," Cecilia declared.

"You think so?" Maya turned to her now. "I was kind of thinking that, too, but then this one does feel a bit more… laid back, simple wedding."

"You could… You could bring both," Sam suggested, still not entirely free of his embarrassment.

"Yeah, you can decide on the day, or you can put one for the ceremony and one for the party," Cecilia added.

"Yeah, that might be best. I know we wanted to pack light, but what's one more dress, right? Okay, well what about you, are you all set?" Maya asked Sam.

"Almost," he nodded. All three of them turned their heads to look upon his suitcase, lying open on the ground, partially filled with clothes and other belongings, partially filled with a sleeping puppy. "He climbed in when I wasn't looking, I can't just move him, look how comfy he is," he indicated Archer. "We're not leaving until tomorrow morning, I've got time."

"I'll help him finish," Cecilia promised. Her own suitcase was downstairs at the moment, next to the couch where she would sleep that night.

"Alright," Maya nodded, keeping her brother's gaze all the while. "I'll go pack this one up with the rest then," she told them, backing toward the door. _"I'm watching you,"_ she signed to Sam, who remained pink in the face.

Even as she was walking back up the hall, smirking to herself as she reached to undo her dress, Maya heard the door open downstairs, heard Trix and Lou barking their telltale happy barks… Lucas was back. Redoing up the back of the dress, Maya went climbing down the stairs to meet him.

"Hey, how'd it go?" she asked.

"Sophie got one look at that mega box of GiGi's cookies you made her and eyes went this big," Lucas informed her, miming for emphasis.

"Did you tell her to pace herself?"

"Nope," he shook his head.

"Good," she grinned, stretching up to kiss him as he locked his arms around her waist.

"Hey, you look beautiful," he declared, and she gave an innocent shrug.

"I was having uncertainties about what to wear on Sunday. I was convinced to bring both."

"I like both. Both is good," Lucas nodded.

"So, aside from treats? How's she doing?"

"Stressing a bit about going in for her check-up on Monday," he reported. "Her arm's still bugging her and so long as that's going she can't get around by herself," he went on to explain when Maya's face had gone into 'why is she stressing, what's wrong?' mode.

"Oh, right…" she frowned.

"Anyway, we spent the afternoon talking about summer camp, when we were counselors," Lucas went on as they climbed up the stairs toward their room. "Somehow some of the kids heard that she'd been hurt and they sent her letters. She couldn't stop smiling."

"Yeah, _somehow_," Maya turned to look at him as they reached the top of the stairs. "Looking all innocent there, but I don't believe you, Friar," she smiled. "Couldn't possibly be another of their counselors who, knowing how to reach them and how much it would mean to our young officer, decided to set things in motion, could it?"

"Might be possible," he shrugged.

"Right… Unzip me, please?" she pointed over her shoulder. He happily obliged. "Got your suitcase down, too, mine's nearly done."

As Maya went about changing out of her dress and adding it to her luggage, Lucas got started with his own packing. Much as he'd had a long day, with class this morning and a cancellation allowing him to take Rosa's Sophie shift for her, right now he wasn't even a little bit tired. He would look to his fiancée, and he would see how excited she was for the upcoming weekend, and he wouldn't know how to be anything but happy and awake.

Not quite forty-eight hours from now, Abigail and James would be getting married, in Tucson. The four of them, Sam, Cecilia, Maya, and himself, were leaving for the airport bright and early the next morning, hence the mini sleepover for Sam's plus one.

"By the way, had my first experience of watching one of my siblings… making out…" she made a face like she was just on the edge of queasy, which was something of an exaggeration, but still expressed some of the shock it had delivered.

"Wow…" Lucas had to laugh.

"Hey, I mean, it's not fair, most of the other ones are really little, and won't be getting up to any of that for _years_, probably, by which time I could… possibly… get used to the idea, but then there's him over there," she pointed to the wall in the general direction of Sam's room.

"He's in there with her now?" Lucas asked, bordering on dad face.

"Yeah," Maya waved it off. "And, fine, it wasn't really 'making out,' looked very chaste for the whole second of it I got to see before they jumped apart like their lives depended on it. Still, that was… that was an experience," she scratched at the back of her neck. "Don't know what it'll be like when it's one of the ones I've known from newborns, but even him, I look at him sometimes, and I remember how he was the first time I met him and he was only ten years old. Now he's sixteen, and he's in college, and he shaves, and he can drive, and he's… kissing…" she shuddered just a bit.

"Hey, come here," he held out his hands toward her and she moved to join him. She'd figured this to be a prelude for him to give her the old Huckleberry boyfriend move, reassuring her over this grievance toward her kid brother growing up. Instead, he leaned in to whisper something at her ear and she sprang back at once.

"No, no, _no_, ew!" she protested, jamming her hands against her ears and squeezing her eyes shut as though that would expel the words and the images they brought along. "Take it back!" she released one ear, just so she could smack his arm. The sound of his laughing made her open her eyes now, the better give him a few more. "Did you really? No, no, I don't want to know, I don't want to know, ah!" she whirled away from him. He just laughed harder. "You realize of course, now I'm going to have to retaliate. You think _I'm_ scarred for life, buddy, you have no idea what's coming for you." She turned back when his laughter cut short. Oh, he looked scared now. "Yeah, that's right. You played with fire, you're about to get burned."

"What… What are you going to do… exactly?" he asked, his face lifting into a smile that felt more like 'see, you like me, you _love_ me, don't do whatever you're thinking of doing, I'm sorry' than earnest.

"Oh, I'm not going to tell you," _she _was smiling now. "You're just going to have to lie in wait, not knowing... I can still picture it…" she cringed, getting back to her packing.

After an evening that felt oddly quiet, with some people being unable to look other people in the eye, they'd gone off to bed, ahead of their early wake-up call in the morning.

When Maya did wake up, it only took her a moment to know, even with her back to him, that Lucas was awake already.

"If I didn't know any better, I'd think you woke up extra early to make sure I wouldn't get the chance to do anything to pay you back for what you said you saw last night."

"I don't know what you're talking about, I'm just excited to get on the plane," Lucas replied, whispering as she'd done.

"Uh-huh, sure," she replied, her tone showing how little she believed this. Lucas responded by pulling her closer, kissing his way into the crook of her neck. "Oh, what's this, bribery?" she smirked.

"You know, under different circumstances, you would have said something about how if _you_ had to suffer a mental image, then it was only fair if I did, too."

"See, you were helping your case better when you were doing that right here," she pointed to her neck with a sigh.

"Was I?" he smiled. She nodded. "Well in that case…" he leaned in, only to pause when there was a knock at the door.

"No…" Maya complained meekly. "Go away!" she called out.

"Breakfast is almost ready," Cecilia's shy voice was heard out in the hall and Maya turned to Lucas with an awkward smile.

"Sorry about that!" she called out. "Thought you were someone else. We'll be right down!" They were both very quiet for a few seconds, listening to the telltale thumping of the crutch that accompanied Cecilia's retreat toward the stairs. Once they couldn't hear it anymore, Maya turned over so she might be facing Lucas, who looked sympathetic to her unexpected blunder.

"Got a little carried away, huh?" he asked, and she buried her face in his chest so to muffle the laughter.

Breakfast was a quick affair, after which everyone went and got dressed. Their luggage was loaded into the minivan, and they left the house right on schedule. The dogs had already been picked up by Missy Sanderson, who would look after them with great pleasure, back at her house, over the following days where they would be away. She was particularly eager to look after little Archer, saying how it would remind her of when her own dog, Coraline, had been a puppy.

"It's not going to be weird, is it?" Sam asked from the backseat, and Maya and Lucas shared a quick look.

"What's not going to be weird?" Maya asked, looking as though she was attempting to button up her mouth so it wouldn't crack into a smile, or worse, giggles.

"The wedding," Sam told her. "Since you two were supposed to be getting married in a few months and now you're not doing it until later."

They hadn't even thought about it like that, although now that Sam had said it they knew it would probably be a thought growing in their heads over the next few days.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	73. Their Day of Landing

March 13th 2020

_Chapter 73  
Their Day of Landing_

There had been a brief thought of making this into a road trip, making the journey from Austin to Tucson by car instead of flying. But in the end, and for the sake of expediency, they had chosen to go for a plane ride. More time with the family was always going to win the game.

"I'm not going to ask him, because I know he's going to give me that look like I'm just messing with him when I really care, so I'm going to ask you," Maya told Cecilia as the two of them waited for the guys to rejoin them at the gate. "You two nervous about Meet the Parents round two?"

"I'm not," Cecilia smiled.

"Right," Maya nodded, understanding.

"I wasn't really worried when Sam met my dad, he's so stuck in his head a lot of the time, I'm not sure if he didn't think I said he was my friend instead of boyfriend. Either way, he probably wouldn't bat an eye about any of it unless I told him I was pregnant or something, and _that's_ not going to be happening any time soon." Maya had a feeling that, had she had a drink in her hand, this would have had the making of a spectacular spit take. Instead, all she could do was try and play it cool, 'try' being the operative word.

"No, yeah, of course not," she spoke, feeling like her voice was shorting out on her. She was really going to have to smack Lucas again for putting that image in her head. "Anyway, Abigail is great, you'll love her. And she's already looking forward to meeting you, too."

"That's what Sam said, too," Cecilia smiled. "I just hope… I don't know…" she grew shy for a moment. "I really want her to like me," she admitted.

Unbeknownst to the girls, a very similar conversation was happening in the men's room, where Lucas and Sam were washing their hands before they could head out and rejoin Maya and Cecilia.

"What was it like when you met Maya's mom and dad?" Sam asked. Lucas hesitated, looking at the boy next to him.

"Well, I mean… When I met Katy, Maya and I barely knew each other. We were friends, that was all. And by the time the two of us started to become more, boyfriend and girlfriend and all that… well, she'd known me a while. So she wasn't so much meeting me as she was just… trading one label for another, I guess." He wasn't going to bring up how that label had become tainted at some point, after the accident. That was all so far in the past now.

"And Mr. Hunter?" Sam asked, which made Lucas smirk on reflex, thinking of how he still called him that, no matter how many times Shawn insisted that he could call him by his first name.

"Honestly? I was kind of scared of the guy at first," he admitted, which chased some of Sam's concerns from his eyes, turning it into curious amusement.

"Seriously?"

"Hey, he can be kind of intense, especially where his daughters are involved, you know? He wasn't really even her dad yet, not technically, but he _was_ kind of that, in every other way he might have been. You know the 'you even think of hurting my little girl, there won't be a safe place to hide' kind of… No, guess you wouldn't," Lucas answered his own question, while Sam shook his head.

From what they'd heard of his first meeting with Graham Winstead, Cecilia's father, the man had been entirely welcoming when he'd met Sam for the first time. Of course, like with Maya and Lucas, Sam and Cecilia had not been dating then. But then again, it hadn't taken nearly as long for these two to shift from friends to a couple, and where anyone with working senses of any kind could have seen the turn for Maya and Lucas while they'd still been ridiculously clueless… Even someone generally attentive to their surroundings might have missed the transition, so when you threw a man like Professor Winstead into the mix… The man was the type you'd feel the need to check up on, to make sure he remembered to eat or go out for fresh air or sleep, while he was working all those long hours.

He was a master in his field, no doubt to it, but where his daughter was concerned, even he would admit he had his failings in being observant. It had already been a problem before the accident which had made him a widower solely in charge of an injured twelve-year-old in need of a lot of care. In a twisted way, Cecilia had told Sam how the weeks and months following the accident had been the most time she recalled spending in direct and undistracted contact with her father. It could have been a time she would cherish, if not for the fact that she had ben coping with the loss of her mother, and the pain of her own injuries. Eventually, things had changed again, not going back to the way they'd been exactly, no, but… But her father had found himself diving headlong back into his work, maybe because it was easier than to deal with his own loss.

"Can I tell you a secret?" Sam asked. Lucas looked at him, his eyes asking without words just how secret they were talking. What about Maya? "I wouldn't be surprised if Cecilia said something to her on her own," Sam revealed, so Lucas nodded. Go ahead. "I think she's more nervous about meeting my mom for how it'll make her feel than for whether or not Mom likes her." Lucas wasn't sure he followed. "Of course Mom's going to like her, that's not even a question. She's going to love her. And she's going to super attentive to her, the way… the way a mom would, I guess."

"Oh…" Lucas understood now. It was going to make her think about her own mother, and she didn't know how it would cause her to react.

None of them brought up the subject as they reunited and soon boarded the plane. They spent the flight more or less talking about anything _but_ Cecilia's meeting Abigail… or anything about the previous evening and _that_ ball of awkwardness. They'd played a bit of musical hair with the seating arrangements, as they sat two by two, one row behind the other. Maya and Lucas, Sam and Cecilia, then Maya and Sam and Lucas and Cecilia, then Sam and Lucas and Cecilia and Maya… It made the movies they'd put on in the front and back row feel like the weirdest mash up.

But then, finally, they had arrived in Tucson. It was a short flight, but long enough to make them glad to have reached the ground again.

"So, what's the plan?" Lucas asked as they were all waiting to get a hold of their luggage.

"What do you mean?" Maya asked back.

"Are we going to Abigail's, or James', or Luna's, or…" Officially, the Lanes wouldn't be moving into the Hart house until the day after the wedding, shortly before the newlyweds went on a short but earned honeymoon. Unofficially, with their house being down to boxes more and more every day, James, Teddy, and Emma had been sleeping at the Hart house for two weeks already and proving that their reconstituted little family was sailing like a dream.

"They're not doing the whole 'can't see the bride before the wedding' thing until tonight," Sam informed Lucas. "James is going to stay at Aunt Luna's. He was going to get a hotel room, but Grandma insisted." Maya snorted. There was no arguing with Elizabeth Hart on this.

"So, your house then. Got it."

"Wedding central," Maya declared, with just the slightest shared look, shared thought with Lucas over what Sam had asked them earlier. Was it going to bother them, all this wedding stuff? They wanted to say it wouldn't, but then what if it did?

The retrieved luggage was packed into their rental car, and they were off. Maya drove this time around, leading her passengers into a rousing bit of car singing, the better to lift moods and loosen nerves. By the time they arrived at Abigail's house, she was happy to find nothing but smiles. Now they just needed to hold on to those.

Sam had used his key to let them in, and the door opened to release a load of sound, voices talking over one another, laughing, running…

"Moo-oom! Cara's trying to cut my hair!" Eliza's voice screeched down from upstairs a moment before the girl came barrelling down the stairs. She nearly tripped over her feet when she noticed the group just inside the door but recovered her balance and immediately dove into her big sister's arms for the protection of her untouched hair. Cara appeared a moment later, like a girl on a mission… for damage control, with Emma following right behind.

"I wasn't going to do it!" Cara insisted on her innocence.

"She was going for the scissors, that's when I made a run for it," Eliza accused, looking back up at her other sister. Cara still denied it, leading to a bout of 'did not, did too, did not, did too' that lasted until Abigail emerged from the kitchen to put an end to it.

"Please, can we not do this right now, I… Sam!" she stopped when she spotted her son, who happily moved to embrace her. "The morning just got away from me, I thought you weren't going to arrive until later… Maya," she smiled, extending one arm to receive her stepdaughters. This came only so long as Eliza could be part of the embrace, too, as she would not let go of the protection of her oldest sister in case her middle sister got any more ideas.

"So how's _your_ day going?" Maya joked, making the bride laugh before letting go of both Sam and her – and Eliza – before approaching the pair still standing near the door. Lucas stood by Cecilia's side, like a support beam. A moment later, remembering himself before Maya even had to nudge him, Sam dashed back to stand by his girlfriend's side to make the introduction.

"Mom, this is Cecilia, I've told you about her… m-my girlfriend," he declared, reaching for her hand to hold. He could always be counted to find himself standing on the side of her free hand, the better to hold it, and this notion seemed to give them both a boost of courage in that moment. Eliza let out half a giggle at her brother's shyness, only to have it silenced by Maya's hand finding its mark right on time.

"Oh, yes, I'm familiar," Abigail chuckled. "I don't know half of what college has been like this year, but I've heard so much about you that I feel like I already know you," she went on to tell Cecilia, who couldn't keep from smiling at this.

"Cecilia, my mother," Sam completed the introduction, as little as it was needed at this point.

"Well, I know all about how his classes have been going, so I can fill you in," Cecilia told Abigail, and whatever fears she may have had about the effects of her bonding with Sam's mother, she had quickly shown her more unshakeable colors for now, establishing herself as someone Abigail was going to enjoy getting to know.

"You go on up and get settled, the girls will show you the way, I'm afraid I need to deal with some floral fiasco. Cara, you come and help me, and no haircuts. Cecilia, you can come right back around and tell me all about what you know about what my son's been up to that he hasn't taken the time to tell his mother."

It was a miracle they all succeeded in holding their laughter until after Abigail had gone, getting a look at Sam's panicked face.

"Oh, Sammy, you're in trouble now," Maya crooned at her little brother's ear as she kept hold of the giggling Lizard in her arms.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	74. Their Day of Dressing

March 14th 2020

_Chapter 74  
Their Day of Dressing_

Saturday proved to be as much of a whirlwind one they got to Tucson as it had been back in Austin as they had hurried to get to the airport for their flight. Abigail and James were having a very small and uncomplicated ceremony, but even that required a lot of preparation. And as any of them present that day could attest, sticking any large number of people in one house on any day was bound to bring extra amounts of chaos to disrupt the flow of activity as much as aid it.

By the time evening rolled around, they were glad to stop and settle down for some conversation once the kids – and James – were out of sight. Sam, in support of his future stepdad, had accompanied him and Teddy over to Luna's house, where they were to remain until the next morning, and where they would be getting ready for the wedding. He had hesitated at the thought of leaving Cecilia behind, even though she still had Maya and Lucas there with her, and even though she and Abigail and his other siblings were all getting along wonderfully. Maya had just briefly glimpsed Cecilia quietly reassuring Sam that she would be alright before kissing him, and to see how he looked at her now… The boy was so in love…

"How's your friend doing?" Abigail asked Maya and Lucas as they sat there in their quiet after the storm.

"About as well as she can be doing, all things considered," Lucas declared with a nod.

They found themselves in a complicated place at times, when they would be asked for news of Sophie. Much as they were close to the people who asked, much as they trusted them, there were some things they didn't think it would be appropriate for them to share. They weren't going to go and tell Abigail about how she'd been having nightmares, and it would wake her up only to have her find herself sort of stuck where she lay due to her mobility issues. The thing was that she didn't want Chiara to know, didn't want to give her more to worry about, but then she didn't have a choice. Even though she didn't want to pull her into that side of her recovery, she was just as thankful that she was, or else she might not have found sleep again.

"She must really mean a lot to you," Abigail went on, and there was no need to wonder what she meant there. She'd been just as surprised as any of their other parents when the news had come down that they'd decided to postpone their wedding for a year so that one of their friends would get a chance to get back on her feet. Abigail was on the outside looking into their lives for a lot of things, but she still knew of Sophie, had met her a few times… It didn't lessen her surprise over the decision any more than it had done for those of their families who had known the young woman for so many years.

"Can't be put into words," Maya nodded, looking back to Lucas. _But it can be put in what we're doing now._

For once, the spaceship in the attic was Maya's room once more, and much as it was hers, as it had been since the move from New York, much as it would remain hers even as the Lanes moved into the house… It would still feel as though she was reminding herself every time that this space was hers whenever they were here. They would visit, once a month, more than once if the opportunity struck, and it kept leaving her in awe that there was this room, standing year round in the event that she should visit. They wanted her to consider this place as her home, too, as much as she could do so of her other parents' home back in Austin. It had taken some time, but she really felt she was coming around to losing that notion in her like she was only a visitor.

If she needed to call it proof, well, there was what she and Lucas had gotten up to once they'd retreated up there for the night.

"Never did that here before…" he declared, his heart still hammering in his chest.

"Almost did a couple times," she chuckled, her ear planted near enough that she could hear that drumming very well. If it wasn't for them actually being interrupted by one of her siblings, there would be the belief that it would happen, sooner or later. It hadn't even crossed their minds tonight. "Hey, Lucas?" she asked, pulling herself up enough that she might see his face.

"Yeah?" he smiled, closing his arms around her.

"I want us to pick the new date. Now," she nodded, and it made his smile grow.

"I like the sound of that. Why now though?" he had to wonder. She shrugged.

"I keep thinking about what Sam said, and then all the questions like… why did you do it, are you sure about this, so when _are_ you getting married, if you're still getting married…" she rattled off. "Right now we're sort of in limbo. The wedding was so much a part of our lives for weeks with all the planning we were doing, it was becoming so real and now… now it's floating again. So I want us to anchor it again, I want to make it a… a _then_ instead of a _when_," she explained, making him laugh.

"I love that," he nodded, which got her grinning.

"Thought you might," she told him, stretching up to kiss him.

"This is starting to feel less like picking a date and more like the start of round two," he pointed out after a while, pausing for breath.

"Can't help if I need a little… inspiration," she smirked, doing the same.

"Uh huh," he kissed her one more time before turning to grab his phone and bring it to where they might look together at a calendar of the following year… 2027… "July again?"

"Maybe, maybe not," she hummed, happy to cause distractions in walking her fingers along his chest, especially when she'd catch him reacting to anything ticklish.

"Right, well… hey, hey!" he stalled her hand, which got him a full blast of those innocent blue eyes turned up at him. "That really doesn't work under… circumstances," he pointed out, which got her breaking character and laughing again.

"July sounds good," she nodded, then, looking to the calendar on his phone, she had a thought and prodded one number, which brought up the day itself. Friday, July 2nd, 2027. "Look. Two-seven, seven, two… Or seven, two, two-seven, depending how you write your dates, either way… That's a good number, don't you think?"

"That's a very good number," he declared, smiling back at her.

"Good. Now, put the phone away," she whispered.

"Right now, doing that," he nodded, blindly setting it back.

The next morning started bright and early. Lucas and Maya climbed down from the attic and went about collecting their young siblings, those of them here today. Teddy had gone along with Sam, so they might be with James, so it left Cara, Eliza, Emma, and Wyatt, along with Luna's girls, who were to be flower girls that day and would want to be getting ready with their cousins, and also with Maya and Lucas and Cecilia. Eliza and Emma had had the idea that they should make breakfast for Abigail, because it was her very important day and she was the bride. They couldn't say no to that brilliant idea, no, they could not.

When Abigail had come downstairs and discovered this treat set out for her, there was no doubt that they had all succeeded in making her feel special. She learned who the instigators of this project had been, and she'd pulled them both into her arms, kissing the tops of her young daughters' heads.

Soon enough, breakfast had to make way for the final preparations leading up to the wedding, now only a few hours away. Cecilia and Cara had teamed up to get all the littler girls ready, as Lucas did the same with Wyatt, which left Maya to see her stepmother into bride mode.

"Wow, I love that…" she beamed when she finally saw Abigail's dress.

"You think so? It's not too…" Abigail nervously asked, making a gesture that completed her sentence as 'too sexy or revealing.'

"What? No, are you kidding? Very decent, all the while telling everyone 'yeah, that's right, four kids,'" she flourished, getting her stepmother to laugh and forget some of her nerves.

"Alright, I trust you," she nodded. Soon, Maya was zipping her up into the dress and she could look at her reflection in the mirror. The nerves had a revival here, as Abigail breathed in and out, setting her hand to the pendant around her neck.

Maya knew it had been a gift from her father, Kermit, early on in their relationship. She'd had it on for as long as Maya had known her, and many years before that of course, but since he'd passed away it had taken on a new meaning. When she'd started seeing James, there had been a question like whether or not she should keep it, but then he would never have asked her to take it off. He had this old twisted coin he carried in his pocket wherever he went, something his late wife had found and 'gifted' him on their first date. He still had it now, and he would continue to have it.

Today though… Today the both of them were about to marry other people, marry one another, and Maya could see at least where Abigail was concerned, how much the memory of Kermit weighed on her in this moment. Much as he had been one thing to Katy, to Maya, back in the day, when he had met Abigail he'd been another person. No one had loved him just the way she'd loved him. And today…

"I think wherever he is right now, he's gotta be so happy for you," Maya spoke quietly, finding herself reaching to the chain around her own neck, where she wore the old guitar pick. Abigail looked at her, seeing this, and she took another breath, pulling her stepdaughter into a hug.

"I hope _you_ know how glad I am that you're here today."

"Wouldn't miss it," Maya smiled. "Now, have a seat so I can do your hair."

Once she'd done her part, Maya had left Abigail to do her makeup, going off to see what the others were up to. No unwanted haircuts had been administered, and instead she found all the girls running about in their dresses, hair done and everything, along with Wyatt in his little suit, which was nothing short of adorable and made Maya anxious to see him in one again, July after next…

"Starting to see why you couldn't make up your mind on what to wear…" Lucas stood from where he'd been texting with Sam, sitting on the couch, when she came down the stairs.

"It was very hard," she nodded dramatically, which made him snort. "So, what's he saying?" she asked, nodding to his phone.

"Everything's right on track, they're almost on their way, waiting for the okay here."

"Great, Abigail's almost ready now. Wait until you see her dress, it's perfect… Possibly giving me ideas for a couple changes on mine, nothing big but just… I don't know," Maya shrugged.

"Well, you've got time, yeah?"

"One year, two months, twenty days, but who's counting?" she came up to him, reaching to straighten up his bow tie. "I like this," she informed him, tapping the bow. "It's like you're wrapped, and I better not finish that thought, I hear the wild bunch coming from upstairs…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	75. Their Day of Cheering

March 15th 2020

_Chapter 75  
Their Day of Cheering_

Neither Maya nor Lucas could recall ever going to a wedding – and they had been to their fair share in their lives – where they knew every last guest to some degree or another. There was always a selection of distant relatives or family friends that they had never met. This would mean any number of conversations, introductions, with strangers.

The day of Abigail and James' wedding, the closest thing to a stranger they had was James' college roommate, and they _had_ met him, when they'd been up in Tucson the month before for James' birthday, along with his family. After him, they had some of both James and Abigail's co-workers, who they'd met a couple of times, and some of James' family… There were about forty of them in total, all of them fitting comfortably in the backyard, where they had installed chairs the previous afternoon.

"Hey, where's Mom?" Sam appeared out of nowhere, and to see him there in _his_ suit, his hair taken from its sometime ridiculous heights into a neat, combed back style… Maya had been the one on the receiving end of the question, and she barely heard it, too busy seeing how grown up her little brother seemed now, how grown up and how just…

"You look… so much like Dad right now," she had to say, feeling that small twist to the heart that came with the strongest of her good memories of Kermit now that he was gone. It didn't spare Sam either, whose eyes seemed to say he'd thought it, too, when he'd seen himself in the mirror, but he hadn't believed it completely until now.

"Yeah?" he asked, as Maya came up and squeezed his shoulders with a smile.

"Big time. Abigail's upstairs, if you want to go see her, maybe let her see you before she's walking down the aisle, yeah?"

"Okay, I just have to make sure she doesn't see James and he doesn't see her. He's coming up from the car now, walking around to the backyard."

"Got it, Eagle One in flight," she smirked as they started to head to where they needed to be. "Wait, wait," Maya turned back and caught hold of her brother again, hugging him close. "Wanted you to be the first to know," she leaned in to his ear and shared the new date she and Lucas had picked the previous night. Sam beamed.

"I'll be there," he nodded.

"Better be," Maya laughed, just as her brother's eyes widened and she turned to find, as expected, Cecilia, all ready for the ceremony. "Make heart eyes on your own time, you're on bride-mom duty, go, go, go," Maya nudged Sam toward the stairs and he went, stealing a good few looks back and almost tripping twice as he went. Maya tried not to laugh, looking back to Cecilia once he'd gotten out of sight. "You good?"

"Glad for the crutch right now," Cecilia replied, a pink flush at her cheeks.

Out in the yard, Lucas had been working to help coordinate the arrival of guests and directing them to find places across the chairs. There was no bride's side or groom's side to the whole set up. Today was a day about bringing together two families into one, and they had chosen to reflect this here, asking for the guests to mingle amongst themselves as well.

"He's coming, he's coming!" Wyatt came hurtling toward Lucas with a giddy smile on his face.

"James is coming?" Lucas guessed, stalling the boy before he skidded off and ended up getting grass stains on his suit.

"With Teddy," Wyatt nodded, a curious look growing on his face after a moment. "Do I have to call him Dad now?"

"Do you want to?" Lucas crouched down to get at his eye level.

"Sorta…" Wyatt admitted, looking shy. "One time I did, not to him, to Cara and Eliza, and their faces looked weird."

"And now you don't know if you should." The boy nodded.

"But that's what he is, right?" How he was supposed to respond to this, Lucas didn't know. Was it even his place to do it?

"Do you understand why the girls reacted like that?" he asked. Wyatt considered this a moment before shaking his head. Lucas wasn't sure if it would have been easier if he'd said yes. "They… might be worried about what it means about your dad, your other dad, Kermit?" He'd made certain not to throw in any word like 'real' dad, because what would that make James? And now that he'd pointed out the issue, Wyatt was all at once catching on and left perplexed.

"He's Dad, too," he declared, like it went without saying as far as he was concerned.

"Good, then you tell them that. And if you want to call James your dad, too, then you do it. I have a feeling it'll make _him_ happy to hear it." That was good enough for him, and Wyatt was off again, running to find James. Going by the smile that came over the man's face as he hoisted the boy in his arms, Wyatt had gone ahead and staked his claim.

There had been plenty of questions along those lines in the days and weeks leading up to the wedding. Maya had told Lucas how the girls had been wondering whether they'd have to change their names once their parents were married. As far as they knew, a decision hadn't been made yet, but the belief was very much that, if or when that choice was made, Abigail and James wouldn't do a thing until they'd consulted all seven of the kids. Maybe, as Maya assumed, it would happen today, seeing as they were all in one place and would not be so again for weeks after this.

Maya had been 'guarding' the back door since James and the boys had arrived, acting more as a liaison between everyone inside and outside, as they awaited the moment where everyone would be taking their positions and the ceremony would begin. She spotted Lucas standing across the yard and smiled over at him.

_"Everything going okay?"_ she signed.

_"As far as I can tell,"_ he signed back. _"How long before it starts?"_ Maya scanned the yard, seeing how everyone appeared to have arrived and taken their seats. The officiant was in place, James and his best man, too… She took out her phone and tapped out a text, waited on the spot while she waited for a response. Once it came, she smiled and whistled to their music guy, who got the tune started and effectively brought the whole yard to attention. The wedding party took its place, ready to lead their bride to her groom.

"Hey," Maya smiled, when she and Lucas rejoined.

"I was hoping I'd run into you," he joked, making her laugh.

"Same to you," she promised.

Looking over her shoulder, she made a funny face at flower girls Ginny and Sadie that got them both to giggle, and nearly had Sadie spill her flowers ahead of time, a crisis soon averted. And then here was Abigail, their glowing bride, on the arm of her eldest child, cutting quite the figure and looking very proud to stand as his mother's escort to the altar.

Up the makeshift aisle they went, and the closer they got to the front, they were able to catch the moment when James saw Abigail. Much as the both of them had never expected or really gone out searching to find someone new after they'd lost their respective first spouses, here they were today, given fortune in their misfortunes for having found one another, for having found a new and very true love. It wasn't just about the two of them, and that was possibly the thing that had solidified their union. It was about all of them, about Abigail and James, and Maya, and Sam, and Teddy, and Cara, and Eliza, and Emma, and Wyatt… and who knew, maybe someone else, too, in the years to come.

Abigail and Sam stopped when they reached the end of the aisle. The flowers were passed on to Cara, who quickly embraced her mother before getting back in place, and then after mother and son embraced as well, Abigail set her hand in the one James held out to her, and they came to stand side by side, looking to one another with those unbreakable smiles.

Lucas had wondered whether those thoughts of his and Maya's wedding, the one that was supposed to have happened three months from now, would be pushed to their peak once they stood here, watching Abigail and James say their vows to one another. But then he was looking to Maya, and she was looking back at him… and maybe she'd had it right, the night before, when she'd said they should pick the date again. Now they were looking at each other and his mind wasn't sad for what might have been. It looked forward to the year to come. If not for the fact that they had decided, out of the blue, just after midnight on New Year's Day, that they were going to do it all this year, they probably would have done it next year, wouldn't they? Maybe that was just when it was meant to happen for them.

It was good and done before they knew it, and as James and Abigail were proclaimed husband and wife, they were cheered by none louder than by their children. Wyatt had been the first to rush at them, where he was scooped up by his new stepfather. Never to be left out, Eliza had been next to go up, and Emma came right along with her, the best friends now sisters going hand in hand. It didn't take long after this for the others to follow, Cara and Teddy, coming from two sides but almost at once, too, and then Sam, who circled about and caught his big sister by the hand, bringing her so they might close around the group. Soon after they'd return to Austin, a picture of this moment, snapped by Luna, would be printed and framed and hung on the wall back home, with other family photos. They had one, too, where they'd been made to stand a bit more formally, facing the camera and giving their best smiles, but that first one was just made for memories to display.

The newlyweds had disappeared off into the house under a shower of confetti soon carpeting the yard. They would get some time to themselves, to properly let everything sink in, and in that time the yard would morph from ceremony mode into a party, with tables for the guests, for the food…

"You alright there, Grandma?" Maya stopped by Elizabeth Hart, sitting once again now that her chair had found its way to her table. She would sit here with her grandchildren, and in that moment she looked lost in her head.

"Oh, yes," the woman smiled, patting her granddaughter's hand as it sat on her shoulder. "It was a beautiful wedding," she declared, genuinely, even as Maya guessed she'd been caught in thoughts of her late son. His presence seemed unavoidable today. "It'll be you, next," Elizabeth went on. "Next year."

She might have been the one who was the most okay with the shift in the date. She respected Maya and Lucas' decision, their reason, so very much. Her father and two of her brothers, she'd told her granddaughter, had been cops themselves, something she hadn't even thought to wonder about until then. Her youngest brother had been one of them, and they'd nearly lost him once.

"Tall, gangly limbed all his life… His name was Francis, but the guys at his station nicknamed him Kermit the Frog. I was pregnant with your father when we did lose him, six days away from giving birth, and when they handed him to me, well…" she gave a sad smile up to Maya, who leaned over the back of her chair to wrap her arms around her. For having come so close to never knowing the woman, she couldn't imagine her life without her now.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	76. Their Day of Dancing

March 16th 2020

_Chapter 76  
Their Day of Dancing_

"I need to go and get changed before they come back out," Maya went to find Lucas, who was helping set up the food table. All of it had been brought by their guests, per Abigail and James' request. They weren't looking for gifts, so everyone was welcome to bring something for the meal, or a dessert, or drinks, and they were also all encouraged to make donations to any of the charities they had indicated on everyone's invitations. That had not stopped a few of the guests from also bringing something for the newlyweds, but on the whole their wishes had been respected.

"Wait, wait," Lucas caught her up as she went by and she laughed as she found herself in his arms.

"Other dress, remember?"

"But this one is already pretty great, does it have to go?" he lamented with just a flare of exaggeration that kept her laughter going.

"Pretty attached to it, are you?" she asked with a look on her like she was in the middle of an intense business deal.

"Yeah," he nodded and grinned. Taking this information under deep consideration, Maya absently dragged her index along his collar.

"Will you… ditch the bow tie?"

"It's gone," he promised, and she went about undoing it, sticking the thing in his coat pocket.

"Just going to…" she undid the top button on his shirt, inspected the effect. "Alright then, guess I'll keep this one on then," she finally nodded, turning a smile up to him.

"Good deal, good deal," he smiled back, kissing her sweetly.

"I do kind of need to go in there a bit and warm up before they get back out there to have their first dance. If I can just find the Hart-Lane Family Singers out there…" Maya turned her head back to scan the yard.

"Teddy's out there with Sam and Cecilia, raiding the corn chips," Lucas pointed before giving a whistle that got the trio to look up like deer in headlights. Maya pointed to Teddy and motioned for him to come toward her. The call managed to get Cara's attention as well, from where she'd been fixing Sadie Chen's hair after her bun had started to come undone. She finished this quick and hurried to join her big sister.

"You guys good for a warm up?" Maya asked her siblings and got a nod out of both. "Alright, come on, we'll go in the car."

The number was to be something of a surprise for Abigail and James, so they couldn't blow the effect by having the pair overhear from inside the house. It had already been established that Maya would sing them out into their party, to their first dance, but the rest had been quietly prepared by the kids. Cara had been singing for years, though nowadays she did it less and focused instead on other hobbies. As for Teddy, it had not been common knowledge in any way that he might have liked to sing. Maya wasn't sure anyone, not even his father and his sister Emma had ever heard him. But then on that day after the sleepover, after the engagement had been announced, Cara had mentioned to Maya how she might want to do this, and Teddy had been in earshot. He'd come up to the two of them and said he'd like to be part of this as well. There had been practice ever since, between the two here in Tucson and then also with their sister in Austin over calls. This would be the first time they tried it with the three of them in the same place.

"Where are they going?" Wyatt popped up now, and Lucas looked to find he was joined by his cousin Ginny Chen. Both of them had gotten their hands on all the cheese cubes they could make fit into their little hands and would eat one after the other.

"It's a surprise," Lucas told them. "And you two need cups, come on."

The singing trio had been back only a minute or so by the time Abigail and James returned into the yard to renewed cheers. Eliza and Emma emerged to lead their parents to the 'dance floor.' The music came up, and Maya took to the small stage which had been her idea, borrowed from all those years at the Babineaux summer parties. James gave his wife a spin and Abigail laughed as they started to dance and Maya started to sing. The newlyweds really made a beautiful pair as they swayed along, looking to one another.

It was on the second verse that the surprise came to be sprung. Out from the circle of guests standing around the dance floor and looking on, Cara emerged, microphone in hand, harmonizing with her sister, moving toward the stage. Abigail turned her head at the sound of her daughter's voice, and her already happy face grew happier. The girl had barely made it to the stage, to Maya's side, that from the other side another voice was heard, and there was Teddy, with _his_ microphone, walking past his stunned father. He tapped James' arm on the way, giving him a smile and a nod as he continued on to join his new sisters. Now as the newlyweds danced on, they would be so taken with the performance happening before them. In the end, it had far exceeded the trio's expectations. Going off of the expressions on their faces, it could easily be only the beginning of Teddy's explorations into performance, him with his younger stepsister especially.

"I feel like I need to call you Theodore now," James declared as he and Abigail had met up with Teddy and the girls after the music had been relegated to the band again.

"No, please," Teddy laughed as his father gave him a quick embrace.

"Is this what the two of you have been up to all this time?" Abigail asked Cara, who proudly nodded. "You all sounded great together!"

With the performance done, everyone had moved to their tables, and by the looks on some of their guests – the younger ones especially – it didn't come a minute too soon. They had been told to wait before going at the food, and though they'd all managed to sneak in some little bits here and there, it was really nothing compared to all the offerings brought along by the guests. Some of the kids looked just on this side of insulted at being told they couldn't take anything yet, like the food was calling to them. It was a miracle that they waited their turns.

"Our mom was a singer, too," Emma told Maya and Lucas after they'd come back from filling their plates, indicating herself and her older brother.

"Yeah?" Maya asked. It had never come up once while she had practiced with Teddy and Cara over Skype, or today, but now to look at the boy as his sister made her revelation, she had to wonder if this had played into his decision to go up on stage today.

"She would sing at church," he explained now.

"And bedtime," Emma nodded.

"Our grandma sang at church, too," Eliza smiled.

"So did Dad, when he was our age," Cara told her. _Before he got my mom pregnant and his dad kicked him out of the house_, Maya thought.

"Is Grandma Lizzie their grandma now, too?" Wyatt asked, chewing on his bread roll with intent. He'd stuffed the thing with the last of his cheese cubes and seemed to relish his 'invention.'

"Do you know what, I think so," Maya smirked. Elizabeth Hart had spent so many years deprived of her son and his family, and now she looked ready to grandmother any and all who should need her to. She'd gone off to use the bathroom or else she would have confirmed this herself.

"She's going to come and look after all of us while they're on their honeymoon," Cara revealed.

"Five of you and one of her?" Lucas inquired, making the kids laugh.

"We're going to be good," Emma insisted.

"I don't doubt it," Maya nodded, offering her the pick of her cherry tomato hoard, much to her delight.

"They're going away?" Wyatt piped up now. He'd heard all about Abigail and James going on their honeymoon, but going by the look on his face he must not have connected this to mean that they would be gone for any period of time.

"Yeah, but only for a few days," Sam promised him. "Then they're coming back."

This must not have been enough for him, as his cheese-stuffed roll was dropped back in his plate to sink in his veggie dip and he took off running over to the table where his parents sat. Sam and Cara both looked to their big sister like they felt that they'd dropped the ball.

"He'll be fine," Maya promised, though she kept looking over to hopefully see that this would be true. Wyatt now sat in Abigail's lap, where she kept him locked in her arms as James spoke with him. Much as all the kids had come to really love their new stepparent, without a doubt Wyatt had been the one to take his one on the easiest. As his conversation with Lucas earlier would attest, James was Wyatt's dad now, simple as that. And now, as he listened to the man talk, the boy appeared to be growing more at ease again. He would stay with the pair of them for the rest of the meal though, and after a few minutes Maya had gone and taken his plate and his cup over to where he might eat it. He happily did this, standing next to his mother.

After the meal was over, the dessert table had been rolled out, and if the kids had been eager for what had come before, they were downright floored by this new offering. They were still just sort of hovering around the table, not even touching any of it, not after they'd had as much as they had been allowed to have, just sort of… eating with their eyes, when the guests had started having their own turn at the dance floor.

"Come on, let's go," Maya pulled at Lucas' arm until he had no choice but to follow or lose his arm. "They're distracted by all the cakes and cookies right now, but sooner or later they're going to hear the music, and they're going to see people dancing, and they are going to come for you."

"Yeah?" Lucas had to laugh for the urgency she pressed into the statement.

"Are you kidding? You're like tiny girl bait out here," Maya pointed out as they found a spot on the dance floor and he set his arms around her as she put hers around him.

"Is that right?"

"Tall, cowboy type, not about to turn a lady away… They're going to want to dance on your feet until the sun goes down."

"And then what happens?"

"Then they go to bed," she shrugged.

"Got it," he laughed. They swayed quietly to the music for a while. They didn't need much more than this, did they? "So, what did Abigail want to talk to you about earlier?" he asked. She'd come by their table, shortly before the desserts had come out, and Maya had gone with her for a few minutes. When she'd returned, she'd looked like she had things on her mind, not bad things exactly, just… things… He hadn't asked about it before, but now he had to wonder.

"Oh, well, she sort of wanted to discuss the whole name thing. Obviously, my situation is different from the other kids'. She and James, sure, they consider me one of theirs as much as the rest of them, but it doesn't change the fact that the name I have was my father's. Abigail didn't give it to me, neither did James. They're going for a hyphen situation with the others, but me, well… If I'm going to change my name anytime soon, it won't be because of either of them, you know?" she smiled up at him. He smiled back. They hadn't even come to any kind of decision on that yet. "Anyway, she just wanted me to know that, even if we didn't do it on any 'official' capacity, I'm still going to be considered part of both sides, Hart _and_ Lane."

"That's great, yeah?" Lucas asked, smiling.

"More than I can even say," Maya smiled back, setting her head over his heart as they went on dancing.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	77. Their Day of Holding

**_A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_**

* * *

March 17th 2020

_Chapter 77  
Their Day of Holding_

"You don't have to miss class for this," Maya insisted as she kicked off her shoes. She and Lucas had finally gotten up to the attic at the end of the night, once the wedding party was good and done. They were exhausted and could not get into bed soon enough, but then there had been something that needed to be said, to be done.

They were supposed to go fly back to Austin the next morning, them and Sam and Cecilia, but after Wyatt's burst of panic over his parents being gone, Maya had come to the end of the night and reached the conclusion that she should stick around Tucson for a couple more days, to back up her grandmother in looking after her siblings. She'd already told Abigail as much and had been received with gratitude. She was just as aware of her youngest's fears, and she could now go on to her honeymoon with something less to worry about.

But for Maya to stick around Tucson was one thing. She had a job, but that job – unless it involved an actual Stage Ready session – did not require her to be in her office, at the theater, all of the time. She could be here and keep working. Hell, she could look into expanding the program beyond Austin and Houston, into a new city _and_ a new state. The other three though… they all had class to get to tomorrow. They were already going to be missing one or two classes a piece, but there had been no way around that. If any of them stayed here with her, they would definitely miss more than they had to. Alright, it would be understandable if Sam wanted to stay, this was his siblings, too… But then didn't they always say that all of her siblings were now Lucas' as well? If he wanted to stay…

"I know, I do," Lucas promised, taking off his jacket. "I just know I won't feel right about being back there when you're here, helping your grandmother…"

"Okay, maybe, but Sam and Cecilia? It's too short notice, he's got a test tomorrow afternoon. I actually overheard Cecilia quizzing him while they were dancing." Alright, it had hardly qualified as a dance when they were barely moving, but they'd been standing together, swaying, and they looked happy about it. "If he stays here, he's going to miss his test, and he might not get to take it again. And Cecilia needs to go back, too. It'd be better if they had someone to go with them, wouldn't it?"

"It would," he had to agree there.

"You know I am really not looking forward to being away from you for any amount of time, I'm not. I sleep _horribly_ when you're not there," she declared, which got her a chuckle out of him.

"You do?"

"Oh, it's hell," she nodded. "I wake up… two, six times…" she shook her head.

"That's a leap," he pointed out.

"Some nights are worse than others," she shrugged. "And the nights aren't the only bad thing, I mean just the idea that there is any distance between us that involves a 'welcome to' or 'you are now leaving' sign, it gets me all twitchy."

"Twitchy?" he echoed, with a bemused smile.

"Oh, yeah, it's bad."

"Alright, then you can spare yourself that bad feeling if I stay, can't you?" he turned to her, finding she had already swapped her dress for shorts and one of his t-shirts and was now undoing her hair. She still had her jewelry on, and her makeup, which made for an amusing image. At his comment, she paused, like he'd just punched a hole in her logic.

"But if we all did what we wanted all the time, who would we be helping?" she finally countered, walking back to where he stood, still a few steps behind her on the changing. "I'm trying to make it so there's as little disruption as possible, you know that, right?"

"I do," he sighed. Of course, it made more sense to do it as she said, but could he be blamed for not wanting to be away from the one he loved? "If I say I'll go with Sam and Cecilia, can we do something about the next couple of nights after this one?" he teased, getting a 'shocked' look out of her.

"Might be able to do something about that, yeah."

The next morning, as had been the plan all along, they all headed to the airport. They were seeing James and Abigail off to their flight, off to their honeymoon, and soon after that it would be Lucas, Sam, and Cecilia, catching their flight home without their would-be fourth, Maya. The goodbyes to the newlyweds had been a parade of hugs, some of them repeated. Wyatt had easily gone in three or four times to both Abigail and James, and when the last call had come for the pair to get on their plane, the boy had been attached tightly to his mother. It had taken Maya stepping in for him to even agree to let go, and if she didn't hold tight to him he would easily have tried to weasel out and chase after his parents.

If the showing at the first gate hadn't been enough to prove to Maya that she'd made the right call in sticking around, the one at the second gate sealed the deal. He already knew that she was staying, and still Wyatt had tightened his grip on her like he thought she would actually leave with the others after all. He wasn't too eager to see Sam go away as it was, and he'd only left Maya's arms in order to hug his big brother. He still hadn't kicked those fears he'd developed after losing Kermit, they all knew it, but on the whole they could almost forget. There would be clues, day to day, but he was never faced with any genuine separations the way he was today, and that made it all flare up big time. He had lost the ability to trust that, when someone went away, they would come back. If any one of his siblings knew how that felt, it was the one he went back to, as soon as Sam set him down.

"Yeah, I got you, it's okay," Maya rubbed at his back, pressing a kiss to the side of his face, all the while keeping eye contact with Lucas as he came up to say goodbye until her return to Austin.

"Can I get a hug, too?" Lucas asked the boy, who turned his head now and reached out one arm. "Group hug it is," Lucas smiled, hugging his fiancée and her little brother together.

Lucas and Maya had to settle for a quick goodbye kiss, as he then had to go along with Sam and Cecilia, who could only wave at her, while she did the same and incited Wyatt to do the same. Just like that, it was down to Maya, her grandmother, and five of her siblings. All of them had been excused out of school for the morning, but then they'd be taken to their respective schools after lunch. Elizabeth Hart would get Teddy and Cara to where they needed to be, while Maya would see to Eliza, Emma, and Wyatt. They'd left the airport and gone to spend what little time they had left wandering through the mall. After a pizza lunch, they'd gone to make their drop offs.

"You two good to go?" Maya asked Eliza and Emma.

"Yeah," Emma nodded, pulling her backpack on while Eliza opened the back door.

"You're coming to pick us up, right?" she asked.

"I'll be right there when you come back out at the end of the day," Maya confirmed, for their benefit as much as her brother's. Wyatt looked ready to stage a sit-in, right in the front passenger seat of his sister's rental car. Elizabeth had Abigail's car.

"I like that you're still here," Eliza declared, potentially dangerous words to utter near her little brother, and Maya had to state the facts here before they went too far into Wyatt's brain.

"Only for a couple days though, remember? I have to go back to Austin after that, or else who will keep Sam out of trouble?" The girls laughed and got out of the car, dashing off toward the monitor who greeted their return. "Hey, Wyatt, want to show me your class?"

"Okay," he agreed, the tone suggesting he might be under the impression that this was a trick to get him to go, which… well, it sort of was, to a point, wasn't it?

They went up together, the boy holding his big sister's hand in a very 'not letting go' kind of grip. Maya just smiled, squeezing his hand back. _Ditto._ They went up to his classroom, where Maya got to meet his teacher, Mr. Finkle. Wyatt was also very happy to show her his desk, and his artwork where it was on display in the class and out in the hall along with his classmates'. He was just as happy to let his teacher know that his sister was a teacher, too, an art teacher, so she would know all about if his drawings were any good. He was so much jollier than he'd been all morning that she didn't have the heart to specify that she did have her degree but wasn't teaching yet, not exactly.

"Right, bud, I have to let you get to class now, but I'll be right outside waiting for you at the end of the day, okay?" Maya crouched in front of her brother a few minutes later.

"Promise?" Wyatt stared her down.

"I swear," Maya nodded, presenting him with both her pinkies. Wyatt smiled, hooking one of his little fingers with each of hers, one and then the other. "That, my dear brother, is what we call a binding contract."

When she was finally able to leave the school, she got to feel something she hadn't expected, a sort of twinge of concern… Yeah, she'd promised, and as far as she was concerned she would hold her word, every time, but then what if one of those times she didn't get to go, what if… What if something happened, to her or to someone else, and at the end of the school day she wasn't where she'd told her brother she would be? Accidents happened, stupid ones and serious ones both. The day Sophie had gotten into all that trouble, she probably figured she'd go home at the end of the day, back to her wife, her roommates… and instead she'd ended up in the hospital, for weeks, after having nearly lost her life. What if she wasn't there? What if something happened to Abigail and James while they were away?

She had never understood her brother's fears as much as she did then. The kid had gone through something none of them would wish on anyone, to lose a parent, and at his age… He had earned his issues. The best they could do was to support him along the way.

Maya drove off to her aunt's house, to rejoin her grandmother. Yes, she was staying at Abigail and James' house while they were away, but then while the kids were all at school she fully intended to keep up her own routine as far as her daughter and granddaughters were concerned. While Luna was at work and Sadie and Ginny were at school, Elizabeth would tend to the house, cook, bake… Luna would insist that she didn't have to do it, as though she was earning her keep, but then she'd know better than to suggest her mother was doing anything out of any sense of obligation of the sort. It was what she liked to do, and so she did it. That afternoon, Maya joined her for a bit of laundry and cupcake making.

When the time came to head out again, to pick up the kids from school, Maya was very ready, as though Wyatt had imprinted some of his urgency on to her. She drove up to the school with minutes to spare, smiling as she looked to the box sitting next to her and containing four of the cupcakes she'd made with her grandmother, one for each of them. Elizabeth had taken a similar box over to Cara and Teddy's school.

_Maya: How was your flight?  
__Lucas: Lonely. I kept looking to the side and you weren't there. The woman who was going to be your neighbor kept looking back at me like she thought I was sweet on her._

She giggled to herself, imagining the awkward look on his face.

_Maya: Did you tell her you were very lovingly engaged already?  
__Lucas: I did. I even showed her your picture so she wouldn't think I made you up.  
__Maya: Was that a possibility?  
__Lucas: The way she was looking at me when I first said it, maybe. Would have asked S and C to back me up, but they were watching a movie and not paying attention to me.  
__Maya: Just so long as you got it sorted out and I don't need to give you scary fiancée eyes.  
__Lucas: Wouldn't mind seeing those so long as they came with the rest of you._

Their conversation was eventually cut short by Lucas' need to get to his next class and by the exit of the first kids out of the elementary school. Maya got out of her rental and made sure to stand well in view while she scanned the faces for the ones she sought. In no time, there they were, Eliza and Emma having taken Wyatt on as part of their hand-to-hand chain, though he broke away from it as soon as he spotted his big sister by the car. He sprinted over to her and she scooped him up.

"Did you get taller since I last saw you?" Maya asked, which made her brother laugh.

"No," he told her.

"I swear you got taller. Or maybe I got shorter, like that's possible." She set him down, soon to have her young sisters swooping in for hugs, too. "Hey, so I didn't think this through, and we really shouldn't eat in there in case of spills, so maybe we should go and sit over there to have…" she reached into the car and pulled out the box of cupcakes.

The plan was fully approved by all. They were more than familiar with their grandmother's recipe, and it would be a challenge just to eat the cupcakes and not inhale them. Sitting with them as they told her about their afternoon in animated voices and hand gestures, Maya thought of how she'd have to go back to Austin in a couple of days. Being here like this with all of them, her brothers and sisters of the Hart-Lane side, she would experience her own bit of separation anxiety whenever the time came to leave them again. The difference between her and Wyatt, of course, was that she had the power to decide and come see them on the spur of a moment, as she had since their relocation to Arizona. She'd keep those going, of course, though now she was cooking up a plan to have them over in Austin in the summer, all of them, and maybe her cousins, too…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	78. Their Music to Run

March 18th 2020

_Chapter 78  
Their Music to Run_

"Is it weird that it's kind of blowing my mind right now? You are twenty-five years old as of today… _Twenty-five_," Maya whispered almost reverently.

"Why does it make me feel closer to seventy-five when you say it like that?" Lucas laughed as they both lay there on their sides, facing one another, with barely inches between them so that their noses nearly brushed.

"I'm sorry, it's just really hard to believe that now, every day, you're getting closer to thirty than twenty," she grinned.

"Here I thought I'd earn respect in my _old age_," he sighed, making her laugh. "It is kind of crazy to think about it though," he finally admitted.

"Right?" Maya nodded, reaching to hold his face in her hands. "Happy birthday, Huckleberry."

April had disappeared into May already, and it brought with it the impending end of school for many of them, the start of summer… There would be some of course, like Maya, where these weeks wouldn't so much be the end of one thing and the start of another and more… well, more of the same.

No, that wasn't true, was it, not exactly… Back in April, when she'd been in Arizona with her siblings, she'd started to get this idea. It had come together, little by little, in scribbled notes on paper or on her phone, and then by the time she'd returned to Austin, on Thursday morning, she was putting in an e-mail to Siobhan at the theater, asking if they could have a meeting.

_Stage Ready Summer Camp._

She knew plenty of kids, from some of her siblings, to some of the kids who'd been attending the regular sessions at the theater, or fans of the band who had communicated with her and the others over the years, or some tales from Lucas and Sophie and the other former camp counselors among them, who would love something like this. They would prefer to spend their summer singing and dancing and doing everything that Stage Ready did, instead of whatever a regular summer camp would ask of them or offer them. She didn't imagine that this was an entirely novel idea, but it would be something to expand the program they had at the theater the rest of the year.

It worked in her favor, along with the fact that Siobhan generally loved the idea, that already the program as it was… well, it was profitable. This profit came by way of the fees to attend the sessions, yes, but it was more than that. It had inspired more presence at the various productions presented at the theater, more ticket sales… When Siobhan had showed her this, Maya had gone back to her office and had herself a good sort of… happy cry, hop around kind of cheer. They'd done that. Her team and her, they'd done that… and now their summer camp would be the next phase.

It would be happening here, and in Houston as well. They'd started putting out feelers in Tucson, though it was still early days and would probably mean no camp for them until next year. She would be coordinating the Austin camp, so yeah, maybe she had a start of summer approaching, too, school or no.

She already knew two of her future campers very well. Cara and Teddy were both going to attend, and they would spend the summer in Austin, along with the rest of the kids, and Abigail and James as well. They could have sent the kids on their own, giving themselves a summer to enjoy their new marriage on their own, but when it came right down to it they didn't see being away from their kids as a thing to look forward to, especially with their being so new as a united family. They had both instead worked out how to get the time away from Tucson with their jobs, and as far as lodging…

Lucas had mentioned to Sophie, on one of his 'shifts' with her, how the Hart-Lanes were looking to spend the summer in Austin. Three days later, Maya had gotten a call from Abigail. She had just been speaking with Diana Zvolensky, who had somehow managed to get in touch with her. Abigail knew who she was mostly by the name and how she knew Sophie through Maya and Lucas and Sam, and she'd never spoken to her before. But now the woman had reached out to her, having heard through her daughter that the family was coming to visit. She wanted to put them up at her Austin summer house, a small showing of her appreciation for all that everyone, including Sam, and Maya, had done for Sophie lately.

"I don't think I could have said no if I tried," Abigail had told Maya with a laugh, and on that she had to agree. She imagined what it might be like if Sophie's mother ever joined forces with Lucas' mother… Oh the things they could accomplish.

This would really be the best of both worlds. They would all get to be together and no one would be left behind. The time they had gotten to spend together in Tucson had been so good, right up until it was time for her to go again and Wyatt had reacted about as well as she'd suspected he would. Maya had almost extended her stay until Abigail and James would be back because of this, but it really wasn't possible, she had to go back. All she could do to try and make it all better was something she'd done before, back when her little sisters had not wanted her to go away either. They'd been having daily Skype calls, him and her, catching up on their days, even as Wyatt proved that he was taking the second part of her goodbye bargain very seriously.

She had entrusted him with the chain holding their father's guitar pick. Her neck felt a little empty without it, but it had felt right to do it. She'd taken the chain from her neck, put it around his, and said that he should hold on to it for her until they saw each other the next time. _Anytime you feel like you miss me, you just hold on to that, okay?_

"Tell you what though, I'm not going to be sad about not having to drive back and forth every day for a while," Lucas breathed out as he and Maya went down the stairs. They could hear noises from the kitchen – and barking – which suggested Sam was already off to his breakfast adventures for the day. Then there were voices?

"Happy birthday!" Dylan happily declared, stepping away from where he'd been slicing oranges to come and greet his friend. He kept his sticky hands well out of range.

"Thanks, I… hey…" he laughed. Also in the kitchen that morning were Riley and Rosa, and Robbie and Ramona, or as they had named themselves, the Pirates, 'because arrrr,' as Rosa had properly intoned, to ensure all their initials would come through. Half of them would have been coming over to pick up Sam, the others to ride off with Lucas, so they'd decided to make a group breakfast of it, for Lucas' birthday and for the impending end of the semester.

"Hey, so any chance you might pack something a bit less 'class time chic' to take with you today?" Maya asked as they climbed back up to their room after breakfast.

"Formal?" Lucas asked.

"Uh, semi? Nice button up, good pants, jacket, clean shoes, leave the tie…"

"We going somewhere?" he smiled.

"Well, you're going to Houston to see Sophie this afternoon, and I'm going to be out there to check on the camp out there, so I'm thinking I meet you at the house, we go and stop by Isabel's for dinner, a little one on one birthday dinner date…"

"I like the sound of that," Lucas nodded back at her, stalled on the stairs. "One on one dinner, and then one on one long drive home, with you… That's a good birthday right there."

"It would be… so easy for me to make an age joke right now," she planted her hands on his shoulders with a smirk. "It's like _right_ there on the tip of my tongue and it _wants_ to come out…"

"I'll make you a deal, you can tell as many jokes as you want on the ride back tonight," he beamed.

"Ooh, a road roast," her eyes practically sparked.

Morning had gone and passed them by before they knew it. Lucas knew, as he made the drive from university to Sophie and Chiara's house, that Maya would be out there at their partnered theater, working on the camp project, and he couldn't wait until she showed up and they could head out to dinner. At least the afternoon would go by quick. It always went in a flash, whenever it was his turn to help Sophie.

"Hello? Sophie?" he called out when he let himself in and found she wasn't on the couch as she usually was.

"Kitchen!" she called back. He blinked.

"How'd you get in there?" he asked, moving to find her and trying not to sound like he expected to find her on the floor.

"A hop and another hop and I lost count how many more," she stood near the counter, hands planted on either side of a walker. She had one foot on the ground, the other held off the ground. "I lobbied for one of those sort of scooter things where you put your knee on, you know? I was outvoted, but right now I'll take the granny look over no mobility."

"What about your arm?" he asked. Sophie looked at it.

"Not loving this, after all those weeks I couldn't really use it, but we're making this happen," she nodded, flexing her fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder… "Hopping is exhausting," she went on to admit. "I am so out of shape."

"You want to sit here?" Lucas asked, indicating the kitchen table. He had a feeling she wasn't looking forward to going back to the couch again.

"That one, with the cushion, that's mine. Behold," she gestured for him to get out of the way, and she started on her way, moving the walker, hopping, moving the walker, hopping… He couldn't keep his hands from staying at the ready, to catch her if she lost her balance as she made the turn to get herself on to the chair with the cushion. Once she was there, she pulled her bad leg on to the next chair over. "Landed…" she breathed.

"Water?"

"Please." When he set the glass in front of her, she gave his arm a pull and he came down for the hug. "I totally meant to do this standing up by the way, but I got caught up in showing off. Happy birthday, Lucas."

"Thanks," he laughed. "Seeing you walking is a pretty great present, by the way."

"Hopping," she had to correct.

"Being upwardly mobile," he offered, knowing it would be exactly the kind of thing Maya would say.

"You're welcome," Sophie took it with a nod. "Short bursts of mobility, followed by long bouts of… this." She was putting up a good front, but he could see through that front. She hated this, it worried her, weighed on her beliefs that she would get to wear her badge again.

"How long have you been on the walker?" he asked her.

"Saturday morning," Sophie replied. "Chiara was so nervous, she barely let go of me the whole time. Not that I minded _that_…" she grinned innocently.

"Alright, so it's only been a couple days. And before that you couldn't do this, but you are now. That's progress. Next thing you'll be doing more than hopping."

"Good thing I've got a year to find my dancing feet again," she smiled, just barely.

"You and me, we are going to bust a bunch of moves, for the old days. Friar, Zvolensky, Monster Mash." She looked at him, and the tears in the corners of her eyes rolled away on a full giggling laugh. That was a deal.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	79. Their Music to Play

March 19th 2020

_Chapter 79  
Their Music to Play_

"You know what I'm not going to miss? Finals stress. You don't realize it when you're in the middle of it, but when it's not happening to you, it's _kind_ of annoying," Maya told Riley and Nadine as the three of them sat in the basement, waiting for the last two of their bandmates to arrive for practice. Nadine was sitting in front of the drum set, just sort of 'air drumming,' like she was trying to see if she still had it even though she wasn't their drummer anymore. Maya sat on the ground, absently strumming at her guitar, maybe chasing a melody stuck at the back of her mind, while Riley sat behind her, pulling her hair into a pair of braids.

"You think that's bad, you've never been around a bunch of med students before a test. Some of them sound like a mix between a human and a text book, and it's really unsettling," Nadine frowned.

"When Rosa comes, just no one ask how hers are going, okay?" Riley told the other two.

"Not good?" Maya asked sympathetically.

"Oh, it's probably fine, but she's in this really kind of… self-defeating mood, you know? If you ask her, she's the dumbest person in the world."

"Not possible, I know him," Nadine joked, getting a smirk out of the other two.

When Maya's phone rang, they all startled, like they thought it was going to be Rosa and she'd overheard them. Instead, it was another TXNY member, retired.

"Hey, Willow, we're about to have practice, say hi!" Maya smiled, putting the call on speaker. Nadine and Riley both called out their greetings over one another.

"Hey, guys," Willow laughed on the line.

"So, what's up?"

"Oh, you know, same old, had a baby…" she breathed.

"Wait, what?" Maya sat up, the half-made braid falling out of Riley's hands even as the girl moved around her friend to be closer to the phone. Nadine left the drums and did the same. "Already?"

"What do you mean, already, he was a week late," Willow laughed again, and now they could just hear in her voice the turn of exhaustion that would have come from all this. "It all happened pretty fast, I was here at the hospital for a check-up, and then boom, labor. Lion barely made it in time. Little man was in a hurry."

"How's he doing?" Nadine asked.

"Oh, he's so good," Willow reported. "All fingers and toes accounted for, some good, healthy lungs… He's called William, after my grandfather, but we're calling him Liam."

"Please send all the pictures," Riley requested, beaming.

"And give him kisses from us," Maya added. "We'll come up to visit tomorrow, give you time to get some rest."

"Good, can't wait."

After hanging up, it wasn't two minutes that their phones all chirped with the arrival of a message. When they looked, they found a few pictures, courtesy of proud third-time papa Lion. Little Liam was in his mother's arms, surrounded by big sister Zola and now big brother Sekani. Already established to be the last of Lion and Willow's children, the baby looked far from lacking in people to love him and see him through life.

"Willow had the baby?" Rosa appeared on the stairs a few minutes later, with Kayla on her heel.

"She sent you the pictures, too?" Nadine guessed.

_"Another Will-something,"_ Kayla signed. They already were amused after they'd realized they had a Willow and a Will, and a Leona and a Lion…

"Good call on going for the diminutive then?" Maya spoke and signed.

"You're going to go and see them tomorrow, right?" Rosa asked, getting confirmation. "Good, I'm coming, too."

_"Me, too,"_ Kayla added.

After talking about Willow and Lion and the new baby for a little while, they had finally started to move into warm-up mode. Today was the last day of finals for pretty much all their college friends, Dylan, and Rosa and Sam, Lucas, too. They'd already had this band practice on the books, but now this was to be followed with a sort of dinner/party for the small group. Rosa had that air about her like she was still riding the 'oh, hey, no more finals, wow' feeling, so they didn't bring up the subject in case it sent her on a new spiral of self-doubt.

They had a gig coming up, an end of term party thrown for Lucas' class and their friends, by 'new old Josie,' as they would call her at times, ever since she'd come back from break with a new attitude and new look that was more like how she used to be, before they'd known her, when she'd been Willow's friend. They still didn't know what had caused the change, or if anything substantial had caused it, but then no one could dare ask her, in case it made her change back again.

"How are things going with the camp?" Nadine asked Maya.

"Oh!" she blinked, remembering… "I drew up some designs for the shirts, I wanted to show you guys," she got up and dashed up the stairs to go and find her mock-ups. When she got up to the ground floor, she discovered Sam had arrived. He was laid out on the couch, feet dangling over the armrest. "Hey, you alright?" Maya asked, trying not to laugh at the sort of bewildered look on his face.

"There were so many questions… And so little time… No one could stop for a second, not even to go to the bathroom… The first person that finished, they left when there was just ten minutes left…" he recounted.

"Wow…" Maya replied, with sympathy now. She went and sat next to where his head was, looking down at him, prodding his forehead with her finger. He didn't even bat it away as he normally would, so she decided to stop on her own after a while. "We're about to start practice in the basement, you gonna be okay? Is it going to be too loud?"

"I can't decide if you're mocking me or not," Sam frowned.

"Bit of both, if I'm being honest," Maya shrugged.

"I'll be fine. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll pass out."

"Dude…" Maya laughed, leaning over to hug him as best she could. "I'd say go upstairs, but I'm not sure how much it'll cover the sound from down there."

"It's pretty good, actually," Sam reported. "In my room, so in the attic it'd probably be almost completely quiet."

"Oh, wow, I had no idea. Alright, then you can go up there, lay back, look up at… well, not the stars yet, but the sun should be setting at some point, yeah?"

"I'll be fine here," he repeated, waving dismissively in a way that suggested he'd choose the thrum of live music nearby over having to go up the stairs or even move from where he was at the moment.

"Want me to get you a snack?" Maya asked, brushing the fringe out of his face.

"Are there any cookies left?" Sam turned his eyes up at her.

"The GiGi cookies?" she asked, and he nodded. "Normally I'd lie and say there weren't any left, but you're all miserable and tired, so you can have my secret stash. Consider yourself sworn to secrecy."

"Like I'd do anything to jeopardize my living arrangements," he held up his hand, doing his best to line up with her hand for shaking. Maya took this to translate as 'brother-sister confidentiality.' Maya walked/crawled her way to the other end of the couch and reached into the end table's drawer, pulling out what looked like a box of pencils and instead held four cookies. "Oh, so that's what that is," Sam blinked, sitting up. "I'll just take two," he reached in to take them.

"Eat the cookies, Sammy," Maya smiled, leaving him the box. She got up, paused. "What was I coming here to… oh, yeah," she moved to the stairs, heading up to the second floor and then up again into the attic, where she'd left her sketches on her drawing desk. By the time she made it back down to the living room, the box of pencils sat empty on the coffee table. "I was gone for like a minute, did you _chew_?" she stared at her brother, who was just swallowing the last bit, checking his face for crumbs with a swipe of his hand.

"They were really good," he defended himself, smiling. Maya stared at him for a moment, then nodded.

"Alright, fair."

She headed back down into the basement, finding that Riley had taken her braiding fingers into Rosa's raven hair, fixing her up with as much as she could give, with how their friend had recently cut her hair back to shoulder-length, which was really what they saw whenever they pictured her in their heads. By what she'd been able to get off their signing, it looked to Maya like Nadine and Kayla were talking drummer to drummer.

"Right, so what do you think?" Maya showed them the sketches. There were four designs, which was really one design with three variants. "This is like the main one, and then I've got one each that's more focused on like… vocal, and dance, and stage… And that's what colors the shirts are going to be," she pointed to where she'd scribbled a bit of a color in the corner of each sketch.

"Great, you can spot who's who at a distance," Rosa teased.

"You joke, but yeah, pretty much," Maya pointed at her.

"Can I have all of them?" Riley asked. She looked like she wanted to come up and look closer, before remembering she was in the middle of doing Rosa's hair.

"Sure," Maya laughed.

The girls continued looking over the sketches while Riley finished with Rosa and then went back to finish Maya's hair, which was left to one completed braid and another half-made one still sort of holding together. When this was done, they had finally gotten to get warm up done and actually start their practice. After a while, they found Sam had come down and sat in the stairs, looking on. He was eventually joined by Dylan, and then Lucas along with him. They always loved having an audience, especially when that audience was made of friends or family. It made them feel a bit more like they were actually performing, and that was kind of what they wanted, wasn't it?

"Hey, how'd it go?" Maya asked Lucas once the practice was done.

"Why are you whispering?" he asked back.

"Trying not to set off Rosa," Maya replied.

"Right, makes sense," Lucas nodded. "It went pretty good, I think. Essay questions were kind of intense, but I did my best."

"Then you did great," Maya smiled, ever the supportive fiancée. She was thanked with a kiss. "And, as a bonus, now you're no longer road guy every day, you get to sleep in a little later… or not sleep, you do what you want."

"I'll consider my options," Lucas promised. "So, not to rush, but what's the plan for dinner? Are we going out or ordering in?"

"We'll let the people decide," she indicated the others sitting or standing around the basement. "Oh, hey, did you see about Willow?"

"I saw the pictures, yeah," he grinned now.

"Not going to lie, every time they have another one, I'm getting deeper and deeper in the 'awww, I want one' hole," Maya smiled innocently.

"Hey, you know, I'm ready for it whenever you are," Lucas went on smiling, too.

"Yeah, but maybe let's just wait until after the wedding, the dress is already perfect without me having to get the girls to let it out," she joked.

"Like I said, ready when you are," he told her. She believed it, and it kept a bounce in her step for the rest of the night.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	80. Their Music to Relax

March 20th 2020

_Chapter 80  
Their Music to Relax_

"I can't believe I did a whole year out here already," Rosa declared as the girls from the band and the guys sat out on the porch after dinner. "I was in college already before, but before I picked my major I was just sort of… _going_, you know? I learned things, but I learn things on my own all the time. This year was the first one where I felt really motivated by what I was learning, you know?" she smiled, looking to the others. They all looked back at her without saying a word. "What?" she asked. "What?"

"Nothing," Maya elected herself to tempt fate. "Nothing, we're just…"

"Oh, guys, relax, I'm fine," Rosa finally understood. They didn't seem to buy it right away. "Really, I am, okay? I know I was acting a bit weird, but I'm like that whenever I have a test. This time it just really came out, I guess. Have you guys just been keeping quiet around me?"

There was an overlap of many voices at this, all rushing to insist that they weren't doing that at all, which just might have suggested otherwise.

"So you're excited for next year then?" Lucas asked, attempting to recover the conversation.

"I am, yeah," Rosa nodded. "But I'm also not mad at having some time off, too. Hey, so, after the gig for the future vets out there, do we have anything else coming up? I was thinking I'd like to go spend a few weeks back in Houston with my mom."

"Nothing fixed except those camp days we're doing somewhere in the summer, right?" Nadine asked, looking to Maya.

"Yeah, no, that's the only thing right now," she confirmed. "Although we are going to have to figure out what we're doing in the next little while… I didn't want to put any feelers out for shows and events until after finals were over," she looked to Rosa, who gave her an appreciative smile.

Truth be told, part of the reason she hadn't gone seeking other gigs yet, along with academics, sort of had to do with what the summer was going to be shaping up to be for her. Was there the tiniest part of her that kept thinking 'I was supposed to be getting married this summer'? Maybe there was, a very small one, way back somewhere, so far back that she didn't really feel it or notice it unless she stopped and asked herself if it was there, which was really never. Mostly she was thinking about her siblings and their parents, who'd be coming to Austin for several weeks, and about Stage Ready camp…

Last summer had been all about them transitioning from one chapter in their lives to another. Zay and Nadine had gotten married, Farkle and Isadora were on their way to becoming parents, and a lot of them had moved and settled into new living situations, new cities, or old cities…

Now a year had gone by, as their timelines continued to be delineated by fall and summer as a start and an end. As it had done many times before, the end of the year, the start of summer, had left them in a position to stop, and look around, and contemplate…

Lucas, for instance, could hardly believe that he and Maya had been living in this house for nearly a whole year already. He still remembered so vividly all the time he had spent out here, on his own or with friends, with family, working to make the place ready for the big moment. And then the house had been done, and the big moment had come… He'd brought Maya out here, and he'd asked her to marry him, and she'd said yes. They'd moved in, not long after that, and then Sam had come to live with them, and then months had gone by, and now… now here they were, all of them.

He still had so vivid an impression in his mind of the house as it had been, the night of the engagement, and then in the days after they'd moved in and started to unpack. Now, looking around the place, all he could see was… their home. They had really started to make something of it, so much that it just felt more and more theirs every day, without their really noticing it unless they stopped and really looked, as he did now. It used to be that he'd walk in here and still tell himself this was his grandparents' place, but now… now it was just his home, his and Maya's, and Sam's… And with what he and Maya had been discussing on the stairs…

"Why are you smiling?" Maya inquired, looking like the expression on his face had been impossible not to echo.

"Just… things," he shrugged, then "You, kind of," which brightened her own smile.

"What did I do to encourage this?" she inquired.

"At the risk of sounding corny, you don't have to do anything, I'm mostly just happy that you're around," he explained.

"Corny is good," she promised, walking her fingers along his hand until she could clasp it.

"One of these days, I'm telling you, we need to do a world tour," Rosa declared out of nowhere, drawing the others' attention and chuckles.

"Okay, calm down, superstar," Nadine pulled her back from sitting upright until she had an arm around her. Rosa looked halfway caught between wanting to protest this restraint and actually preferring to allow it to go on because she was at ease. In the end, she leaned into it, like she'd told herself 'hey, I'm on vacation.'

"It would be fun though, wouldn't it?" she asked.

"Not wrong there," Maya agreed.

"Do you need a roadie?" Sam raised his hand. "I'd like to go."

"There's no world tour," she nudged her brother's leg with her foot. "Not yet anyway, but if you want to carry my stuff around, Sammy, all you have to do is do it, and be quick about it."

"Ha, ha," Sam flatly replied, retaliating by giving his sister much of what he got.

"Hey, hey, just because you're taller than me now, it doesn't mean I can't still kick your a…" Maya was cut off when Lucas put his arm around her and ensured part of that arm covered her mouth. She turned her eyes up at him with a squint, letting her hands do the talking instead, getting a chuckle out of her brother and the others.

_"My parents lost it when my friends showed me signs like that,"_ Kayla revealed with an accompanying laugh. _"There was nothing they could do once I knew them. I thought they were hilarious."_

_"I thought so, too," _Maya returned. Kayla had been the one to show her, of course. And seeing as she'd been older now than she'd been when she'd learned them, their significance and origin had done so as well, which had made for a laugh-inducing lesson with her then new friend and bandmate.

"My granddad used to say 'If I hear you saying filth like that, I'll wash your mouth out with soap!'" Dylan imitated the old man, to much amusement. "Now I can't stop thinking how that wouldn't work for signing…"

_"My father would threaten to take away my phone. It did the job," _Kayla informed him, getting new laughs from the others.

"Alright, so maybe we can't do the world, but can we at least try and do some shows somewhere other than Austin, or Houston, or just Texas in general?" Rosa renewed her query. The girls looked to one another, thinking about the suggestion.

"We could do that, couldn't we?" Riley asked. "We've been living out here for like ten years now, but there's plenty of places that aren't so far off and we haven't seen them. It could be like… half tour, half sightseeing…"

"And we might find ourselves some willing guides out there like we did on the Europe trip," Nadine threw in.

"We found guides, Sophie found a wife, we found a friend, successes all around," Maya nodded with a grin. "I'm in if you are," she told her bandmates before looking to Lucas. It wasn't as though she needed permission, but it still felt like the least she could do was see what he thought.

"What are we thinking, put decals on Sparkles and turn her into a tour minivan?" he asked her with a smirk that made her snort.

"That's either going to be the best thing ever or a recipe for disaster. Like hey, random creeps, follow the girls!" Rosa intoned.

"We're going to need some muscle," Nadine agreed.

"Like this?" Dylan asked, flexing both arms for display. He wasn't exactly lacking in strength, even though he generally got taken for being a big on the weaker side. Still, knowing how accident prone he could be to begin with, it was no wonder Riley just casually reached out to pull her boyfriend's arms back down. Her face said 'I love you, so please don't.' They could tell he'd been joking, but Riley still had to be sure.

"Was thinking more like this," Maya tapped Lucas' arm, still around her. He kissed the top of her head, as though declaring his intentions to the world and anyone who'd dare so much as to look at her funny. "Oh, and Bishop would be good for it, too."

"Where are you going?" Lucas asked Sam, when the boy suddenly stood up and moved toward the house.

"Getting a notepad and a pen and a map," Sam replied, carrying on into the house. Once he returned, he handed all this to Rosa, who looked at him in surprise. "What, it was your idea," he shrugged. She still looked a bit stunned at possibly being put in charge, but from the looks of the rest of the band, they were on board, too.

So, they started to work it out, all of them together. It could be hard to manage all of their schedules at the same time, along with availabilities at the actual venues they would want to play at. They all had jobs, and families, and there was Sophie… The plan became about hitting cities they could get to in a reasonable amount of time, so they might drive back after the shows, even if it meant driving through the night and being home by morning. They soon started to throw in the possibility of hitting further cities, in a bit of one-two punch with a night in a hotel in between. The map was marked along the way, and by the end of the night they had sort of a plan. Rosa vowed to start making calls the very next day… in the car on the way to Houston of course. They had to see baby Liam Obi.

"You know you're going to have a few people who are going to want to follow you wherever you all go and play," Lucas told Maya as they went back inside, once their friends had gone home. "Like my cousins, and your sisters…"

"VIPs!" Maya happily proclaimed.

"It's not going to be too much, is it?" he asked. "With your family visiting, and the camp, and the regular sessions, and the tour?"

"I know, I tend to want to do a lot at the same time," Maya turned back to him. "It's like my brain won't be satisfied unless it's doing five things all at once sometimes."

"What, just five?" he teased, making her laugh.

"But… I also know that I have you there with me, to see what I don't see and tell me to slow down if I need to, and I love that about you."

"I do my best," he nodded.

"Your best is excellent," she assured him, and he bowed his head in appreciation.

"Well, this summer definitely won't be boring, will it?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	81. Their Music to Train

March 21st 2020

_Chapter 81  
Their Music to Train_

The gig for Lucas' classmates was three days after the end of their semester. The day before that though, the girls from TXNY had a whole other kind of gig…

"There's a lot of them today," Riley commented, as the five of them walked into the theater.

"We've been at capacity for a few weeks now," Maya couldn't help but smile as she reported this. "I've been thinking we might need to hire on a few other mentors, that way we can allow more registrations per session. Either that or adding another session to the schedule."

There were plenty of Stage Ready regulars by now. They would be weekly attendees, some of them hitting two or all three of the weekly sessions. They had who were not exactly regular, but still came more than once. There were the one-and-dones, whether they just needed the one session for a specific reason, or because they hadn't liked the experience. It had worried Maya, the first time that had happened, but she'd quickly been reassured by Siobhan, and her mother, and any number of people, who pointed out how those people, more often than not, were just entirely more self-assured of their talent than they were aware of just how much or how little of it they had.

Maya could always spot the first-timers. This almost went without saying, seeing as she did handle registrations, and how the repeaters would usually greet her with a smile and a wave. More often than not though, she would always find them on a single sweep of the room. They'd be the ones looking sort of nervous and uncertain, or keeping to themselves… They had three first-timers that day, and she found them immediately.

"Be right back," she told her bandmates before moving to greet her newbies.

They would have these sessions where the rest of the band would be there with her, like guest mentors. They may not have had specific qualifications for training others, but then they had experience in them now, years of performing on stage, of following this little passion they had cultivated all this time. Just that morning, Lucas had hit her with a realization that still sort of blew her mind. They'd been in the bathroom, brushing their teeth, when he'd turned to her and stated…

"You know it'll be ten years next summer, the band?"

She'd nearly choked on the tooth paste. He was right. They had started it all, the summer before 9th grade, at the Babineaux party. She'd been in this band since she was fifteen years old and now…

Maya shared this little fact with her bandmates, and the effect had been very similar with them as well, especially for those who would be celebrating their tenth anniversary the following summer, too. And then the others… _they_ would be closing their fifth years by the coming fall, wouldn't they?

"Okay, but come on, _world tour_," Rosa had reiterated, tugging at Maya's arm.

"I would love to, but see there's this little thing happening next summer, sort of getting married…" Maya pointed out with a laughing sigh.

"What's more romantic than a destination wedding!" Rosa threw her hand up. Maya stared at her, not believing for a second that Rosa of all people would play the romance card, when she would sooner write the whole concept off. "What, I shelved a lot of bridal magazines in my day, I can be curious."

"Lucas and I already know where we're getting married, and it's going to be right here in Austin, Texas," Maya reminded her.

"Honeymoon then?"

"Yeah, you're not invited to that one, sorry. But we will do something special for the 10th, don't worry. We have a whole year to figure out what that'll be!"

The anniversary plans would have to wait, as they were now set to integrate themselves into the Stage Ready session that was about to begin. Maya could already tell that some of their regulars and semi-regulars, and even one of their newbies, had shown up on this particular day because they knew the band would be there. If she wasn't sure before, then it would become clear by the time the five of them climbed up on stage for the welcome/intro talk. The newbie in question, Maya knew, had come especially because of Kayla, as she was deaf like her. As for regulars, well…

"Maya!" a familiar voice called out, as soon as the intro was through and everyone started to move off to where they needed to be. Out from the mass of attendees came forth Lucas' ten-year-old cousin, Lea Sullivan-Reyes, daughter to his mother's brother and his husband. It hadn't taken long for her to convince her fathers to sign her up for Stage Ready once she'd heard about it. She had been ready to sacrifice her allowance and pay for it herself, whether or not that would actually cover the fee, but Maya had told her that she'd give her the 'family discount.' Truthfully, Lucas had taken it upon himself to foot the bill for his cousin, as an investment toward her acting dreams.

"Yes, Lea," Maya waited for the girl to get to her.

"Can I go first, please? I worked all week on my monologue and I can't stay the whole time, I'm supposed to go with Dad to get the cake for Papa's birthday."

"Uh…" Maya looked around. "I think you might have to settle on being second, is that cool?"

"Fine, I guess," the girl sighed anxiously.

"Hey, hey, come on," Maya lightly tapped the top of Lea's head. "Being first isn't all that great, not all the time. Sometimes it's kind of better to let someone else have the first piece… Usually comes out all broken like a pie," she pointed out, getting a smile out of Lucas' young cousin.

"Alright, but I'm really second?"

"I swear it, and may a plague fall on my head if I'm lying," she dramatically drew a cross over her heart and offered her hand to shake.

"Okay," Lea giggled and shook her hand.

Maya always made it a point to attend as many of the sessions as she could. She didn't have to be there every single time, leading the whole thing. They had a good, solid team, who would see their students through whatever needs may have brought them to Stage Ready. But Maya really wanted so show up, to take part, and so she did. Over time, since that first day, she had really gotten to love it more and more. She would take it all in at times and it would send her heart skipping and leaping to think that she had made all this happen, that it had been her idea that started everything.

Now with the camp coming up, it would be five days a week of this, five days a week with kids just like Lea, and now that… She might have been looking forward to that most of all. She wouldn't necessarily be here on all those weekdays either, especially when this mini tour of theirs would go and kick off, but she would absolutely be here as often as she could.

As promised, Lea had gone up second, with the rest of those who'd come to work on their acting and their stage presence. At ten years old, she might not have been up there with the all-time greats, but her potential was right there, and it rang true enough that you would look at her and you'd know that, if she kept going the way she went now, she really would become a famous name someday in the near or further future.

"That was amazing, kid!" Maya held up her hand when Lea came bounding back over to her. The girl high fived her after nearly hopping to get at that offered hand.

"You think so?"

"I think and I know so," Maya promised.

"I almost got the crying down, but it's hard."

"Yeah, well, just make sure you tell your dad that's what that is," Maya indicated her face before pointing out the figure of Michael Sullivan, standing midway up the auditorium aisle. "He _definitely_ cried," Maya revealed in a whisper. Lea beamed, quickly hugging her goodbye before dashing to find her father and ask him what he thought of her performance.

The session went off the way Maya always hoped the sessions would go. There was not a single problem, no divas… A few of their people had themselves a moment of revelation, which were always the best thing to see, and when those moments would come it would be hard to see anything top them as most memorable for the day.

"I just need to wrap up here, I'll meet you guys at Chubbie's?" Maya told her bandmates when the session was over and everyone was starting to leave.

"Are you sure? We can wait for you," Nadine insisted, only to have Rosa clear her throat at her, giving a pointed look Maya could recognize just as well, for having lived with the girl for a while. That was one big 'I am starving, please can we go eat now?' stare.

"Please, go feed the little one," Maya smirked.

"Oh, look who's lording that one taller inch over me now," Rosa 'accused,' as Kayla directed her up toward the exit, while Nadine and Riley waved back at Maya.

"I'm ordering you a milkshake in twenty minutes," Riley informed her.

"And this is why you'll always be my favorite," Maya grinned.

After the four of them had left, she'd gone back up to her office, grabbing a few things before tracking down her team, to ask after how the session had gone for them, if anything came up out of the ordinary, or needing her attention. She would get to have a look at their notes later on, but she generally wanted to get their first impressions right on the day.

_Maya: About to leave the theater, band and I are heading to Chubbie's._

_Lucas: Done in thirty, meet you there._

Passing through the auditorium again on her way out, Maya could see someone standing in the lobby, a woman typing at her phone. From a distance, she gave off an impression somewhere between business woman and artist, though that last part might have had to do with her hairstyle and the tattoos along her arm, clashing and yet complimenting her sleeveless dress and heels.

"Hi, can I help you?" Maya asked, once she passed from the auditorium and into the lobby. Now that she thought about it – and she really didn't see how she could have forgotten the woman once she'd seen her once – she recalled seeing her in the audience for about half the session that day. She'd figured maybe she was there to pick up one of the students, or she was sort of auditing… They got some of those sometimes, and at least half had ended up joining as actual students in the end.

"In a way, I suppose you could, although I really see this as going the other way around," the woman declared, and Maya paused. She knew that voice from somewhere, but she couldn't pin it down.

"You want to help me?" she asked, blinking.

"At the risk of coming off as persistent, yes, I would, very much," the woman tipped her head, and something in her tone helped Maya piece it together. She _did_ know that voice. She'd never met the face that went with it, but she'd spoken to her, a couple of times. Audra. Malcolm the music store guy's cousin. Malcolm's cousin who had offered TXNY a record deal, about a year before. She smiled now, like she could tell Maya had figured out who she was. "I was hoping you and I could talk, discuss a few things?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	82. Their Music to Soar

March 22nd 2020

_Chapter 82  
Their Music to Soar_

"Sorry, my friends are waiting for me nearby, I just had to let them know I'd be running late," Maya came and sat with the woman who'd gone to wait for her by taking a seat in the auditorium. It looked to be the same one she'd been in when Maya had spotted her earlier.

"Not a problem if it means that you and I can talk this out some more," Audra smiled. Looking at her, Maya couldn't say how much or how little her look matched what she had envisioned from speaking to her. She was younger than she'd thought, definitely, thirty tops. The warmth, that at least she'd nailed. When this woman smiled at you, there was no doubt she was telling you the truth. The smile went all the way up into her eyes.

"How did you know I'd be here?" Maya had to ask. "Malcolm again?"

"No, well, to be honest, I have been keeping tabs on you and your band since last summer. Some might call it a fault or quality, but when I really feel something it's very hard for me to let go of it. And you, Miss Hart, you are setting off a lot of bells in my head. Now this, right here," she gestured around the auditorium, to the stage, too. "This is setting off even more of them. Sharing your own talents already and now nurturing others'… I am impressed."

Maya was momentarily speechless. She didn't know why, it wasn't like she hadn't received a whole lot of praise for all she'd done already, but coming from Audra, who represented this higher echelon… It was like the woman stood up there and reached down, offering a hand to pull her up there, too. She'd said no the last time, and if that was what she was after again… When she finally said something, all that came out was…

"You… you can call me Maya, Miss Hart is just…" _For students, my students… I am a teacher._

"Maya," Audra bowed her head with a smile. "Would I be wasting my time in asking for you and the rest of the band to reconsider?" Her question felt in no way forceful. All it was, Maya could tell, was Audra taking a chance, in case circumstances might have changed. That concept in itself was just making Maya's heart drum faster.

Already that the woman would have sought TXNY out once, made them an offer, that… that was a one in a million chance. They had said no in the end, and they all had their reasons for it, but it really all boiled down to their choosing to pass. None of them had regretted it, not to her knowledge. As far as Maya herself was concerned, well… There had been that brief moment, when she'd been having trouble on her job search, before she'd come up with the idea for Stage Ready, where she had gotten that 'oh, why did I say no?' feeling. But it had been no more than a moment, really, and even under the stress of that moment, she'd recognized that she'd made the right call.

As tempting as the idea of going even further with the band had been enticing, it was no more than a curiosity resolved in dreams. The reality was that she knew what she saw for her life, and it didn't involve fame and fortune. It involved living in that house, with her Huckleberry husband and their Huckleberry kids, making music, making art, and teaching… That was where she belonged, and it was a truth earned from years of self-discovery.

Still, for all that, if getting someone like Audra to notice TXNY had been one in a million, having someone like Audra return to make that same offer a second time, after she'd been told no, after a year had gone by… What was that, one in a billion? Maya knew that wasn't a reason to change anyone's mind, no, but still it felt like it was the least she could do to at least hear her out, yeah?

"I can only speak for myself," she started to say, and Audra nodded, understanding. "Although I haven't heard anything that could indicate any of the others changed their mind."

She took a moment, searching for the best way to explain herself. She hated to let the woman down, especially for how much she clearly seemed to support the band and its advancement in the music world, but even as she looked at her, she didn't feel anything like 'thank goodness, I have a second chance.'

"You won't know this, but not long after we last spoke, last year, I got engaged," Maya told Audra, whose less than surprised look suggested she'd already spotted the ring on her finger.

"Congratulations," Audra told her, with genuine gladness. "When's the big day?"

"July of next year," Maya answered with a small smile. She could have gotten into the fact that she had originally been supposed to walk down the aisle… just a month and a half from now, more or less, but it would have taken them off course and she really felt like she needed to keep steady, so she kept going. "My fiancé, he's been my best friend since… pretty much the whole time I've lived in Texas, almost eleven years now. Loved him… all that time," she nodded to herself. "I'm sure there are people out there who would look at us and not understand what it feels like, to meet someone back then, in the seventh grade, and know before you were even out of high school that you were going to spend the rest of your lives together, but we did, me and Lucas both.

"For a while I really didn't know what the future was going to be like for me, or what I even wanted. My family back then was… _so _different from what it is now, it was… me and my mom. And if I ever thought about myself in the future, I knew one thing. I knew that if I found someone and I had a family of my own, I was… I was going to do better." It was so much more complicated than that, especially once Kermit had come back into her life, and they'd mended, and he'd… She took a breath. "And I found someone, I found… my home, the kind that's a person, you know? I could look at him and I knew what our life together would be."

A home that was also an actual home, one for them to flourish in, for years and decades, as husband and wife to one another, and father and mother to whoever would come along and join them. And through all that? Lucas would get to do what he'd always wanted to do, and he'd be a veterinarian. And she would get to do the same, get to follow her own dreams.

"I came to Texas feeling like my whole world was spinning, and I couldn't find the ground. But that was who I'd been for a while, and I figured… that's who I would be. Instead, I came here and… I found people who showed me how to get my feet back on land, yes, but also how to just… fly. I found myself in Austin, I found the things that made me feel most alive. A lot of people would tell you I'm way too ambitious for my own good, and it's never enough for me to have one thing, I need like four or five."

Audra finally made a noise here, chuckling, after having quietly listened the whole time. Her laugh said 'I hear that.'

"But no matter what I do, I know that there will always be things in my life that will take precedent… over anything else, because they're the things and the people that live right here," Maya pressed a hand to her heart. "And that's my family, and Lucas and our family in the future. And it's doing the work that's felt like my place in the world ever since I pieced it together. Teaching art, whether it's here, with Stage Ready, or in a school, with paints, pencils, clay… anything… I still get to make music, we all do. In another life, maybe I could have said yes, maybe it would have been the future I needed."

"This is not that life," Audra finally spoke.

"I'm so sorry," Maya shook her head.

"Don't be. I more or less knew I was fighting a losing battle when I walked in here today, and I saw you with your students. But that's why I came up with a back-up plan." Maya's hesitation was on her face. "Not about the deal, not like last year, something else."

"Okay…" Maya slowly sat up.

"I can appreciate you wanting to have this life you told me about. The whole time you were speaking, all I could think was 'that sounds nice.' Might not be for me, but if it's for you then I want you to have it."

"So what's the back-up plan?"

"You are a phenomenal singer and performer, you are," Audra stated, as though to say 'let's make that clear right off the bat.' Maya smiled. "Peel back that layer, and you might be an even better songwriter. So let's focus on that, you and me. You get to be here, living the life you want, but also… you get to share your words, your music, with other artists, and the world gets to hear it. Does that sound like something you'd be on board with?"

Maya didn't know what to say. For a few seconds she just sat there, looking to the woman with her bright smile and her back-up plan. Could she see herself doing this? She already did it, didn't she? For the most part she'd done it for Weaver Kings, but she'd loved it very much. And she was always finding new melodies, new bits of lyrics, more than the band could put together… Sometimes she wrote songs that weren't even theirs from the start, like what she'd done for Shae.

"How… How would that work exactly? Hypothetically…"

"I will put something together for you to look at," Audra told her, rising from her seat with an intent like she just might go right back to her office to do it now. "You can have a lawyer look at it before giving me an answer… You don't have one of those, do you?" she asked.

"Uh… I know one, she's my best friend's mother, she's… been almost a mother to me, too," Maya confided.

"Good, then have her look at everything with you when you receive it."

Maya gave Audra her e-mail, and soon the woman was wishing her a good evening and going on her way. Left standing in the theater lobby, Maya could only take a deep breath, and another, letting the feeling of her lungs taking in and expelling air be her proof that this wasn't a dream. It was real… Oh, it was real, it was…

Her phone chirped, making her jump before reaching into her pocket to pull it out.

_Lucas: Made it to Chubbie's, where are you?_

If there was one person who could help her sort through this, it was him, always.

_Maya: Still at the theater, leaving now._

In her minivan, she could get to Chubbie's in three minutes, tops, but she decided to walk instead, to let the breeze touch her face, wake her up. As she went, before she'd even made it to the corner to cross the street, she could feel it, in the back of her mind… a melody. Some events were like a perfect storm to get her creative juices flowing, and this was one of those moments. Maybe it was her brain's way of giving her an answer. Maya smiled as she sped up her pace.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	83. Their Music to Grow

**_A/N: Hey everyone!_**_ I was thinking, with most everyone isolated these days, I might try and do something extra on here along with the daily (and weekly) chapters. I wanted to do maybe like... deleted scenes. Like, if there are moments from throughout the stories in this universe, from 2017 up to now, that were not covered in chapters and people might have wanted to see played out, I could write them and post them as I do them. Let me know if that is something that would interest you and what you'd like to see! :)_

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March 23rd 2020

_Chapter 83  
Their Music to Grow_

"Hey, I'm not calling you at a bad time, am I?"

"No, not at all," Topanga Matthews replied, though Maya heard her and imagined she might have been caught up in an attempt to do something that involved two-year-old Hunter Matthews. She could hear the boy in the background, complaining. "Hold on a minute, will you?"

"Uh, sure…" Maya told her, though the phone might have already been set down on the other end. She kept on walking on her way from the theater to Chubbie's, hearing a lot of 'Get back here!' and 'Sit still!' from Topanga and a lot of 'Nuh!' from Hunter. Riley would often laugh, saying that her mother had finally met her match in this boy. Her youngest was as stubborn as she was, and he would hold his ground until he was blue in the face. Thankfully, Topanga was an excellent negotiator, even with hard-headed toddlers.

"I'm here, sorry," she came back on the line, breathing out.

"Rough night?" Maya kept herself from laughing.

"Bath night," Topanga confirmed. "I've called in reinforcements, it's fine. What can I do for you?"

"I need a lawyer," she replied, then just as quick, "Not for trouble, just legal counsel, you know?"

Topanga was aware of who Audra was, of course, for having heard about the offer from her daughter the previous summer. Maya recounted the encounter back at the theater, along with the offer she had received. Even running back through it like this, just hitting the facts as she kept on walking, it felt like it couldn't be real, but she knew it was, she'd been there, and she'd already established it had not been a dream.

"Maya…" Topanga responded much the way she envisioned her own mother would react. She could almost see the smile on the woman's face just from hearing the way she said her name.

"I'll let you know when I get Audra's e-mail, I just wanted to give you a heads up." _And maybe catch my breath for a second before talking to anyone else about it._

"Of course. I'll be ready for you whenever."

By the time she'd hung up with Riley's mother, Maya was nearing the restaurant and she followed up the call with a message.

_Maya: Meet me outside?_

Lucas came through the door just as she walked up. Maya cut off his greeting with a kiss.

"That works, too," he breathed. "Everything alright?"

"Very much," Maya smiled. "Possibly more than very much," she added. "I had a visitor at the theater today, after Stage Ready."

"Guessing that's the reason why you ran late?" She nodded. "Who was it?"

"Audra Watts," Maya replied, glad to see he remembered the name.

"The one from the record deal?" he still asked. Maya nodded again. "What did she want? Did she want to sign the band again?"

"At first, yeah, which was just…"

"Wow…"

"Yeah, that," she agreed. "But even when she was saying it, I knew… I still don't want it," she told him. Lucas gave an understanding tip of the head.

"You're okay with all of it then," he asked.

"I am," Maya smiled. "I told her about you and me, the wedding, our future as we've planned it, and she got it."

"Good," Lucas smiled back.

"She wasn't done," Maya went on, taking another breath. "She had a different deal to offer after that." Lucas' posture changed at this, which made her chuckle, recalling how she'd had more or less the same reaction. "She wants to sign _me_, as a songwriter," she revealed. Lucas' reaction here was what she would call a halted celebration, like his immediate response had been to rush forward and embrace her, but then he'd had to consider the possibility that she might have said no, in which case he might have needed to respond differently.

"Did you… How did…" he asked.

"I haven't made any decision yet, not exactly," Maya explained. "Audra suggested I should have a lawyer look at what she'll be sending me, so I called Riley's mom, just to give her the heads up."

"Okay, that's good… What are you thinking though?"

"A lot… So much…" she hummed, balancing from heels to toes. "For now, I mean… all I've got is this offer, and it feels huge, and I want to hop around and shout and shout some more. It would be perfect, wouldn't it? I get to be here, with you, living the life I want to live, and at the same time, people everywhere could be listening to my songs, singing them… And who wouldn't want an extra bit of income for doing something like that?"

"With you so far," Lucas grinned.

"I just want to make sure that it would be as good as it sounds. It's one thing to write stuff for the band, and for Weaver Kings, and Shae… This comes with… paperwork, and legal things… I don't want it to end up being something that turns out to be too good to be true. Not that I think Audra would put me in that position, but she might not get the final say, and then… I don't know… When we said no last year, a part of it was just how all of us in the band had been making it work as well as we did, all on our own for all these years."

"You did, yeah."

"I'm trying to tell myself to just not to think about it too much, not until I get more information, and I talk to Topanga… but it's just…" she shook her head, a giddy little smile leaking out.

It made Lucas respond in kind, allowing himself to lift her off the ground – an easy feat – and into his arms. He could easily say he had been impressed with this girl from the day he'd met her, and it wouldn't be wrong. But more than that, the more he'd gotten to watch her grow, and evolve, year by year, that feeling only followed in that same climb. More than once he had watched her go and his instinct had been to tell her to slow down, not to take on as much as she would. Sometimes it really would be too much, and she would recognize it herself, but other times… most times… she actually just thrived in that chaos, and she came out on the other side having produced… gold.

"Make you a deal, you play it cool until you know for sure, and I'm going to just keep on being so, _so_ proud of you all the time. No matter what, you made all this happen, Maya…" She giggled at this, pulling her head back so she could see his face.

"I can work with that," she nodded.

"Yeah?" he smiled. She nodded. "Good," he kissed her, setting her down on her feet without breaking their hold. When the kiss finally ended, leaving a trail of small pecks for a few more seconds, he kept his arms around her, finally looking back to recall where they were. "Keeping this to ourselves for now or are you planning on telling them?"

"Until I know more, I think I'd prefer not to tell," Maya shook her head.

"In that case, I'd like to cast my vote for you and me just calling it a night and heading home," he told her, which made her laugh.

"But there's food in there," she 'pouted,' pointing to the door.

"I will cook," he countered. "Sam is out hanging with his friends tonight, so it'd be just you and me… and the dogs."

"All good people…" she nodded approvingly. "Sparkles is back at work though. And what about them in there?"

"We can walk, and I'll take care of it."

So they left Chubbie's together, taking the same path Maya had travelled just minutes ago, where they found the red minivan and drove off toward home. Lucas had already texted Nadine, informing her and asking her to tell the others that he and Maya had decided to call it a night after all.

They arrived at the house to find eager pups in full welcoming committee mode. Trix and Lou had been at this game long enough to have developed a technique along the lines of 'come say hello, get scratches, go lie down and wait for the food if there's none left.' Archer the puppy, on the other hand, was still very eager when his people returned, and he would follow them wherever they went for a good long while.

This time around, as Lucas went into the kitchen to prepare his promised dinner, Maya scooped up the growing dog and took him along into the basement, where she hoped to tease out that new song from the back of her mind. She sat on the ground, knowing Archer would want to keep close. As predicted, he sat across her ankles, which made her chuckle as she picked up her guitar.

"Want to sing with me, Arch?" He barked. "You've got a real voice, kid, come on, lemme hear something," she asked in her best 'gruff old timey' voice. She strummed at the guitar strings, humming her melody, and the pup did more or less as told, giving a weak little attempt at a howl that made the musician laugh through her humming. "Yeah, you're a star!" gruff Maya declared.

Having done about all she could expect to get done on the song for the time being, the guitar was set aside, the recording on her phone was stopped and saved, and the puppy was carried back up the stairs. Her stomach had already been growling just a bit, in clear competition to the dog, but now that she could smell what was being made in the kitchen, she was very near to drooling.

"No, you were right, this is so much better than Chubbie's," she told Lucas, coming to lean against the counter next to the stove where he worked.

"Don't let them hear you say that, they won't let you back in," he teased.

"Please, they love me," she defiantly declared.

"Yeah, well the line forms behind me on that."

"Even him?" she 'gasped,' holding up the dog who had been desperately attempting to get at the food while Maya held him back from getting burned. He squirmed in her hands, which only heightened the cuteness and made Lucas break into laughter.

"Even him," he finally nodded.

"Tough bargain," Maya squinted at him, pulling Archer back to herself. "Come on, you, let's see what's happening with _your_ dinner."

When they finally went ahead and sat to the meal Lucas had prepared for them, Maya got a look at their plates and had to hold back some solid giggles.

"Okay, that is next level right there, did you seriously make the potatoes into music notes?"

"Cookie cutters," he shrugged with a smirk.

"You are such a nerd," she whispered.

"I told you I was going to keep on being proud while you're not telling about the offer."

"Well, I've never met a potato I didn't love, but these might be my favorite now, and if the next ones aren't like this, I might not eat them anymore."

"I got you covered," Lucas assured her as she happily bit into her first note.

"So long as we're settling all that, if you see me go off track tomorrow night at Josie's because I've gone all Pensive Maya…"

"I got her, too," he nodded. "Are you trying to make a song?" She had started to move her potatoes around in her plate, like pieces in a puzzle.

"It'll be real short unless you… You made more, didn't you?" she asked, seeing the look on his face.

"Not enough for a… symphony or anything, but we may have something." She grinned at him, pressing her hands together.

"Permission to play with my food?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	84. Their Music to Celebrate

**_A/N: Hey everyone!_**_ Glad to hear you're liking the deleted scenes idea! Let me know what you'd like to see!_

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**_A/N2: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is up!_**

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March 24th 2020

_Chapter 84  
Their Music to Celebrate_

Even if she hadn't asked him to keep an eye on her and her 'pensive' side, Lucas would have done it, and he would have known to do it, right from the next morning.

When he woke up, he found his little spoon had gone sideways, turned on her back and staring at the ceiling, arm slung over her head and fingers moving like they were either conducting or playing something. He almost didn't want to move, didn't want to bother her or interrupt her. But then she turned her head and looked at him.

"Morning," she smiled.

"Been awake long?" he asked, pulling close enough so he might kiss her good morning.

"What's long?" Maya shrugged. "I really can't wait until tonight. I _need_ to be on a stage right now."

"You say the word, I will be your audience," Lucas told her, which made her laugh.

"So, no time travel then."

"Afraid not," he shook his head, and she gave a half-hearted sound of disappointment. "Just going to have to get through the day somehow."

"Can we 'get through the day' in Houston? With Sophie and the others?"

They would leave to pick up the rest of the band shortly after breakfast, which would get them to Houston somewhere mid-morning, closer to lunch. They were aiming to be at Josie's place by five, giving them time to set up before the party finally kicked off, guests and all. This left them several hours to just hang out with their friend, which was all they could ask for, and the same could be said for Sophie. Now that she could get around on her own, even if it meant hopping along with her walker, it wasn't so much of a thing that she needed assistance the way she did in the beginning. This meant that there would be those times where she was alone, and she did not particularly care for 'alone time recovery.'

When they all showed up, the band and Lucas together, Sophie looked as though she could have kissed every single one of them.

"You look like you were a minute away from rearranging the bookshelves," Rosa declared.

"Don't give her any ideas," Riley whispered.

"You know my ears were one of the things that _didn't_ get damaged?" Sophie asked the both of them, never losing her smile for a second.

"Sorry," Riley mumbled, elbowing Rosa.

"Ow! I mean… sorry," she frowned at Riley before looking to Sophie.

"Well, you _could_ apologize by taking me to this gig of yours tonight," the young officer beamed with victory.

Getting through the rest of the day – the part before the show anyway – was still going to be a challenge, even as they hung out together, all of them and Sophie. Already, Maya would still be thinking about Audra and the deal. Lucas knew she was, he could see it on her face, recognized the signs. It was only made _more_ complicated when somewhere around three in the afternoon her phone gave off the bell that said she had a new e-mail. It wasn't like she never received any other ones from day to day, and yet when the bell chimed, both Maya and Lucas sort of paused, froze, looking to each other.

_Is that it?_

Maya pulled out her phone in as casual of a way as one could and took a look at her notifications. There was the tiniest flicker in her expression that told Lucas it was indeed Audra's offer.

"Maya, can I talk to you? Upstairs?" Lucas asked her, also going for casual. Even so, it was random enough that it drew the other girls' attention. Maya was looking at him and now her eyes gave off 'I'm shaking my head at you' vibes.

"Yeah, okay," she stood up, and he followed.

"Just so we're clear, you guys don't live here anymore, keep it clean!" Sophie called after them.

"Wasn't even thinking about that until you said it!" Maya called back.

They ended up – because it would have felt weird to go anywhere else and they wanted a closed door in case anyone came snooping – in the bathroom. Standing there, facing one another, the phone sat in her hand, in between them, and it felt very much like it could burst any second with the way they stared at the thing.

"Are you going to open it?" Lucas asked her.

"I… I mean I want to, I really do, but... well… Look, I'm screwed either way. If I open it, and I see what it says, I won't be able to stop thinking about it tonight at Josie's. And if I _don't_ open it…"

"You're going to think about it anyway," he guessed.

"Bingo," Maya nodded, breathing out. "So which one's the lesser of two evils?" she asked, looking at him with an almost pleading smile for him to get her out of this mess.

"Is it easier to know or not know?" he asked. She blinked.

"Well, one means I know what's on the table, whether it gets me all jumpy happy or sends me swirling in the dumps all night…" she started to reply.

"Okay…" Lucas slowly nodded.

"And then the other… the other means the contents of Audra's e-mail is left at the mercy of my imagination all night. You know how _that_ can go."

"So, so many places," he nodded again.

"Right, so…"

"Screwed," he agreed.

"So screwed…" she groaned, letting her head thump against his chest. She pulled it back just as fast, which stalled him mid reach to hug her. "What if you read it?"

"Uh…" he shook his head.

"You can tell me if it's good, and if it's not, well then you don't say, like ever."

"Tell me how that would work exactly," Lucas pointed out. She looked at him, reaching the same conclusion he'd done. She could read him so much better than he could read her, and something like this? Yes, he'd managed to keep his plans for his proposal and the house renovation a secret for months on end, but that was different, that was subterfuge and also starting from a place where she had no idea anything was even happening. Here she would know that he knew what the e-mail said, and there would be no hiding from her.

"No, you're right," she sighed. "Back to hugging, back to hugging," she gestured, setting her head down again. He chuckled and did as told.

"I say wait until we're home, after the party. It'll be a lot easier for you to just get your head in the game once you all start to play."

"Yeah… okay… yeah… I can do that. See, I knew you could figure it out," she smiled now. "How long before that happens?"

"Few hours still," he reported. She groaned.

Little by little, the hours finally faded away, and they were all on their way to Josie's. What started out as having Sophie tag along ended with Sophie, Chiara, Asher, _and_ Ray tagging along. There was a moment where they wondered if Josie would have a problem with Lucas bringing extras like this, but there really wasn't.

"She actually said 'the more the merrier.' She said it and she meant it!" Maya whispered to Lucas as they headed into the house with their load of the instruments. "No clue what's going on with her?"

"Who says anything has to be going on?" Lucas shrugged.

"Me. I say," Maya pointed to herself. "No one changes like that on a whim, no way. Good or bad, something happened, I'm telling you."

"Well, she hasn't said anything."

"Why are we whispering?" They jumped, turning to find Asher trailing behind them with Riley's keyboard.

"Nothing… No, we're just talking, it's fine," Maya told him.

"About her?" Asher asked, nodding back to where Josie stood talking with Zelda.

"Hey, hey, stop that before she looks over here," Maya stalled, which nearly sent the three of them crashing.

"Wait, is she the one you were telling us about?" Asher looked again. "The Dark Lord?"

"Eyes front, Garcia," Maya very nearly stomped his foot. Asher looked back at the two of them. He chuckled, moving along with the instrument.

The set up may not have been part of the show, but sometimes it did feel like it was. They arrived to an empty stage, which was really just an empty floor, and little by little they made it into their space, where they would come and make their music. It was an essential step, and it started them on the road to getting hyped up.

"At the risk of making trouble where there's none, are you good to go?" Lucas asked, as the first of the guests, the first of his classmates, started to arrive, which meant that Maya and the rest of the band needed to clear out until the start of their show. In response, she gave him her phone, with the notification still on the lock screen.

"Hold on to this for me please?" she smiled. He nodded, kissing her for good luck, and then they went their separate ways.

The next few hours were something of a whirlwind, the way any show would be. That feeling Maya had been eager to get to that morning as she woke, she found it without difficulty, from the moment she stepped up to that microphone. She _loved_ to perform. She may not have wanted to make it her life, but she still loved it like almost nothing else in the world. By the time they were all sitting in the minivan again, with Lucas driving the band back to Austin, she had that wide awake exhilaration look on her face. The day had felt endless, but the two-hour drive, and the drop off of the bandmates, looked like it had lasted two seconds in her brain.

They arrived at the house and Maya made a direct line for the basement. She had a new song working its way through her, Lucas had seen it in her eyes since the day before, and now, after tonight, it was coming right out, from her mind and into her fingers, into her voice. He could hear her as he went up to check that Sam was there and he was sleeping. He _was _there, and he _was_ sitting on his bed, but he was also reading by flashlight.

"Hey," he looked up. "I was just…"

"It's fine, just finish the chapter and get some sleep after?" Lucas told him.

"I will," Sam promised, and Lucas knew he would.

He went down to the basement after this, finding Maya sitting in the room that looked very empty without the instruments still sitting in the back of the minivan. By now she had two guitars, one she took out on shows and one that stayed home. That one had once belonged to Kermit Hart, and it had been left to her. She still held it, but she'd stopped playing. She was looking at her phone, which rested on the floor in front of her.

"Waiting for me?" Lucas asked.

"Little bit," Maya smiled up at him.

"I'm here," he sat down next to her as she set the guitar aside in its case. She picked up the phone and opened the e-mail without hesitation. There was a quick note, and then a few attached documents. The note had told her which one to open first, the one she needed to look through with Topanga.

"I might be a little too tired to make sense of this right now, you can read it, too, yeah?"

"Yeah, I'm good," he promised.

X

_TWO DAYS LATER_

"Do it."

Those were the first words out of Topanga Matthews when Maya opened the door and found her standing there, looking entirely in Lawyer Mode.

"Are you sure?" Maya blinked. She'd passed along the e-mail, attachments and all, that night after the show, after she and Lucas had read through everything. They'd been left feeling optimistic, but then it was the middle of the night and they were both really tired, so maybe it was just wishful thinking.

"After I finished going through the documents yesterday I got in touch with Ms. Watts," Topanga nodded, as Maya let her into the house and they went to sit in the living room.

"You did?"

"We spoke about the offer, and about you. You might have a better deal now than you did going into this. I spoke to her, and a few other people. You wanted my counsel, well this is it. Call her back, say yes, if you want to say yes. This is and always will be your choice, and I will be with you every step of the way when you need me. My fee is very reasonable. You and Lucas need to come over for dinner more often," Topanga smiled, and Maya was all smiles, too, as she agreed to 'the fee.'

X

_ONE WEEK LATER_

"Wait, this is for real?" Nadine gasped.

_"Maya, this is amazing!"_ Kayla signed.

"I knew something was up!" Rosa pointed at her.

"Can I get in on that 'more dinners' deal, too?" Riley beamed.

As much as she'd hated keeping them in the dark up to now, telling her friends and bandmates about the contract was possibly the best thing she could have asked for in compensation. There had been this very brief moment of fear, thinking that any of them might be in any way upset about it, that they might resent her in some way or not want to be in the band anymore. Instead, and really as she should have expected it, the four of them had been nothing but thrilled for her.

"Okay, but wait, what does it mean for us?" Rosa asked, after the hugs and the giddiness had been pulled back in halfway. The others looked to Rosa, and then to Maya. "Like… all the songs you did before, for us, for Weaver Kings, and the ones you'd do for us from now on?"

"The before stuff is before," Maya promised them. "And whatever I write for us now, that'll be ours, too," she went on. "Your mom made sure of that," she looked to Riley. "It was our make or break rule, and they agreed. Audra was all for it, too. She's a big fan of the band, remember?" Now that the brief concern was put aside, the celebration could resume.

As a way to kick off summer, Maya really couldn't think of anything better. Of course, there _would_ be a lot of good things, great things. There was the camp, and Abigail and James and the kids coming over, and there was Lucas and Sam being out of school, which meant more time at home… And now there was the anticipation for what this new chapter would bring.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	85. Their Summer in Austin

**_A/N: Hey everyone!_**_ Hoping to get the first deleted scene done and posted sometime today. It will be in a separate story, so be on the lookout for that! And suggestions are welcome anytime!_

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March 25th 2020

_Chapter 85  
Their Summer in Austin_

"He knows they're not staying _here_, right?" Lucas whispered as he and Maya stood together, watching Sam. He'd been making his way along, cleaning around the house, since they'd come down the stairs for breakfast earlier.

"Am I being a bad big sister for letting him do it?" Maya whispered back. Lucas looked at her. "He's just so meticulous about it," she shrugged. "And if it makes him happy to do it, who am I to stop him?"

"Okay, but we have to leave for the airport in like half an hour," Lucas reminded her. "He's coming with us, isn't he?" Maya considered her options for a moment, the options being 'to stop him or not to stop him.' Finally, she sighed and stepped forward.

"Hey, uh, Sammy? Sam, hey!" she called out to her little brother until he stopped and looked at her, sponge in hand. "Hey, how's it going?" she smiled.

"Good, yeah," he nodded.

"Great," Maya told him, still with that smile of casual curiosity. "It's just that, well, we have to leave for the airport soon, to pick up everyone off that Tucson flight. You _are_ coming with us, right?"

"We're going now?" he asked, looking at himself for a moment.

"Half an hour, if you need to… yeah…" she stepped back as he put the sponge where it belonged and moved to go upstairs. Maya looked back to Lucas. "Do I need to worry about this?"

"He's been living away from most of his family for almost a year now, I think maybe it's just really hitting him that he misses them and he wants to show them that he's doing okay," Lucas shrugged.

"I get that, it's just…" Maya gestured, trying to come up with the right words and coming up short.

"I know," Lucas told her.

"How?" Maya asked, as though to say '_I_ don't even know.'

"Experience," he shrugged, nodding at her to indicate who he had experience with. Words or no, hers was the face he knew the most. She might as well have been carrying a sign.

"You ever think that one of these days the whole Huckleberry thing isn't gonna work anymore?" she wondered, pointing at his face.

"Is it?" he inquired. She looked at him a few seconds more, finally letting her hand down.

"Nope," she declared, smiling at him before moving toward the stairs, listening carefully before calling out. "Still changing?"

"Yes!" Sam called back. Maya turned to look at Lucas to see if the beat of silence had left him thinking the same thing she thought. He nodded.

"Put down the duster, sponge, or other cleaning implement, we're heading out!"

It was just as well that they left early. By the time they made it to the airport lot it appeared as though the whole place was occupied, and it took them a good ten minutes to find a spot to park. It was going to take several minutes more for them to reach the terminal and get to the gate where the Hart-Lanes would be coming through. Maya went the whole way arm in arm with her brother, who tried to look embarrassed but never really tried to pull away either.

"Are we late? Did they land?" he asked as they approached.

"No, we're good," Lucas reported, looking at the board.

"I used to think I spent a lot of time in airports after moving out here, but now it's really starting to be way more, isn't it?" Maya wondered aloud. "When friends would come to visit, we'd have a sign and everything," she told Sam, who now looked like he wished he had one. "No time for a masterpiece right now, Sammy. Don't worry, they'll still know you're happy to see them."

The plane landed on time, maybe even a few minutes early, and before long they were in for a solid bit of a reunion. Sure, they'd seen each other not two months before, but then days could feel like an eternity when family was involved. They would get through those days, and weeks, and months, with phone calls and video calls and texts and e-mails, but as soon as re-established contact came on the table, it was like they forgot how to think about anything else. They found those familiar faces in a crowd, and suddenly they were magnets, pulled to one another.

"I have your necklace!" Wyatt informed Maya, once he'd pulled back from the tight hold he'd jumped into. "I kept it safe," he held up their father's guitar pick, hanging from the chain around his neck.

"Yeah, you did, thank you," Maya smiled as he pulled the chain from around his neck and put it back around hers The chain was just long enough that it could go over her head. It still carried some of his body warmth, which made her happier than she'd expected it might. She didn't realize how much she'd missed having their father's gift around her neck until it was returned to her, made to feel almost alive by her brother's protection.

The Hart-Lanes had a rental for the summer, which was soon loaded with luggage and passengers both. They trailed along after Lucas' car and they all started on their way to Diana Zvolensky's summer house, which was to be their residence for the next several weeks.

"Is it a big house?" Sam asked Maya and Lucas as they went.

"Well…" Maya considered the question.

"You know the house we went to when we had the sleepover?" Lucas asked.

"It's _that_ big, too?" Sam's eyes went wide.

"No, no," Lucas quickly shook his head. "It's like… half that?" he estimated, looking to Maya out of the corner of his eye for confirmation.

"Let me put it to you this way, it will comfortably house everyone… and then some," Maya turned to look at her brother.

"Woah…" Sam blinked.

They had been there, for the first time, the second summer they'd known Sophie, and this was after they had all returned from their Europe trip. Sophie had decided it would be the best way for them to just sort of book end their vacation together.

The two of them and their friends had been up to that house… at least once a year since then, for a weekend here or a week there… Now, it would be the first of many times they'd be coming up, with the family spending weeks here. They could have come up and stayed here with the rest of them, too, but then family or no, they still had work to do, and it would just be easier if they stayed at the house.

Sam would be the only one of the three of them to stay with Abigail and James and the others. And as much as part of them would feel that they missed having him around the house, Maya and Lucas would have been lying if they said they weren't looking forward to having the house to themselves for that time.

"Hey, look, it's Mrs. Carlton!" Sam pointed out the window as they approached. "Wow…" It took them back to that first summer of coming here. It didn't matter that they had been going to Sophie's house for near on two years by then, seeing the summer house would be one of those things that reminded them again just how the Zvolensky were in a whole other bracket than they were. Even now, after seven years, they could still be caught by surprise.

"She's not spending the summer out here, too, is she?" Maya quietly asked Lucas.

"I don't think so," he whispered back. "Maybe she's just here to open the place."

That turned out to be the case, more or less. She'd come to do her usual walk through, preparing everything for the Hart-Lanes' arrival, and to give them the tour, sharing all the information they might need, such as nearby stores, restaurants, phone numbers they might need, and to hand over the keys.

When the other car pulled up and everyone climbed out, they all had that look on their faces like they thought they were in the wrong place, even Teddy and Wyatt, who had also seen the Zvolensky house and could have had some inkling. But then there were Maya, Lucas, and Sam, so they had to be in the right place… right? This wasn't a prank?

As it really was not a prank, this first surprise was followed up with the tour, as given by Mrs. Carlton. The woman had barely gone on her way back home that the Hart-Lane kids, from Sam on down to Wyatt, had taken off running to go upstairs again and decide who would sleep where.

"Don't break anything!" Abigail called after them, which was responded to by a chorus of 'okay, Mom!' by the lot.

"They are definitely going to break something, aren't they?" James mumbled to himself before looking back to his wife, who tried not to laugh, and then to his stepdaughter and her fiancé.

"I have a feeling Mrs. Carlton may have put away anything too breakable and valuable while she was here before," Maya told him. "Sophie told me how somewhere around when she was twelve or thirteen and considered 'more mature,' she started to notice some stuff around this house and their actual home that she'd never seen before, like suddenly she was considered less likely to knock things over."

"Right, well, at least when they break something it won't actually bankrupt us to replace it," James nodded.

"Maybe we should go and make sure they won't tear the place apart over who gets which room," Abigail suggested, and so she and James went up in search of their kids, while Maya and Lucas trailed behind them.

Up in the hallway, they stopped to find the kids were all mostly standing there, moving from one doorway to another. They would stand in a doorway as though they were claiming it, but then someone would wish to be next to someone, or across the hall from someone, and then that would jumble everything again. It was turning into a game and, if left unsupervised, it might have lasted all day, with everyone satisfied for it.

"You all keep this up and you'll fall asleep right where you're standing now," James pointed out.

Finally, with all the rooms selected, their bags were fetched from downstairs and unpacked to whatever degree their owners saw fit. Then it was time to go swimming in the lake.

Maya and Lucas had stayed there at the house until most of the kids had gone to bed, after which they'd hit the road for home. It had only been the first day and already they couldn't wait to see what the rest of the family's visit would bring them. As often as they had all been out to Austin by now, whenever they'd visit Maya, there was a lot they still needed and wanted to see, and there was no doubt they would have some very willing guides to get them around. Then of course there would be Cara and Teddy down at Stage Ready camp, and any number of days playing and swimming and eating together… They had already promised everyone a camping trip worthy of Pappy Joe.

"It's so weird…" Maya declared, a few seconds after they'd walked back into the house.

"What is?" Lucas asked.

"Just that… it's going to make it sound like he was loud, which he really isn't, but… the house feels so quiet right now without Sam." Lucas looked around, both of them silent.

"No, you're right," he nodded. "Just give it a second though, I'm sure…" Like they'd been summoned, the dogs came trotting about, Archer giving no mind to it being late as he barked up at them in greeting. "Oh, buddy," Lucas reached down to pick him up. "If we thought we were going to be the ones missing Sam these next few weeks…" he shook his head, scratching the pup.

"I'd say take him to the summer house, but if we do they're all going to want to take him back to Tucson in the end," Maya came up smiling at little Archer, too. "You're staying right here with us," she whispered at him. He barked. "Good, then it's settled."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	86. Their Summer in Camp

**_A/N: Hey __hey!_**_ I keep getting delayed on writing these deleted scenes because I am on a house cleaning kick, but I'm finally doing it as soon as this chapter is posted :D Whether it goes up tonight or tomorrow will depend on if I end up down a rabbit hole of looking up past chapters for continuity ;)_

* * *

March 26th 2020

_Chapter 86  
Their Summer in Camp_

Having the house to themselves turned out, on the whole, to be strange… at least in the beginning. And the fact that it felt strange might have been the strangest thing of all. They had been living away from home, living 'on their own' for five years now, except, well, they had never really been on their own like this, had they? In Houston they'd had roommates, and here they had… well, Sam. Sure, there'd been that small window after they'd moved in here and before Sam had come over from Tucson, but then they'd still been settling in, so they almost didn't have time to stop and think about it. And there had been some short visits out to see his family… Now, that missing energy in their home universe felt like it was telling them 'hey look, it's just you two now.'

It wasn't a 'bad' weird. It was mostly just him and her stopping for a moment and going 'huh…' All their lives there had always been other people around them and now… now it was properly just the two of them. Once the weirdness settled down, what they were left with was… Hey, this is kind of nice, too. Sure, it was only for a few weeks, and they would be so happy when Sam returned, but they were going to take what they could get. If things kept up on the trajectory they were holding, they probably wouldn't stay 'just the two of them' for very long with or without Sam, and they were more than okay with that.

The first morning where Stage Ready Summer Camp was to be held also happened to be a first day for another project as well. So while Maya had set out to get up early and get herself ready to go and welcome the campers, Lucas was just as early out of bed, to get ready to head out and meet his own 'campers' down at the animal shelter.

Much as he could have kept it easy for the summer, just picking up more hours at the bookstore – although he did that, too – Lucas had wanted to keep the ball rolling on his steps toward animal care. He had a bit more time for the Sanderson farm, yes, but then maybe seeing Maya going around with her ideas for her camp had gotten his own brain turning. He wanted to get more involved down at the shelter. He knew that, going off his and Maya's track record, it was practically an invitation to him bringing home more dogs, but it was just a risk he was willing to take. This was where he felt he needed to be.

"What do you think?" Maya asked, and when he looked around and saw her standing there in her camp t-shirt and a skirt, Lucas had to grin.

"I think I want to go to camp," he declared.

"Well, unfortunately, while Stage Ready does run on a 'no age limit' policy, I'm afraid the camp is another story," Maya pointed out with an innocent look. "And you do not look like a kid," she gave him a once over that felt very much like the words 'thank goodness for that' were in her mind somewhere.

"Right, well, I'm just going to carry this mental image with me today," he encircled her outline with his finger as though selecting her out of the air and cutting away the rest.

"Same here," she held up her hands with a laugh.

When Maya reached the theater, she really felt as though she would not be able to stand still for the wait. She'd grabbed coffee on the way and gone to sit in her office until the time came, but she ended up ducking into the back of the auditorium instead, pulling out her notebook and letting that energy in her produce what it would, lyrics, a melody, a drawing… Little by little she could hear the rising buzz of voices from out in the lobby, parents arriving to drop off their kids, waiting for someone to come along. It took everything in her for Maya not to get up and go out there yet. It was still early, and she was going to have to wait a little while longer, too.

Finally, she sprang out of her seat, putting her bag, her notebook, and her empty cup in a corner and out of the way before heading for the closed auditorium doors. Taking in a breath and letting her nerves flow out along with it, she opened the doors and welcomed the campers and their families to come inside and sit as they'd get checked in. She knew so many of these kids already, from the regular sessions. She knew some of the parents, too, for the same reason. All those familiar faces kept her on something like a sugar high, which put those families of parents and campers she didn't know in a similarly good mood.

"We match!" Lea Sullivan-Reyes declared as she came along, pointing to her yellow shirt and Maya's. Behind her, 'Papa' Keith Reyes of the deep voice, stood with youngest daughter Lydia perched in one arm. The four-year-old looked like she'd been crying, which Keith informed Maya was because Lea had her Stage Ready camp shirt, and middle sister Lara had her soccer camp shirt, while Lydia had no 'special' shirt like them.

"We're going to go and do something about that, aren't we, Hypnoteyes?" Keith asked the small one holding on to him and sniffling.

After all their campers had arrived, no one late or missing, and Maya's fellow counselor/mentors had also come along, the parents had said goodbye to their kids for the day, and they were set to begin. As much as Stage Ready felt very much like a 'we do what everyone needs to do on that particular day,' there had needed to be a bit more of a structure when it came to the camp, which would run Monday to Friday for seven weeks. Finding that structure had been easy enough: they were going to end their camp season with a show… So while every day was there for all of them to have fun and to learn along the way, they would also be working toward putting that production together and presenting it to their families on the last day.

"I don't want all of them to turn into stress balls by the end of the summer," Maya had told Lucas when the idea of the show had come along. "I know it's going to make some of them worry about getting it right, and that's normal, but maybe we can get them there a bit… I don't know, healthier? They're supposed to have fun, right?"

One of her goals would be to spot those kids, the ones who'd need someone there to tell them to breathe when they seemed to be so focused on the end result that it was like they were holding their breaths the whole time. She had spotted it in Lea long before today, and she was happy to say she seemed to be… maybe halfway there. She hoped to get her the rest of the way before summer's end.

Earlier that morning, she had dropped Lucas off at the shelter. She would be done for the day before he was, so she had the car. As he walked through the door of the familiar building, he thought about Maya's oft used decree to 'hug a puppy' on his first days and it made him smirk. There was definitely a reasonable chance of that happening around here today. If he needed proof, his morning soon kicked off with a sign of that.

He hadn't made it twenty steps that all of a sudden here was a call of 'hey!' followed by barking and scampering, and then there was a small dog, making a mad dash down the hallway. Lucas barely had a second to register it and he was already crouching to scoop the runaway into his arms. The dog barked on, moved about like he was trying to get back on the ground, but in no time he started to settle down, changing his tactic and sniffing the stranger that held him before deciding he liked him. Even as this was happening, a girl came dashing along, too, likely the one the dog had gotten away from. She saw that Lucas had the dog and she breathed.

"Hey, you're here… Good… I mean, morning."

"Morning, Jen," Lucas smiled as the dog went into kissing mode. He'd known Jen from previous visits to the shelter, including the day they had left with Archer and Max. She'd been working out here since she was thirteen, so five years now. "Who's this one?"

"Doesn't have a name yet. Right now I'm thinking Cujo."

"He doesn't seem that bad," Lucas frowned, looking back to the dog, who was practically curled up in his arms like a baby about to doze off.

"Well he must really like you, because he's been a nightmare since he came in a couple days ago," the girl reported.

"So no name for now then," Lucas noted, because there was no need to pin a name on this mutt that would brand him as trouble to anyone who got the reference.

Even as he'd set the so-called nightmare dog on the ground, he'd remained fairly docile, quietly trailing behind Lucas as he went on his way into the shelter proper with Jen. He trailed after him like a silent shadow, so much so that by the end of the day it would become his name. Shadow. Already by mid-morning Lucas was feeling those alarm bells go off in his head, telling him he was one good impulse away from bringing the animal home with him.

"Maybe this is just what we both need, huh?" he told Shadow as he sat on the ground and the dog stared back at him. "You need a good home, and I need to make sure you get one, even if it's not with me." Shadow gave a low whine, almost like asking 'why not?' and Lucas chuckled. "I better make sure Maya never sees that face of yours, because then _she'll_ want to take you, too, and it really can't be a good sign if I take one of you guys home on the first day." Shadow took a step forward, nudging at Lucas' offered hand. "Or tomorrow either," he added, with an almost apologetic scratch.

With his Shadow on his trail, Lucas went through that first day, finding many more faces staring back at him. They all needed homes, too, and he was happy to say that by the end of that day a couple of them had left with who would hopefully be their people for a good long while.

_Maya: On my way, be there in five. Dinner out tonight?_

_Lucas: Sounds good!_

"Okay, bud, I have to go now," he crouched before Shadow, who looked like he already knew Lucas was about to go. He was coming on strong, and it was almost impossible to look away. "I'll be back tomorrow morning, I promise," he scratched at the dog. "Just don't go wild on them tonight, alright? Please?" Shadow went and lay down in his spot, turning his eyes back up to Lucas like 'see? I'm a good boy.' "Good night, Shadow," Lucas sighed, patting his head one more time before going on his way back out of the building. Stepping out into the early evening air, finding Camp Maya waiting for him at the curb, Lucas breathed out. They could really make this work.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	87. Their Summer in Play

**_A/N: The first deleted scene is up! Look for "The World Around" :) I will see about doing more today!_**

* * *

March 27th 2020

_Chapter 87  
Their Summer in Play_

"What are we going to do with you, huh?" Lucas sighed, sitting on the ground of the shelter to tend to Shadow. The dog was an absolute angel when he was with him, but when he wasn't… "Don't you want to have a home somewhere that's not here?" Lucas asked him, holding his head in his hands. Shadow kept looking at him, stepping forward after a moment to nuzzle at his face. There really was no mistaking the dog's desires, and he was really wearing down Lucas' resolve day after day. He'd been holding steady in his aim to resist the urge to bring home any and all dogs he felt a connection to, but this one was rough. "I'm telling you, your people are out there, okay?"

He knew it was normal, that Shadow wouldn't be the last case he'd take to heart and he would just have to get used to it. It did not make it any easier.

As he drove up the lane toward home that afternoon, he knew he needed to get his head back on straight. Tonight was a big night.

"Maya?" Lucas called out as he walked into the house and was immediately accosted by Trix, Lou, and Archer.

"Upstairs!" Maya called back while he was greeting the dogs with a smile. They were particularly intrigued whenever he'd come home from the shelter, the same way they'd be back in Houston, when he would work at his aunt's clinic. It was the 'other dogs!' giddiness, as they'd call it. Since he'd started at the shelter, he'd been left to wonder what they all thought, if they could smell Shadow's ever persistent presence near him.

When he climbed up the stairs and found Maya in their room, she was standing in front of the mirror hanging inside the closet door, holding her hair up one way, then letting it cascade back down and twisting it a different way…

"You're so lucky you don't have long hair," she told him without pausing in her attempts at a hairstyle.

"We're all lucky, I'd look terrible," he shrugged, making her laugh. "Too many choices?" he guessed as she sighed and let go again.

"It's a really chaotic mix to put a creative person and _options_ together," Maya insisted.

"Sounds like it," Lucas nodded, coming to stand behind her, casually splitting her hair in two bunches and twisting them about like she was Princess Leia. She snorted, batting his hands away until he let go. "We have to leave in like twenty minutes," he reminded her.

"I know, I know," she groaned, moving to pull out her dress. Maybe it'd be easier to decide once she had the dress on.

"Nervous?" he asked as he went about changing, too.

"I don't know why, it's not like I'm the one who'll be on stage tonight."

"Sympathetic nerves then?" he amended.

"Okay, yeah, big time."

How else was she supposed to feel? Tonight was the premiere of the theater's new production, with her mother in the leading role. When they had put up the poster out front, with Katy's photo front and center, it had sent such a thrill through Maya's heart, like electricity sparking out. Shawn had insisted on taking the photos, of course, and the poster had since been framed and given a place of honor in the Hunter Hart home. The kids had gotten a kick out of it, too. The twins had wanted one in their room, too, so they did – one each. MJ missed absolutely no opportunity, whenever he'd be taken near the theater, to tell any and all who would listen that the lady in the photo was his mommy. And Haley, coming up on her second birthday before long, would often be found standing or sitting in front of the frame, staring up in awe.

The kids had been giddiness and awe. Shawn… Shawn was the proudest husband there ever was. They half expected him to go door to door and tell everyone about the play so they would want to buy tickets. He had been 'on the frontlines' of seeing Katy through, from when she'd gotten the role, and then all the preparations, the rehearsals, and the ticking clock bringing them closer and closer to the premiere. From what Lucas and Maya both had been hearing, he'd been stopping her from deciding to quit at least once a week since the beginning, and twice a week after a while. Now, it was pretty much daily.

So for all that, Lucas could more than understand why Maya herself was so nervous. It was a sort of sympathetic anxiety for her mother. When he asked her about it, she just considered it for a moment before she could think of what to say.

It had been just the two of them for so long, Lucas knew that, like he knew how acting had been such a big part of who Katy was back then, such a big part of how Maya identified her mother. She _knew_ how big of a part it was of her mother's life back then, but it had taken a few more years' growing up, of being out here in Texas, after Katy had essentially given it up for her job at the theater… It had taken her that time to see how it was so much more than a part of her life, it was a part of _her_. And even though she didn't see her mother regretting the choice, to know that she'd essentially given it all up for the sake of giving Maya a better life… It made this new opportunity, this role and this first performance coming up that night, feel as big for Maya as it did for Katy.

The hair was finally dealt with, along with everything else, which enabled Maya and Lucas to get into the car and on their way to the theater. They arrived right behind the car which brought Shawn, Nellie, Gracie, and MJ. Haley had been left with a babysitter, which, according to Shawn, was not a well-received decision by the girl in question. She'd seen her brother and sisters get all dressed up, and her father, too, and when she had been left as she was, she'd understood enough to know that she wasn't doing the same thing they were doing that night.

In reverse, it made the other three young Hunters feel very grown up indeed that they had been trusted to go to the show that night. According to Gracie, they had each been made to promise that they would behave, which meant they had to be quiet, couldn't shout anything along the lines of 'hi, Mommy!' at any time, or complain that they were bored… That was another thing. They were told they might not understand everything that was going on, but looking at all three of them it was clear that all they really cared about was seeing their mother up there.

Also along for the show that night were Abigail and James and the kids, and Cecilia, and Cory and Topanga, with two out of three children, and so many more of their friends, their families, and Maya's friends, especially those who had fallen under the umbrella of 'you're our kid's friend, you're family here' in the Hunter Hart house.

"There's so many people already…" Maya remarked as they walked through the crowded lobby and saw into the auditorium, where so many more were already sitting or making their way to their seats. "Been to so many shows out here before, it's never really hit me how many seats there were." Lucas took this to mean 'that is a LOT of people, what if Mom blanks when she sees them?'

"Come on, you've had shows like that before with the band," Lucas pointed out, his covert way of reassuring her. "Way more." She couldn't help but smile at that.

"Well, you're always right there where I can see you," she told him.

"Yeah, and where are _we_ going to be?" he asked, holding up the tickets. Front row, front and center.

All the kids had their own seats, officially, but even before the play started, MJ ended up in Shawn's lap, where he was happily received, while Gracie moved over so that she and Nellie were sharing the seat at their big sister's side.

The premiere performance would soon begin, and to see that curtain open, with the stage all set and Katy a lone figure standing there under the lights… Lucas had turned his head so he might get to see how the others reacted. He saw Shawn, five seats to his right, with his son in his lap, staring up at the woman on stage with so much love in his eyes that it spilled over in unrestrained tears, even as he kept his arms locked around MJ, whose whole face was as good as him shouting out 'Mommy!' which he didn't, instead keeping his lips firmly pressed together. This was a tactic also employed by the twin girls two seats to his right, stuck together, arms looped together and eyes full of wonder.

And Maya… Maya, at his side… He'd reached for her hand, even as the curtain was coming up, and he just felt that breath catch in her at the sight of her mother up there, releasing again as her own face lit up into such a smile. She didn't look away for even a second, might not even have blinked, until Katy's character had exited the stage after the first scene. When she did break contact, it was to check on her sisters to her right, and then to look back at him to her left. _She's doing it…_ He tipped his head. _Yeah she is._

Any of them who'd known Katy Hart back in the day would never have expected the performance she put in that night. It wasn't as though they saw her as a joke before, but they definitely did not think of her as a great actress, not even a good one, truth be told. But tonight… tonight, she was mesmerizing. It was night and day, but then the Katy who stood on that stage that night was just a whole other person than the one she'd been as the struggling actress from New York. This was a Katy who'd started her life over, who'd found new love, true love, a Katy who'd gone from doing her best just to provide for one daughter to now juggling four little children and one grown one like a pro. She'd seen ups and downs, wins and losses… and they had made her into this.

If the sight of her at the rise of the curtain had been something to remember, so was the moment when the play ended and the actors were applauded. As she stood there now, with the raucous praise of all these people, it was all there on her face, the realization of that journey, New York to Texas and all those years since the last time she'd practiced her craft.

Maya got to be the first one to approach Katy as she finally came to rejoin her family, and she wrapped her mother in such a hug, the two of them quietly locked together, like the ghosts of that duo from a past life inhabited them. Even without hearing any of it, Lucas just saw Maya whisper at her mother's ear and he knew that it would all come down to one sentiment. _I'm so proud of you._ Katy had given up so much to raise her baby girl as she'd known she needed to be, and this right here, this was her getting some of it back, and about time, too.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	88. Their Summer in Chores

**_A/N: Morning! _**_A second deleted scene has been added! Another later today hopefully!_

* * *

March 28th 2020

_Chapter 88  
Their Summer in Chores_

"Can you reach it?"

"I think so," Lucas braced himself on the ladder before looking down and carefully climbing up to the next step.

"I got you, go ahead," Pappy Joe told him, standing below, holding the ladder.

"I know," Lucas told him, smiling to show he was not concerned. "Okay, I'm good," he reported.

"You really didn't have to," Patty insisted, standing nearby and looking up as well as he went about dusting the framed artworks high on the wall. "No one really notices, and if they do then they know to keep their mouths shut about it." It made Pappy Joe laugh. "Joseph, the ladder," Patty warned.

"Sorry, dear, I've got it, don't worry."

It had been so much a part of his life growing up, the big house cleans every season. Growing up with Melinda Friar, cleanliness had been right near the top of the list along with courtesy, politeness, honesty… And every summer, this would extend to Pappy Joe's house as well. He would usually grumble and tell his daughter-in-law it wasn't necessary, but then he knew her well enough to guess whether or not that would make any difference, so he'd let her do it anyway. After he'd moved in with them, after his fall, it had fallen to just their house, and then he'd moved in with the Hillards, and finally with his new wife, Professor Robinson, so that had been that.

But then on a whim, when the two of them had come to Austin to see Katy's play, they had been talking and he'd said that if they ever wanted it, he'd be happy to come over and see to anything they might have needed help with around the house. Now here he was, up a ladder.

Dusting the top frames had seen him have to continued down with the next row, and the next one, but finally he was back on the ground and he looked up.

"There," he breathed, knowing that he'd be coughing if not for his having covered his nose and mouth with a makeshift mask before going up the ladder.

"Do you know what, I'd forgotten that big one there had those gold details in the wood," Patty pointed to a big frame in the top row. "Now I'm kind of sorry I didn't get it done earlier," she pressed a hand to her cheek, smiling sheepishly.

"Happy to do it," Lucas nodded. Pappy Joe chuckled, reaching over to bat some dust off his grandson's head and shoulders.

"You look like you're off to rob a train there," he declared before Lucas got the scarf off from around his face.

"I'll get started on the windows," he told his grandparents, folding up the ladder.

He remembered the first time he had been to this house, with Maya. The both of them had been left sort of in awe to even be here, at her professor's home. The place wasn't massive, by any means, but it had that refined quality to it, which went right along with someone like Patty. She'd want them to call her by her first name, but they'd still feel that compulsion born of manners to call her by her title and her surname. It didn't matter that she treated them both like family already, it was all so natural to them.

And then she'd gone and become his grandmother, by marriage as well as by her own caring nature, which was, according to Sophie, to be 'the world's best grandma.' And now Pappy Joe was living here with her. Since he'd moved in here, the place had not changed so much, but they could definitely spot out the changes which would have been brought on by his presence. If there was ever any doubt that the artist and professor could belong with the man who still looked like he was followed by a twangy soundtrack wherever he went, they only needed to look at the two of them together, in this place, and they'd know Joseph Friar and Patty Robinson could never have ended up anywhere else than here, together, so long as their paths ever came to cross.

Lucas could not speak to the state of his new grandmother's life before the marriage, but as to his grandfather… He knew that he'd gone through enough in his life, suffering losses that affected him so deeply, from his little Annabeth long ago, to his first wife and Lucas' grandmother, Susannah. His fall down the stairs and the effects it had on him, physically, that was all different, but it was impactful nonetheless. Joseph Friar had always been an active man, a man of strength and practicality, and all of a sudden to find himself limited… It had forced him to face the fact that he was growing older, to the point where it had felt as though everyone else had forgotten his age, too, and suddenly… suddenly he _was_ old. Lucas had worried, just as his father did, that, if this kept up, they could lose him, so much sooner than they ever expected to.

And then Patty Robinson had happened, and she'd been brought into his midst, and it was like he'd found his fountain of youth again and bounced back… maybe not exactly the way he'd been before the fall, but near enough as to make it feel like none of it had ever happened. Lucas didn't know that he'd seen his grandfather be quite so happy, not since… well, not since before Susannah Friar had passed.

For himself, Lucas had not known how he would deal with the idea of a new grandmother. He'd had… two of the best ones there could ever be, Susannah Friar and Marianne Sullivan. Having lost them both so long ago now, it was easy to see them as sort of the idealized versions created by a boy, but then he only had to hear the way people spoke about them both, missed them both, and he knew he remembered them as they were. He had been made into the man he was today, in great part, for who they had been to him as a boy.

And when Patty had come along, well… She'd started to have a place in his life, even before the thought of her ever becoming family was ever on the table. She'd been Maya's new professor, who was wonderful and inspiring to her, and then he'd met her, and he'd seen why Maya would be so pulled toward her the way she was. Then when she'd met Pappy Joe, it had never really occurred to him that the two of them would end up married, but… he saw how happy she made him, and if his grandfather was happy then Patty Robinson was right where she belonged. Before long, he would come to see that… yeah… he wanted to call her his grandmother, and so he did. She was not erasing the presence of those who'd come before her, no. She was joining them, a third pillar, bringing that much more stability.

It had also gone and opened up this position where Thomas Friar found himself with a stepbrother in Patty's son, Nick. And there was Nick's daughter, Maddie, who had been one of Lucas' campers back when he'd been a counselor and was suddenly his… step cousin? Whatever the term, the girl had been very surprised and actually amused to learn that they were now family, and especially for the link it gave her to one of her favorite singers. She had introduced her grandmother to TXNY years back, and then Maya had been her grandmother's student, and now she was going to be married to her new cousin, so that as good as made it so Maya was her cousin, too.

"I think you've done enough for today," Patty came to find him, in mid-afternoon.

He was up on his ladder again, cleaning the top cupboards in the kitchen, silently singing along to the music on the radio, something that almost came naturally, like it was part of the activity, per his mother's example. It all sort of happened automatically, so much so that he wasn't even thinking about what he was singing to as he did it. Instead, he was thinking – as ever, this summer – about his 'buddy' down at the shelter. Every time someone came into the shelter looking to adopt a dog, there'd be this pause where Lucas and whoever else was there at the time would wonder if they should bring out Shadow or not. Maybe he'd find his people, but at the same time, maybe he'd go haywire again and scare them away…

Lucas stalled mid-lyric and looked down at the sound of his grandmother's voice, hoping that he didn't look too much like he'd been busted in the act of doing something much more shameful.

"You can come down and I'll get started on dinner."

"I'm almost done," he promised, pointing to the cabinets.

"Well, I won't stop you, I'm too much of a completionist to argue with that," she smiled up at him.

"I think that might be me, too," Lucas laughed, getting back to work. "Sophie said you guys went to visit her the other day?"

"Yes, Thursday," Patty told him. "She's coming along on her recovery, what a relief…" she breathed, and Lucas could only nod. "At the risk of being too forward, has she spoken about nightmares again, or have those stopped?"

"Not stopped, no, but I think they've been happening less," Lucas replied, the thought of it leaving him pulled out of focus for a moment. That Sophie had these problems was not a secret. They knew about the nightmares, just not _what_ they were. They didn't know the specifics of what had happened to her that night and if she wasn't ready to discuss it then they wouldn't push her, even if it opened up their minds to any number of horrible possibilities.

"She will get through this," Patty declared with confidence.

"She will," Lucas agreed. Sophie had told him about the visit because she'd been so touched that they'd wanted to look in on her, and he was left feeling the same way. Pappy Joe and Patty had hosted him and Maya through those days they'd spent back in Houston after the incident. They hadn't gone by the hospital to see Sophie, not wanting to crowd her in those more difficult first days and weeks, but they'd sent flowers and treats and books, by way of Maya and Lucas, while also asking after her every time the two of them would return to the house…

"What would you say if we just ordered in?" Patty asked, pulling him out of his thoughts.

"Oh, sure, yeah, I just…" he started, then paused. His ear was drawn to the music coming from the radio on the kitchen counter.

He knew that melody, he'd heard it… He'd heard it hummed by his fiancée, for days upon days, weeks ago. And the words… He knew them, too. The voice was new though, but he'd known to look for that, he'd known…

"Oh…" he moved off the ladder as quickly as he could without falling, sweeping over to the radio to turn up the volume.

"What is it?" Patty asked, while he was tapping away at his phone.

"That's Maya's, she wrote it," he quickly explained. "The first one, with the contract… Had no idea it would come so fast…" His face was locked in a smile, and it took him back to that night of Katy's premiere, seeing Shawn's face turned up to the stage. He knew he must have looked something like that right about now. When his phone rang, seconds later, he picked it up and knew it would be her even without looking at the screen.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	89. Their Summer in Sound

March 29th 2020

_Chapter 89  
Their Summer in Sound_

She was on her own today. Lucas was in Houston visiting his grandparents, Sam was off with the rest of the Hart-Lanes on an outing to a water park. She could have gone to either of these places with them, had been invited and everything, but she'd chosen to stay home and relax. It was one of those rare days where she wasn't due at the theater, for her regular duties, or Stage Ready, or the camp, and she didn't have any errands to run, or deadlines to meet… As hectic as her life could be at times, she knew better than to ignore an opportunity to just stop and breathe for a while. So here she was laid out on the couch, vaguely tuned into the sound of Trix and Lou munching on the food in their bowls in the kitchen, while little Archer snored on the ground next to her.

She wasn't _bored_, but she was also left to face the fact that she wasn't so good at sitting still from time to time. Right now, she was struggling with it. She was just… tingling… with the need to do something, anything more than this.

"Just relax, Hart…" she sighed, very aware of her feet tapping against the armrest. The sound of her voice, breaking through the quiet of the house, brought the pup to rise up on his front legs and give a curious bark. Maya turned her head at this, then turned on to her side to look down at Archer. "Hey, wanna go take a walk?"

That still counted as relaxing, yeah? A nice, peaceful walk out around the land surrounding their house, with the three energized dogs… Trix and Lou were old pros by now and could be allowed to run free. Archer, on the other hand, was still small and overly enthusiastic, which had already led to him wandering off on his own once and nearly being lost. So he got a leash on him, though he appeared to find this an acceptable compromise so long as he was outside and could still go sniffing and wandering, up to a certain distance.

Maya had only just slipped in her earbuds, watching the dogs further up ahead as she did so, and she had just started flipping through radio stations on her phone, when she chanced to catch a familiar hook. She stopped walking so suddenly that a couple seconds later Archer reached the limit of his leash and gave a little yelp of surprise. Maya was barely aware of this, too startled as she looked to her phone screen and it all hit her even more.

This song, her own composition, was going out across the country and beyond… and here she was, standing in an open field, with a dog barking for her attention.

In every wonderful way, she just wanted to scream out into that blue summer sky. There would be… millions of people hearing her words, her music, at this very moment. _Millions!_ After a few seconds she just ended up sitting down in the grass, feeling as though her legs wouldn't have managed to support her much longer if they tried. It was so much, too much for her not to get overwhelmed. It was one thing to make the thing, and put it in the hands of others to make it into this finished product, but to be standing here now, hearing it… It left her heart ready to burst out of giddiness. And all she could do was sit here, and listen, as the dogs came dashing back around her like they thought she might be in trouble.

Weeks ago, when the contract had been signed, and all of it had been made official, she hadn't known what to expect, how long it would be before they got to a moment just like this one. But then not a week later she'd gotten a call. They had an artist who needed a new song after something else had fallen through at the last minute. Audra had taken this information and turned automatically to their new writer, asked if she might have something for them. All she did have at that point was the song she'd started to come up with, that day she'd first come by the theater, and the beginnings of something else, still in progress. The two songs were night and day from one another, and after hearing what there was of both of them at this moment, Audra had asked if she might be able to get a demo down for that second one by the end of the week. She'd told her she'd get on it, and she'd done it.

She hadn't even heard the finished song. Truth be told, she'd never found out who the song was meant for, just that she'd find out soon enough, and all she'd been left to go on was this feeling like when she did find out she would be floored.

This was not a floor, but it was the ground, and she was sitting on it now, hearing this voice in her ears, this voice singing her words, this voice she had known and often emulated… for most of her life. She was shaking, and that was okay.

It took her a moment to realize that her phone was giving off vibrations, alerting her to incoming messages. She looked down at the screen now and there were so many outbursts from one friend and another, telling her that the word had clearly gone out. She zoned in on one more than any other.

_Lucas: MAYA YOUR SONG_

_Lucas: ON THE RADIO_

_Lucas: QUICK!_

It made her laugh, as much as it made her realize she was crying. He'd heard it, too, back in Houston. What she wouldn't have given for him to be here with her instead of way out there… Still, she held on to her need to call him until after the song had come to an end, taking a few deep breaths and fanning some air into her face, wiping tears from her eyes before finally hitting that speed dial.

"My heart's beating out of my chest…" she spoke with a shaky laugh. "That means it's real, right?"

"Yeah, it is," he replied, and she could hear laughter in his voice, too, laughter and wonderful frenzy. He was so excited, for her.

"I'm sitting in the grass right now," she reported, her free hand having busied itself in scratching at Archer in her lap. "You might need to come and get me once you're back in Austin, I don't think I can get up from here." She told him about how she'd been walking the dogs when it had all happened. What were the odds that she'd turn on the radio just at the right time, the right station like that? _No higher than the odds of having my first song get taken on so fast, taken on by _her_ of all people…_

"So I better excuse myself from dinner with the grandparents then?" Lucas asked.

"Oh, you should eat first, I'll still be jumpy in a few hours," Maya shook her head at him.

"And leave you in the grass all that time?" he joked.

"Somehow, I'll survive," she volleyed back to him. The memory of the song on the radio came back at her like a force of nature. "Ree Forster…" she said the name, almost reverently. She still couldn't believe it. Her legs felt like jelly all over again at the thought.

"You know this probably means she's heard you sing now, from the demo?" Lucas told her, and her breath shrank in a gasp.

"I-I hadn't even… thought of that, oh my…" she took a deep breath, pulling Archer closer in a one-armed hug. She'd never felt so self-conscious of herself, like she couldn't remember what she'd sounded like in the demo. Was it okay? What did she think of it? "This is all happening so fast…"

"Are you sure you don't want me to come back now?" Lucas asked.

"Really sure," Maya insisted. "Look, see… well, you can't see… but I'm standing up, all on my own," she reported as she did so. Sure, she was still feeling that wobbliness and hyperactivity like she'd just come down from doing a show with the added kick of super good news to really send her off balance, but this wasn't going to get resolved by sitting still, no, never. She needed to be back at the house, she needed to do… something… with all this energy in her. She had a particular itch to pull out her paintbrushes and all her colors…

"I'm not going to be able to think about dinner, you know that?" Lucas pointed out.

"You're already saying goodbye to the grandparents, aren't you?" she smirked to herself. In response, she heard the distinctive sound of a car door opening.

"Be there in a couple of hours."

"Better be." _Ree Forster… my song…_ "I'll be in the attic."

She never made it up to the attic before he arrived. Walking back into the house with the dogs, her feet just took her down into the basement. There, on one of the shelves, sat a pair of long boxes filled with CDs. They had belonged to Katy as she grew up, and at some point they'd just become Maya's. It wasn't as though she ever even listened to most of them, but she loved just having them. They were a picture into who her mother had been as a teen.

There were a few she had actually pulled from their cases and listened to, again and again. One of them was Ree Forster's debut album. Maya pulled it out now, finding it without having to think of which box it would be in or where in that box it would rest. Ree had been all of sixteen when she'd come on the scene, which would mean she'd been in the public eye for the better part of her life, with over twenty-five years under her belt. She'd never stopped growing, never stopped putting out hits. And now… now she was singing her song.

After staring at that album cover for a solid minute, Maya pulled her phone from her pocket again, staring at the blank screen now as she considered if she wanted to go and see what people thought of it, or if Ree was talking about the new single… What if people didn't like it?

Before she could make up her mind, there was the doorbell upstairs. Maya put the CD back and hurried up the stairs to go see who it would be. She reached the top even as her mother let herself in, and they stopped and looked to one another for a few seconds before Maya bolted toward Katy, who had her arms wide and at the ready for the embrace as she practically leapt for her mother.

"Would you like me to pinch you?" Katy asked, hugging her firstborn close.

"No, this is good," Maya promised. "You heard it, too?"

"I was at the grocery store, Shawn called and told me about it. I'm not ashamed to say I may have caused a scene in the middle of aisle four," Katy informed her, making Maya laugh. "I had to find it online, once I got back to the car. You should see what everyone's saying…"

"Should I?" Maya asked apprehensively.

"Are you kidding? Maya, they're loving it," Katy pulled back, taking hold of her daughter's hands and giving them a good squeeze. "And look here," she presented her with her own phone, opened to a video of the audio track. The description was pulled down, and right there, like the binding of past and present…

_Ree Forster – How You & I (Audio)_

_Music & Lyrics: Maya Hart_

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	90. Their Summer in Recovery

March 30th 2020

_Chapter 90  
Their Summer in Recovery_

It had only been a few days since Ree Forster's new single had hit the airwaves, but it still felt like no time had passed. Maya could still feel it, down to her bones, that moment when she'd heard it for the first time, and everything else that had happened in the hours afterward. She remembered standing there with her mother, as Katy had shown her the video, the credit in the description… Maya had just stood there, looking at those words, at her own name staring back at her, and she'd cried all over again.

By the time Lucas had made it back from Houston, he'd walked into a crowded house. Katy's arrival had been followed by another, and another, and many more. Shawn and the Hunter kids, Thomas and Melinda Friar, the Matthews, the Cassidys, Zay and Nadine, Riley, Dylan, Rosa, Cecilia, Kayla… They'd all heard it, either on the radio as it had come on, or after, when someone had texted and told them about it. How they'd all known that it was her song, when no one had heard even just the demo except Lucas and the girls from the band, who'd acted as… well, her band… Alright, well maybe that was her answer right there.

The last to have arrived before Lucas had been Abigail, James, and the Hart-Lane kids, and that had been just a minute or two before, which meant that the conversation was still loudly energized when the door opened and there he stood. Maya had turned and seen him and in no more than two seconds she was in his arms and several inches off the ground. It had turned into something of an impromptu party, lasting well into the evening and into the morning hours for some of them. Even after they'd all gone, Maya couldn't sleep if she'd tried. Instead, she'd finally allowed herself to go back and listen to the song again, without the distraction of her brain imploding.

It was even better than she recalled from that first listen. It suited Ree's voice so smoothly. Yes, she'd made it her own, but there was no denying that this was the song she had written. She hadn't torn it apart in any way, she'd just joined her own sound into it.

That first night, much as she'd tried not to look at it like it mattered, she'd looked to the number of views. How could she have ignored it though? Already then it had been massive. But now, days later… massive almost felt small by comparison. And then once the TXNY fans had caught wind of the fact that _she_ was the one who'd written it… She didn't know that she'd stopped smiling in all that time.

"Maya, she mentioned you!" Sophie came speeding on her crutches when she and Lucas arrived for their visit that day. She still couldn't put weight on her foot but she'd graduated from the walker to crutches, much to her relief.

"What?" Maya blinked, not following.

"How long's it been since you looked at your phone?" Sophie shook her head like she couldn't believe her friend right now. "Is it on silent, how are you not blowing up right now?" she waved her hands at her until she'd take it from her pocket and look. Maya and Lucas both looked at the screen together, and Lucas instinctively set his hands on his fiancée's shoulders so she wouldn't tip back. That might not have been a bad idea. "I think you're going to have to adjust your notification settings unless you want your phone to keep blinking like that," Sophie grinned.

It was like she said, Ree Forster had tweeted about the song, and she'd mentioned Maya, identifying her for being the one to write it. And she hadn't stopped there.

**_Ree Forster_**_ followed you._

"Did I write anything really stupid lately?" Maya mumbled.

"I don't think so," Lucas promised, squeezing her shoulders but looking to Sophie, knowing she'd probably have thought the same and checked. She gave thumbs up.

By the time Chiara and the guys came to find their guests had arrived, Maya still looked like she'd taken a good knock to the head. There was a lot of talk about The Tweet, and the follow back. Asher was convinced this would be followed by a message. Ray wondered aloud if she'd ask to meet, and Maya had looked at him like 'why would you even put that idea in my head?'

Lucas was kind of glad that this all happened today. The whole reason they'd even made the drive up to Houston to visit on that one day had been… not necessarily to distract the both of them but still… It had felt like they needed to do something more than to sit at home.

Today had been meant to be their wedding day, before they'd pushed it back to the following summer.

They tried to imagine what it would have been like, if they hadn't changed the date, if this was the day. Putting aside the major surprise of all the Ree stuff, well, there was Sophie.

On the whole, putting aside the scar over her eye, and the presence of the crutches, and the trail of another scar or two visible on her arm and her leg peeking out from under a shirt or pant sleeve… Well, putting all that aside, she looked in perfect condition. Her energy was certainly up, the more mobile she got to be again, which was a tremendous help. The progress in her recovery went a long, long way in giving her the motivation to continue in that direction. She had a goal in mind, and that was all she needed. She was going to get better, she was going to get her badge back.

It didn't change the fact that she was still 'the great hopping wonder,' and every now and then – according to Chiara – she would have a tendency to wear herself out. She certainly would have done that today, at the wedding. It wouldn't have felt right to put her through that, especially as Chiara's words also left them wondering if she ever overdid it in order to tire herself into a dreamless sleep. The nightmares had been almost gone for a while, but now it felt as though it took even less to keep Sophie in a state of revolving insomnia.

As difficult as it all was for Sophie, it hadn't left Chiara untouched either. Her own troubles were not physical, no, but they were there, in her head. She spent so much time worrying for her wife, and all the ups and downs of Sophie's recovery had settled into Chiara like hyper vigilance and just a bit of helplessness. Sooner or later, something was going to have to come out of this, and it left their friends thinking it would either bring them closer together or it was going to tear them apart.

"If all goes well, I get to start putting my foot on the ground this week," Sophie told Maya, as she accompanied her up the stairs a few minutes later. "I've been told it's going to feel real weird at first."

"No marathons yet, right?" Maya joked.

"Week after that," Sophie told her with a laugh. "I sort of tried it," she admitted. "Not putting any weight on it, just let it touch the ground, you know? It's like it's not my foot anymore, I haven't used it in so long." Maya had followed her because Sophie had wanted to show her something, but now she suspected it had really just been the means to get to talk to her one on one. "I'm really sorry you're not getting married today. The weather's so nice right now, and imagine what it would have been like, all the Ree madness… We would all have been dancing to your song before the night was up," Sophie smiled, though it didn't quite manage to reach her eyes, where her regret continued to rule.

"Yeah, well, it wouldn't have been the same if you weren't up there dancing with us, okay?" Maya insisted with a nod.

"I _am_ the best one," Sophie tried to brush it off with a burst of confidence, but it only seemed to drag her down again.

"Hey…" Maya touched her arm, but Sophie wouldn't look up, just shook her head, and Maya took this as her cue to move from a touch to hold, carefully minding the crutches as she embraced her long-time friend. "Sophie…"

"This has got to be some kind of record, spoiling not one but two huge things for you on the same day, first the wedding, now everything with Ree…" the redhead sniffled into her shoulder.

"Stop it, you're not spoiling anything," Maya told her. "Talk to me, please?"

"I just… I thought I was getting better, I thought…" Sophie shook her head as she pulled back. Her face looked like it was set on vibrate, and her hand shook, too, moving to wipe tears from her eyes.

"Is it the pain? Your leg, or…"

"Everything that happened, that night, I just… I didn't… All I had were sort of… clips, you know? Flashes… I couldn't remember all of it, everything… everything that happened to me out there." But she remembered now. Maya didn't need to say it, and neither did Sophie. She remembered, and that was why she couldn't sleep. "I know what you're going to say, and no, I haven't really told her about it. She already worries so much about me, and I don't want to add more… But I don't have much of a choice, do I?" Maya didn't know what to tell her; she was trying not to start crying, too. "I just want everything to go back to normal, I miss it, I miss looking at her and not seeing concern all over her."

"Isn't 'concern' a lot like not knowing?" Maya pointed out after a beat.

"Yeah…" Sophie breathed, nodding.

"It'll be better after, even if it has to be a bit worse first, won't it?"

"I hope so, I… I don't want to lose her…" her voice was barely audible now, and Maya hugged her again.

"Not gonna happen," she vowed, trying somehow to see over the banister and down the stairs. They'd all known this was going to have to happen sooner or later. Sophie could only mask herself with humor for so long before it all came crashing out, and right now the dam was cracking open, everything was about to come pouring out, and it couldn't just be her up here, but what was she going to do, shout?

She could just see the back of Lucas' head, where he sat on the couch. She tried waving her arm in his general direction, hoping he'd catch her on the periphery and look… There he was. He tipped his head back, looking confused, until he got the whole picture. Maya breathed, letting her fingers sign spell out Chiara's name.

Soon, the others were coming up the stairs, with Chiara at the lead. She and Maya managed to do a swap, where Maya slipped away and Chiara took her place in holding Sophie. Soon as she knew her wife was there, she wobbled on her crutches, but she held steady, _Chiara_ held her steady. Maya stood back now, with Lucas, with Asher and Ray, the four of them unable to do anything but look on, their own feelings over the events of the last months brimming over their faces. Sophie had it in her head that she'd ruined this day for her friends, but for Maya as much as for Lucas it felt in the end that she had made this day better. It didn't matter that they hadn't gotten to have their wedding as planned, didn't matter that their giddiness over Ree had given way to crying and hugging. This day felt like a milestone in their friend's recovery, and that… that was all they could ever want to see.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	91. Their Summer in Progress

_**A/N: The newest chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!**_

* * *

March 31st 2020

_Chapter 91  
Their Summer in Progress_

It would come to a point where, having had the Hart-Lanes in Austin for a few weeks already, they would almost forget that, in time, they would be returning to Tucson. But that was coming along now. They were headed back in just a few days. They might have been gone already, except for two events. For one, Nellie and Gracie really wanted them all to still be around for their seventh birthday party, and for another, they had been invited to attend the Babineaux family party.

First, there was the twins' party. With Sam being off at the Zvolensky summer house with the visiting family, it had been easy enough for Maya and Lucas to accept the girls' request for them to spend the night leading into their actual birthday over at the Hunter Hart house. They wanted to have the two of them right there when they woke up and they weren't six anymore.

"Remember when they were all tiny and they'd crawl in between us and it would be cute?" Maya breathed, lightly tracing along Nellie's hairline as the girl slept huddled against her. Lucas smiled at her from across the two girls in between, Gracie in much the same position as her twin but next to him.

"Are you freaking out because they're almost as tall as you now?" he quietly asked.

"Hey, I'll have you remember I've still got over a foot on them," Maya defended herself with haste, kissing that brunette head resting nearly at her shoulder. According to her mother, who _had_ tracked all her children's growth, she predicted the twins wouldn't exactly be on the tall side, but they might outgrow their big sister in the end, if only enough that it showed when they stood together. They weren't there yet. For now, Nellie and Gracie stood at a respectable forty-four inches tall, and they were proud to say they were the exact same height, down to the smallest decimal.

"Of course, what was I thinking," Lucas indulged her, which made her drop the 'affronted' act and smile back at him, just as the twins started to stir and wake.

"Hey, good morning," Maya looked to Nellie as she turned her eyes up to her big sister.

"Am I seven yet?" she inquired.

"If you want to be very technical you'll have to wait a few more hours, but if the day's good enough for you then yeah, you are officially seven years old. Happy birthday my Penelope," Maya told her before giving her a big hug and many more than seven kisses over her face, which made her giggle. Meanwhile, Lucas was amused and intrigued at the sight of Gracie Hunter lying there, staring at her hands, front and back, then feeling at her own face…

"What are you up to?" he finally had to wonder.

"Everyone keeps saying about our birthday like we're supposed to change, but I don't see it," she declared in that little observant voice of hers. Lucas laughed.

"It's not so much that you're going to change now," he explained. "But birthdays have a way of just… reminding people about the past, especially when it's kids, I mean… Here, look," he reached to the nightstand for his phone and started digging through his photo albums. "Let's see… last year," he showed her a picture from the twins' sixth birthday party. Gracie took the phone out of his hands and inspected the image. "Do you see it?" She nodded. Now, Nellie had turned around toward her sister and squeezed in closer to see the picture, too, while Maya looked on as well. "And then the year before that…" Lucas tapped at the screen until he found the image.

"Woah…" Nellie breathed.

"And the year before that…" They went down the line like that, third birthday, second, first, and then newborns, in their parents' arms. It might have been harder for the two of them to put all this in perspective, but their big sister and her husband to be certainly had that capability.

"I want to see if the others are up," Nellie declared all at once, and it showed how Gracie was very aware of her twin's habits that she at once tucked her legs in and was therefore spared from being climbed over, unlike Lucas, who accidentally got a couple of tiny girl knees just below his own and found that to be anything but pleasant. When he heard Maya snort, he looked up at her.

"Hey, it could have been worse," she pointed out before turning her attention to the lone Hunter twin between them now. "Now you, little Mouse Mouse," she smiled, finding Gracie's smile echoing her own. The twins hugged as they behaved. Nellie was likely to pounce, always, while Gracie would take hold like she wanted to express every bit of what she felt for a person. It was the kind of hug that would fill you with such an understanding that you were loved by this small girl. "Happy birthday, my Grace…"

Nellie had come to find that the rest of the household _was_ awake. As she'd returned to report, Shawn and Katy were in the kitchen, busy with breakfast and prohibiting her from going in to see, while MJ and Haley had been upstairs, just waking up, too. They'd come down with their birthday girl of a big sister, and while MJ still looked half asleep, hair sticking up everywhere it didn't need to go, the recently-'upgraded' two-year-old Haley mad a mad dash to get scooped up and pulled on to the bed along with Maya, who did not have to be convinced.

"Are they coming soon?" Gracie asked Lucas a little while later, while Maya was fixing up her hair to match Nellie's. She sat up very straight in her chair, though all the while she also held on to the edges of the chair on either side, dangling her legs about, the better to brace herself in case her hair got pulled.

"Shouldn't be long now," Lucas assured her, trying very carefully to check his phone without dropping the already coiffed Nellie, who held on to his neck and had her legs locked around him, like a human backpack. Maya had just gotten the last pin set to attach the braid in place when the doorbell rang and Gracie bolted to join her sister, who suddenly went from backpack to rider, inciting Lucas to get them to the door. She was finally set on her feet, enabling both twins to get to greet their guests as one.

"Is she sleeping? Can I see her?" Nellie asked in a whisper that felt more like a rasp of her normal volume. MJ had come running up now, too, as did Haley, although it was likely more for the fact that her other siblings had all gone, and so she wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

The fuss was a now seven-month-old Ada Marie Minkus, in a car seat, carried by her father.

"She'll wake up soon, but yes, she is asleep," Isadora informed the kids, taking a look at her baby daughter to confirm this, even as Farkle set her down once they'd walked into the house proper.

As the kids remained crowded in fascination around the baby, Lucas and Maya both were left to wait their turn and greet their friends in the meantime, despite the fact that they had been waiting on this moment since Ada was born last December. Farkle and Isadora could hardly travel with her across the country as a newborn, and on their side there just hadn't been any sort of possibility for a trip off to New York. So they had all waited, contenting themselves on texts, and calls, and video calls… and photos. There were so many photos. They knew that little face so well by now. There was just so much of Isadora in her, and yet that smile… that was all Farkle.

But they knew very well that pictures and videos would pale in comparison to the actual little human being right there in the same room as them, and in their arms… Right now, the still slumbering babe was busy being observed by the Hunter kids, especially by her birthday buddy, MJ. The way he saw it, their being born on the same day made it so that they were special to one another. One day, they would be friends, he believed that, and right now, it didn't matter that she was a baby, she was already his friend.

"How was the flight?" Maya asked, hugging Farkle. To look at him now, advancing into his twenties like the rest of them, married, with a child, she still found herself thinking of that boy she'd left behind in New York when she'd moved to Texas. That he had kept such an important part in her life, him and Isadora both, despite that distance, was hardly a surprise to her, no. He was her Farkle friend, he was right where he belonged. And yet she knew they could all have had such a different relationship if they had kept growing up in the same city. He was in many ways someone with a life separate from her own, and so to see him grown up this way… It was weird, but also amazing.

"Started out alright. Ada slept through the take-off, stayed quiet for a while. Then we hit one jolt of turbulence, lasted two seconds and it was over, but she didn't care. Just kept crying and fussing the rest of the way."

"People kept looking at us like we were doing it wrong," Isadora added, not even looking hurt, more like she was affronted that they would dare pass judgment on them _or_ their daughter, like they would have done so much better as a baby on a plane for the first time. Maya and Lucas could just imagine them falling quiet under Isadora's glare.

When the kids finally stepped back, the young mother took the freshly awakened Ada from her seat and set her in Maya's arms. She looked so happy that she got to do it, too, like this was looping the loop that had started the previous summer, at Zay and Nadine's wedding, when she'd told Maya about her being pregnant. Lucas looked on as Maya held the baby, too, and to see how she lit up, looking at Ada Marie, he knew it was just one more notch in her own thoughts of the future, _their_ future, and their own children, whenever they'd go and have them. When he got his own turn, he couldn't pretend as though he wasn't thinking the exact same thing.

The Minkus family had originally been due to come just in time for the Babineaux party, but then it had come to be that they would arrive in time for the twins' party, so here they were. It had led to a funny moment where MJ insisted on having his slice of birthday cake with Ada, because even though he knew she was a baby and she couldn't have cake yet, they were birthday buddies and they needed to have birthday cake together.

The following days had seen Ada being introduced to a lot of people, all as eager to meet her as the last. For all that though, they couldn't say that anyone was as excited – after Maya and Riley – to meet Ada Marie Minkus as GiGi Babineaux was.

When they'd arrived at the party, the old woman wanted one thing and only one thing. She wanted to see the baby, to see her and to hold her. She was just home this past week after having spent the two before that in the hospital. She spent a good half hour and more just sitting in her wheelchair and holding little Ada, talking to her, singing to her… And Ada looked up at her the whole time with such a smile that no one had the heart to separate the two, until a diaper change forced their hand.

The Babineaux party was also marking the end of the Hart-Lane family's stay in Texas, of course. They were flying home to Tucson the following afternoon, and there had been some debate about whether or not they should all even go to the party, if they wouldn't be better off staying back at the Zvolensky house, all of them, having dinner, and a quiet evening. Maya and Lucas could have spent the night there, and they could all have stayed together up through the time when they had to go to the airport and said their goodbyes. But in the end they had decided that being here, at this party they'd all heard so much about… _that_ would be the perfect way to mark the end of their summer together.

"If you get to meet Ree Forster, can I come?" Cara asked Maya after she'd climbed out of the pool and dashed over to where her older sister was getting ready to go up on the small stage.

"I was wondering when that would come up," Maya laughed.

"Please?" Cara insisted, squeezing water from her ponytail.

"If it comes up, you will be the first person I ask," Maya vowed, and that was good enough for her sister, who went running off again.

"Liar." Maya turned to find Lucas there, eating from a loaded plate. Maya chuckled, stepping up and accepting a forkful he held out to her.

_"She said 'if it comes up,' not 'is it already happening,'"_ she signed as she chewed.

"I'm just amazed you managed to keep a straight face this time."

"You have a meltdown _once_ and you can never live it down," Maya shook her head with a sigh.

"I'm only disappointed I didn't manage to record it," Lucas laughed before taking another bite. Maya could only imagine what she must have looked like, when she'd gotten that message from Ree, saying that she was working on some tour dates for the fall and that when she landed in Texas the two of them should meet. "Anyway, I'm not supposed to say anything to anyone until the tour gets announced. Only reason I told _you_ was…"

"That you were bawling like a weirdo and I was right there?" he teased.

"Give me that plate, right now," she tried to take it from him and he held it over his head. "Oh, that is low…"

"Is it?" he grinned down at her, especially as he watched her realize she'd walked right into the joke. He came very close to dropping the whole plate a moment later though, and it was snatched away from him when he brought it back down. "Hey!"

"Can't be trusted with a plate of food," Maya shook her head and went to sit at the edge of the small stage, where he joined her and they ate together, looking across the yard, dotted with so many of their people, enjoying one of their last summer days for the year.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	92. Their Fall in Days

April 1st 2020

_Chapter 92  
Their Fall in Days_

Lucas had a plan.

This was his last day working at the shelter, with the end of summer meaning he'd be starting back at school in a few days' time. It wasn't as though he'd never be here again, especially after the time he'd spent here over the last couple months. But he wasn't going to know what became of most the animals here, wouldn't get to be involved so closely when he'd been getting to know some of them so well over the weeks. As difficult as that would be in some cases in particular, there was one above all of them he kept thinking about.

All summer long, he'd been hoping to find a home for Shadow. This was his last day at the shelter, and he had made up his mind that this would be the dog's last day here, too. He could have taken him from here from the first day he'd seen him, but he'd resisted the pull up to now. This was the end of that.

"What do you think? You want to get out of here?" Lucas asked, crouching to give his bud some good scratches. Shadow responded with some kisses, making him chuckle. "Just a few more hours."

He'd asked Maya about it, of course. It wasn't like he was bringing home a piece of furniture they hadn't planned on. Bringing home a living thing, a fourth dog, meant a need for consensus.

"Look at that face!" she'd gasped, taking his phone from him, when he'd shown her a picture of Shadow. "How am I only just now seeing _that_ face?" she'd turned a look bordering on affront toward him. He'd explained his whole 'I can't bring every single dog I like home' rule. "Sure, sure," she'd nodded, still smiling at the picture. "But… come on…" she'd thrown in her own set of puppy eyes.

"How would you feel…" he'd started to ask, only to be cut off.

"Yes," Maya had told him, beaming.

"I didn't even ask…"

"Face," she argued back. So, that was that.

Now here they were, and the day was just about done, so he'd gone about starting the process so that when he did leave, Shadow would be coming with him.

"Dad, look! He looks just like Pan!" a girl's voice made him look up. She couldn't have been more than ten, and her eyes had fixed to the dog walking at his side. She came walking up to Shadow, who stared back curiously. "What's his name? Or her name?" she looked up to Lucas.

That was all it took. All at once he knew he wouldn't be bringing the dog home with him… but he would keep his promise to him, that it would be his last day here.

"His name is Shadow," Lucas told her, crouching and then kneeling next to him, scratching at his back. When she heard the name, the girl let out a short gasp and smiled.

"We had another dog before, but he got sick and he had to go to sleep," she told Lucas.

"Sorry to hear that," he told her. He sympathized with her on all that, thinking of his old Dash.

"His name was Pan… because when he was a puppy, he kept trying to jump on people's shadows." At the sound of his name, or near enough, Shadow gave a bark.

"Well, what do you know?" Lucas laughed. "This guy here got his name because he kept following me around, like a shadow." The dog barked again. "Some people thought he had a bad attitude, but I think he just knows who he likes. And right now, him just sitting here like this, I think you should pet him and see what happens."

The girl looked back to the dog, reaching out her hand until he came up and sniffed it. After a moment, he nudged the hand with his nose and she came closer and did as Lucas had suggested.

"All summer, anyone so much as walked up to him, he'd retreat, or he'd growl, unless it was me. Then she came, and it clicked with her, too."

That was what he told Maya, when he came home and she asked where Shadow was. She looked disappointed for a moment, but then she looked at him, and maybe he wore his own disappointment, which felt a lot more like loss, and she decided that it was more important that he felt better.

"He gets to be in a good home," she stated, smiling. Lucas nodded.

"He does." Maya came up to him, putting her arms up around his neck.

"Think of the summer he would have had without you there. Maybe he wouldn't have been where he needed to be by the time that girl showed up." He looked at her, with that smile of hers, and he just chuckled. "Yeah, that's right, I'm good with the words, too," she told him.

"Are you? I had no idea. Hey, Maya, what was The Song of the Summer this year?" he pondered.

"Well, let me think for a second, I think it was…" He didn't let her finish, instead following his natural impulse to want to kiss her when she was being all cute like that.

Lucas knew he wouldn't just go and forget about Shadow just like that, and it would probably take him a few days to settle on the fact that he might never see him again. He wouldn't have much of a choice but to deal with that fact though. In a few days' time, he and Sam and all their college friends would be starting a new semester, a new year, and when that happened he would have to be focused on that and not on the dog. He would have to stop recalling that look on his face, as he'd left with his new owner, Stella, like he was so torn, like he could have been happy no matter which of the two he followed but in the end… maybe he also felt what Lucas had felt, that the girl needed him in her life most of all.

"Do you know what sucks about being in college at my age?" Sam asked Maya and Lucas as the three of them sat to dinner that night. Maya looked like she wanted nothing more than to tease him with a hundred answers, each more ridiculous than the last, but then finally resisted and gave the proper response.

"You tell me."

"I don't get to go through all of that with Cecilia, and Dora, and Adam…" Sam told her. "By the time they'll start college, I'll be almost done."

"Unless you go the same way he did," Maya pointed out, nodding over to Lucas. He chuckled, nodding in agreement. "Or you just study something else for a few years. No one will wonder why you're still there, you won't look a day over Freshman, and we get to keep you around for a while longer. I don't see any downsides here, do you?" she looked from Sam to Lucas and back.

"You'd let me stay that long?" Sam looked surprised. "Not that I'm saying I'd do that, but…"

"What do you mean 'we'd let you?'" Maya almost looked offended.

"Sam, you can stay as long as you want," Lucas chimed in.

"You, me, the golden years," Maya went on, nudging her brother's foot under the table.

"Okay, but before you buy the rocking chairs, can you take me to the bookstore tomorrow? My last textbook finally came in and I want to look through it before the semester starts. I've got that class the first day," Sam told his sister, who got that amused little smirk on her face aptly nicknamed 'I love you, my nerdy little brother' by Lucas.

"I need to pick up a couple of books from mine, too," he mentioned.

"So, maybe we swing by both bookstores tomorrow, make it a road trip, maybe play a round of 'my bookstore is better than your bookstore," Maya smiled, looking to both her college guys. They were on.

Going up to get ready for bed that night, it really felt like summer had officially gotten to the point where it had bowed out, for them anyway. Now they were turned toward the next thing, toward fall and this new school year. It was hard to believe they were already headed into their second year in this house, that Lucas, and Sam, and Dylan and Rosa, all of them were starting their second years at school, whether that was from starting, or restarting, or hitting the next part of their education. But as hard as it was, it was even stranger to think it had been five years since they'd graduated from high school.

There had been rumblings of a reunion possibly happening, until someone had rightly pointed out that five years might have felt too soon. Most of them would just be out of college, some of them still there… No, they would wait another five years, that'd make more sense.

Even so, it had ended up that a lot of them had gotten to see each other the previous spring. They'd decided, those of them who'd been of that same graduating class who had also been around for the homage to Coach Wiley, that they would try and make an effort of being there for the basketball finals every year. So, they'd been there, those of them who could. After the girls' finals – they'd won – they'd ended up sitting out in front of their old high school, reminiscing. Mostly they'd reminisced over basketball, but there was plenty just about school, and senior year, and coming out on the other side of those school years.

"Still thinking about the dog?"

Lucas blinked, realizing he'd been distracted until Maya's voice brought him back.

"What? No… Well, maybe a little, but that's not… I was just thinking about that day after the girls' finals," he explained, which made her smile in understanding. Their unofficial five year reunion…

"That was a good one," she nodded.

"It was," he agreed.

"You know what I liked the best about all that?" He didn't. "When we were all out there together, I'd look around and think about when we were still _in_ high school, and you and me we just knew that… all those years later, we would still be together. The fact that we stood there, all those years later, and it was like 'yeah, of course we're still together, go ahead and check up on us in another five years, we'll be there,'" she nodded confidently. "That felt really good."

"I know just what you mean," he nodded, laughing lightly. "What do you think it'll be like, in five years?" he wondered.

"Oh, well…" Maya considered this. "In five years… Married, finally," she counted off with a smile that he matched. You'll be done with school, maybe working at Sullivan Stables…"

"Maybe," he agreed. He still hadn't made up his mind. It had been right there in the will, that it was up to him, and who knew what he'd decide, in three years' time. "And you will be teaching," he decided to fill in some of that picture himself.

"One can only hope," Maya nodded.

"World renowned songwriter," Lucas added with a smirk.

"Someone's mom," she countered, with a breath and a smile. It warmed his heart, as only she could.

"Someone's mom," he repeated with a tip of the head. "Which will also make me someone's dad," he stated, feeling that little thump in his heart at the thought.

"Is it five years from now yet?" Maya joked, and right then and there Lucas felt much more at peace over Shadow's adoption into another home. It was hard to trouble himself over what might have been when he heard the call of what was to come.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	93. Their Fall in School

April 2nd 2020

_Chapter 93  
Their Fall in School_

Lucas woke up on the first day of the fall semester to the low drone of the mixer breaking through the silence of the house. He opened one eye, just barely, as though having his arm around her couldn't already confirm that Maya was still at his side. The slow rise and fall of her breath also told him that she still slept. That left him with one solution: Sam. He was back to his breakfast making ways, getting himself and the two of them here ready for this big day.

"Hey," Lucas spoke quietly, setting a kiss to Maya's shoulder and keeping it there for a moment until he knew she was starting to wake up, at which point he carefully pulled her nearer, pulling her hair from her face so he might kiss her cheek. There really was nothing like these small, quiet moments of waking up together like this, was there? She would just smile, and he'd know she was just as peacefully warm as he was, with this thought in her like 'I never want to leave this space.'

"He's making breakfast, isn't he?" Maya mumbled.

"I think it's waffles," Lucas replied.

"How can you tell?" she asked.

"Don't know about 'tell,' just that the first day last year he made waffles. And the first day back in January, also waffles. So I'm putting my vote down for waffles again."

It was indeed waffles.

Once they had gone down the stairs and shared the meal with Sam and the dogs, they'd all gotten ready for the day and soon they were off. Maya would drive Sam off to school on her way to the theater, while Lucas went and picked up Robbie and Ramona and the three of them headed off to their first day back, first day of their second year.

Most of the ride saw the married pair in the backseat arguing over some misunderstanding that had happened the day before, he wasn't sure what exactly, as Lucas did his best to tune the conversation out and give them what privacy he could. It wasn't what he would have wanted, as a sort of 'welcome back!' starter, but with any luck it would just be that one small hiccup and then they would get to the university and there would be the rest of their small group, ready to jump into this new semester, new courses, professors…

When the voices in the back had gotten a bit louder, Lucas had ever so casually turned up the radio in the front, though he couldn't say he was paying much attention to what was being said or what music was on. But then, about halfway through the drive, he heard familiar notes and it pulled his attention back from the single-minded focus he had on the road, back to where he could realize it was Ree's song, Maya's song, and it made him smile. It was like, through no control of her own, Maya had gone and realigned him. He took a breath and went on driving.

By the time they reached the parking lot and the car stopped, he had a feeling one of his friends would get out as soon as motion had ceased. Right on cue, one of the doors opened and Robbie climbed out, shutting the door again and walking toward the building without a pause. This left Lucas and Ramona on their own for a moment, and after hesitating to say anything, Lucas turned around in his seat. Ramona didn't look like she was about to leave the car. Right now, she looked like she was trying very hard not to cry, to pull herself together before she went out, too, so not to get stared at by everyone she passed. After a few more seconds in silence, deciding that she didn't want to talk, Lucas pulled the car key from the ignition and extended it and the chain it was hooked to. Ramona blinked, maybe just now remembering he was there.

"Take your time, lock up when you're ready. You can get them back to me in class." Ramona only nodded in reply, which Lucas suspected was to stop herself from crying, and took the keys from him.

Getting out of the car, slinging his bag's strap over his shoulder, Lucas started toward the school with a feeling like his morning back home, with warmth and waffles, was so very far away.

"What's the matter with him?" Turning around as he walked, Lucas immediately smiled at the sight of Bishop Nicholas, now in step with him along with Simon Shin. Neither of them looked in any way troubled. Actually, they looked perfectly normal, as cheerful as he'd ever known them. It levelled out his hopes for the day with little to no effort.

"All I know is that he and Ramona were arguing in the car, but I tuned them out as much as I could, didn't feel right to intrude," Lucas explained. It wasn't like he'd been given much of a choice over being witness to the whole thing, but if they weren't so caught up with what they were going on about, they might have been left uncomfortable over his hearing anything.

Much as he'd tried not to hear a thing, it had been impossible not to catch some words, and from what those few words had allowed him to piece together, there had been some kind of misunderstanding over Ramona's friendship with one of her co-workers. Robbie had gotten the impression that the two of them were flirting, even though Ramona denied this entirely. So, as far as he was concerned, talking to Bishop or Simon or anyone else, he had no idea what the fight was about.

"Where is she?" Simon asked, looking around.

"She had to make a stop on the way," Lucas shrugged.

Ramona arrived all of twenty seconds before the professor called everyone to attention. She very quietly went and sat to Lucas' left, never minding that there was a free seat next to Robbie, who sat to Lucas' right. He now found himself in between his road mates, trying again to focus on something else but them. He'd only known Robbie for a year, unlike the near on twenty years – on and off – that he'd known Ramona, but even then he had never known the guy to be anything remotely jealous or prone to overreacting, so either he didn't know him as well as he thought he did – which didn't feel to him as though he did – or there was more to this than what either of his friends were letting on and it had nothing to do with this claim of flirtation. Whatever it was, he had to set it aside. It wasn't his place to speculate, and he really needed to focus on class.

"What's going on with those two?"

Coming out of class, Ramona had handed Lucas back his keys before going off on her own. The question had come from behind him, and Lucas turned to find Josie staring back at him with curiosity. He had meant to try and speak to Robbie, but when he looked again he was already gone.

"I… I don't really know," he turned back to Josie. "Look, whatever it is, they'll sort it out, just…"

"Just don't get involved?" Josie guessed, and Lucas hesitated, sensing something like hurt in her voice, like she'd guessed what he was about to say and now she felt bad.

"That's not it," he shook his head. "I'm sorry, it's all…"

"I get it," Josie shrugged. "I know how I was." He didn't know how to respond to that, and he couldn't help feeling like he must have been giving a very believable gaping fish impression right about now. "I'm working on being better," she went on, and he could believe it. He'd seen it. He'd never dared bring it up, but he'd seen it, they all had.

"I noticed," he told her, and to see how she smiled now, a proper and genuine smile… It was like he was meeting her for the first time all over again. "If you ever want to talk…"

"Thanks," Josie nodded. "Later, okay?"

"Deal," Lucas agreed.

"So… What's going on?"

He told her about the fight in the car. He hadn't even told Bishop or Simon about what he'd overheard, so it was natural that he wouldn't tell Josie either, past history or none. She said that she would try and talk to Ramona, along with Zelda, suggesting that he and the guys talk to Robbie. That was as good of a plan as he could hope for, so he agreed.

They had the rest of the morning free, their next class starting just after lunch, so there really would be no better time to try and see if they might be able to help their friends. Being the only one to have a vague idea of what was happening, Lucas knew it could be risky to try and tackle the situation, knew that they might make things worse and not better, so he might just try and approach Robbie on his own. As for Ramona… as for Josie and Zelda stepping in… He figured he had to give 'new and improved Josie' some amount of trust, otherwise what would be the point of extending his friendship out to her?

He found Robbie sitting outside, where they would all go to study or eat at times. One of his new textbooks sat on the bench next to him, like he'd taken it out to try and read for a while but finally abandoned the idea when he'd gotten nowhere. Lucas came up and sat next to him. For a few minutes, neither of them said a word. They just sat there, looking around, looking at nothing…

"I'm sorry about this morning," Robbie finally spoke, sounding a bit dejected. Lucas looked over at him. "Guessing you heard everything."

"I… tried not to, but… car…" Lucas shrugged. Robbie nodded, sitting quietly again for a few seconds.

"I know she didn't do anything wrong," he admitted now, sighing. "Neither of them did."

"But you accused her…" Lucas slowly stated.

"My head wasn't in the right place, when I went to pick her up from work last night. I know that doesn't make it right, I just… You get fooled by one person you trusted and all of a sudden it's like you don't trust your beliefs anymore."

"What happened?" Lucas asked.

"Turns out my father's been keeping up with another woman for… years…" Robbie revealed, shaking his head as he stared at his shoes. Lucas was speechless. For having heard just a few stories over the past year, he had been painted a picture of a perfectly happy family, Robbie, his parents, his two older sisters…

"Robbie, I'm so sorry…" was all he could think to say. "How…"

"I always wanted a brother. Turns out I've had one for sixteen years… and another for twelve… and four… The little one, he's sick, and no one else out there is a match for him, he needs… I don't know what he needs. So his mom showed up on my parents' doorstep and spilled the whole thing."

"When did you find out?" Lucas asked, feeling his own head spinning, which gave him some idea of what Robbie must have been feeling like. He didn't reply, but he didn't have to. Last night… It would have been last night, not long before he'd gone and picked up Ramona. "Why didn't you just tell her?"

"I wanted to. The only thing that made sense was that I had to get to her, and when I got there…"

"Robbie…" They both turned around, finding Ramona standing there, Josie and Zelda behind her. There were tears in her eyes, and it didn't take long that there were some in Robbie's, too. Lucas stood and left with the others, so the couple might have a chance of having the talk they should have had the day before.

"Thank you," Lucas told the girls. Zelda nodded, Josie smiled. "Lunch? I'm buying."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	94. Their Fall in Work

April 3rd 2020

_Chapter 94  
Their Fall in Work_

The Stage Ready Summer Camp had been over for a few weeks already on the day the boys had started back at school, but as she'd gone in to the theater that morning, sitting in her office, Maya had found herself thinking about it all again. It could have seemed as though her getting her first song recorded by a big, world renowned artist would have effaced any other event's chance of standing out over the summer, but she would definitely remember the camp's inaugural run. As wild as it all was, to witness her creation connect with so many people in so many places, when it came down to it this was Ree's song, and only a certain percentage of people who heard it would actually know that Maya had played any part in this success. That was alright, that was what she'd chosen and she was so very happy with all of it.

On the flipside, there was the camp, which in itself was born of the work she'd done in getting Stage Ready off the ground. She'd been in the thick of it across the last few months, and it still left her feeling so accomplished, so happy. All those kids who'd attended over the summer, she knew their faces, their names, and she knew their voices, their quirks, their tastes. She could imagine herself, years from now, seeing one of them on television or hearing them on the radio, and thinking to herself 'I knew you when you were just a shy ten-year-old with a voice and a dream.'

The camp had been such a success, in Austin and Houston as well, and that success was reflected in the main Stage Ready sessions' registrations. From this, Siobhan had already tasked Maya with ensuring the camp would have another season like this the following summer, which she had been more than happy to put in the books. Siobhan also wanted her to look into expanding the program to more cities across the state in the months to come, and this, too, was something she would do with little to no prompt. This theater stood as the very reason Maya and her mother had found their way in Austin, Texas all those years ago, and even now it continued to make their lives better.

Katy's play had completed its run, and though she was in no way disappointed to resume her regular job, Maya could tell her mother was not the same as she'd been before the play. That acting bug had bitten her for the first time all those years ago, as she was growing up, and it had never really gone anywhere, leaving that bite to heal over. But now that bug had gone and sunk its teeth even deeper. She was finally living that old dream, and she was finally getting to experience the thing she'd wanted to experience when she'd been in high school, when she'd been a young mother after this, struggling to provide for her daughter, with and without Kermit. Back then, maybe deep down it had been about fame more than anything, which might have explained why she'd never gotten anywhere. But now, this time…

After that first performance, she'd told Maya how she'd felt, being on that stage, before the curtain had gone up, and throughout the play, and then in the end, when they'd taken their bow… She'd compared it to craving some dessert she'd seen on display, thinking it would be the best thing she ever ate, only to taste it and discover she had no idea what 'the best thing' even meant, because this had to surpass even that. And now that she'd had something like that once, oh… she needed to have it again, as soon as possible.

There was no telling how long it would be before she did get that opportunity again, but when it did she would absolutely be going for it. And as for Maya… well, she had opportunities of her own, and _those_ were coming up much faster.

After the success of her first creation, Audra and her people were very happy with their new songwriter. About as soon as Ree's song had blown up the charts, they'd started putting feelers out, to see if they might be able to hit that perfect storm all over again. No one but Audra, who wasn't kidding when she'd said she'd done her homework where Maya and her band were concerned, could get how easy of a request that might be, on Maya's end at least. They didn't know her enough to know that the first song and the frenzy of the summer would have pulled her into that groove where she was soon pulling together new songs, products of her inspiration. They wanted a new song? Great, she had three.

Now, one of them was being recorded, and according to Audra they were on the verge of making something happen with that first song she'd written after the contract had happened, the other choice she'd given them along with what had ultimately become Ree's song. Before long she'd have three songs out there, or at least three contracted ones… She didn't want to get to a point where she saw her work with her own band and with Weaver Kings, and Shae, anyone else, to be in any way inferior because it wasn't getting the same kind of play. Not that she could deny the fact that she'd basically struck gold, right place, right time, right song, and now she had… momentum.

It wasn't like the first time, when she hadn't known much of anything except that her song was being recorded and only discovered who was recording it when she heard it on the radio. No, she knew where her second song was going, and if everything went through with the third song she would soon find out what was happening there, too. As of now, only Lucas even knew anything about song two. She knew she had to keep it that way until the song was out, but she had to be able to tell _someone_, and it would be next to impossible for it to be anyone but her fiancé. Sure, the girls in the band knew the song existed, they'd helped her make all her demos, but they didn't know anything beyond the fact that these songs existed and could someday get recorded. She couldn't have done this without them, and she couldn't wait to see the surprise on them.

"Who is it this time?"

Maya looked up from the document she'd been reading over when her assistant whispered her query. Lily was looking back at her from where she sat at her own desk, on the other end of the office space. She had a curious smile on her face, but it wasn't enough for Maya to grasp what she was getting at.

"Who's what?" she asked.

"Your new song," Lily replied with a nod. Maya hesitated.

"Why do you think I have a new song?" she slowly asked, hoping her face gave nothing away.

"It's just that the last few days you've had the radio on all day, and the way you stop sometimes, it's like you're waiting for something." Alright, she had her there. The whisper made sense now, sort of. It would have made _more_ sense if they weren't in a closed space and alone in that closed space, but either way Lily knew it was all to be kept sort of hush hush. Maya _wanted _to tell her, wanted to tell anyone she was close to in any way, but it wasn't that simple, not now.

"What can I say, I love music…" she shrugged, looking across her desk, searching for a paper. "Do you have the list with all the… I left it in my mother's office," she answered her own question, rising from her desk.

"I can go get it," Lily offered at once.

"It's fine, I need to run something by her anyway."

Coming up to her mother's office door, she knocked on the frame and Katy looked over from her computer. Maya found it way too amusing sometimes to witness her mother's concentrated 'office face,' but then she'd look at her and smile and she'd just be happy to see her.

"Looking for this?" she held up a thin stack of sheets stapled together. Maya stepped forward and took it.

"Yeah, thanks," she quickly looked it over. She turned back to her mother now, and Katy looked up again.

"Something else?"

"Well, I just sort of… I've been speaking with a lot of people from the theaters that might set up their own Stage Ready," Maya told her mother, who nodded. "I was talking to this one woman and we got to talking about what they were working on at the moment, and she mentioned they had a new production coming up. She told me what it was and I mentioned how you'd done the lead in another one the guy's plays, and she knew who you were. She saw it when she came to visit her brother who lives in Austin. Anyway… she didn't say it outright, but I think she's interested in seeing you audition out there."

She'd been seeing her mother's posture shift in her chair, like she'd gone from Office Katy to Actress Katy as soon as she'd understood where this conversation was going.

"Why does it sound like there's a problem?" she asked.

"Not a problem, not exactly, just kind of a small hitch," Maya admitted.

"What is it?"

"It's just that the theater in question is in Dallas… which might complicate things for you, and Dad, and the kids…" Her mother sighed, nodding to herself in understanding. "But, you know, whatever you decide… we'll find a way to make it work if we can, right?" Maya pushed onward, unable to let the chance float away when they hadn't even looked for ways to anchor it down.

"Right," Katy smiled.

"I'll send you the information, then you just…"

She was cut off by another knock at the door frame, this one from Lily, who now stood just out in the hall.

"Sorry to interrupt. Maya, Siobhan was looking for you. I told her you'd be right over."

"Sending in a bit," Maya amended her statement to her mother, moving into the hall and handing Lily the papers she'd come for. Her assistant headed one way, back toward her office, and Maya went the other way, toward her boss' office. "Hey, heard you wanted to see me?" she stopped at the open door.

"At the risk of putting more on your plate…" Siobhan nodded, motioning for her to come in and sit, which she did.

"Please, my plate can take it," Maya smirked.

"Well, as you might know, the Fall Festival is coming up."

Of course she knew. The event had always held a special place in her heart. It had been coming along right as she'd moved to Texas with her mother, and Lucas and the guys and Nadine, still strangers on the whole at the time, had taken her there. They hadn't missed a single one, all through middle and high school. In college, only those of them who'd still been in Texas had carried on the tradition, but now that they were back, they'd resumed the tradition in full force.

"You'll also know that the theater's been part of the team in charge of the festival. Matilda's been handling it ever since she started here, but she's going through IVF treatments right now, and she really wants to put every chance on her side to make it work, so she asked if someone might be able to take over for her, and I thought…"

"I'm in," Maya told her, needing no more than this. Siobhan gave her a silent 'thank you.'

"The coordinator is on her way, I didn't get the chance to reschedule. I'll send her your way as soon as she arrives."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	95. Their Fall in Festivity

April 4th 2020

_Chapter 95  
Their Fall in Festivity_

Lily had gone off on a late lunch break almost as soon as Maya had returned from Siobhan's office. Left to her own office, Maya allowed her curiosity toward the radio to seep out a little, clicking between stations for a few seconds at a time before returning to the one she'd been on at first. Alright, fine, she was anxious to hear the song. It was almost making her wish she didn't know, like last time, so she wasn't so tuned in on the wait. Where her first song had gone to someone she genuinely considered one of her idols, this other one was being recorded by a girl group that was just starting out, and as soon as Audra had told her this, Maya had been so very on board. It was like an echo of her own group, if they had ever taken the offer when…

"Hello?" a woman's voice brought her back to reality, accompanied with a knock to her open door. She turned in her chair and stopped, her face breaking into a smile at once.

"Miss Alcott?" she blurted out, even as the woman's eyes went wide with recognition, too.

"Maya?" she laughed, moving into the office even as she came around the desk. "Can I…" she gestured, a request for a hug which Maya was more than glad to grant. All she could think was 'I remember her being taller,' but then how could she not? She'd only been thirteen when she'd met her new English teacher, first day of middle school in Texas. "Look at you, my goodness…" the woman pulled back, almost fanning herself to stop the urge to cry. "Last time I saw you, what was it, nine years ago?"

"Think so, yeah," Maya tried to count. It was wild to realize that, in this moment, she wasn't much younger than what her former teacher had been back when she had been her teacher. "You're the coordinator for the Fall Festival?"

"First year," she nodded. "I've been involved the last three years, since I moved over to the high school, and now I'm the one running the show."

"I remember Mr. Matthews telling me you were there now, totally slipped my mind for a while," Maya admitted. "Please, have a seat, can I get you something to drink?"

"I'm alright, thanks," Miss Alcott replied, moving to sit as she took off her jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. She looked around with a smile on her face, still, in what Maya would imagine was the same sort of amazed disbelief she was experiencing, too, to find their paths crossing again in this circumstance. "I had no idea this was you, but now that I do… I can see it."

"Thanks," Maya smiled back, trying not to feel like a kid in front of her teacher. "It's been… almost a year now."

"And you put it all together?"

"I did, yeah, it was just… I came back here after college, couldn't find a teaching post yet, or a job that I…"

"Teaching?" Miss Alcott cut in, like Maya had brushed past a very important piece of information.

"Yeah," Maya felt like she might have been blushing. Miss Alcott looked at her for a moment like she was trying to pinpoint something.

"Art," she finally decided, and now Maya chuckled. "Explains all this then," her former teacher… fellow teacher… gestured around them. In her head, Maya could just hear what Nadine had told her once. _You _are_ an art teacher, Maya, even if it's not exactly the kind you set out to teach._ Even Miss Alcott could see it. She told her as much, and when she mentioned Nadine, the woman's eyes lit up all over again, recalling yet another former student, and realizing the two of them were still friends. "You two, and the boys," she tried to recall. "Asher Garcia, and Dylan Orlando, Zay Babineaux, and…"

"Lucas Friar," Maya finished for her, nudging the picture frame on her desk until it was turned around and the woman could see the picture of the two of them and Sam standing in front of the house. She hadn't intended to be all 'hey, look at my ring!' about it, but it had been right there for her to see, and oh how she looked like the nostalgia train was hitting her at full speed. "We were supposed to get married last summer, but we had to move it over to next summer. Oh, but Zay and Nadine just celebrated their one-year anniversary," she revealed. "And Riley and Dylan should be coming around to that at some point… Asher and his boyfriend, too, he wasn't in our year, but you must have taught him, Ray Choi?"

"Yes, of course I do, oh…" Miss Alcott nodded, overwhelmed still. She looked at the picture again, pointed to Sam standing to Lucas and her. "Your brother?" she asked, in a tone that sounded like 'I don't remember you having a brother.'

"That is a… very long story, which I will be happy to tell you all about, but I'm thinking we should probably start talking about the festival," Maya nodded.

"No, you're right, absolutely," the English teacher nodded, reaching into her bag and pulling out a notepad and pen. Maya chuckled and she looked up.

"Flashbacks," Maya explained. Miss Alcott laughed along now. "So, where do we start?"

"Well, first thing, please call me Lindsay," she smiled, especially at the flash of 'but manners!' shyness across Maya's face.

Between Stage Ready, and the summer camp, and any number of band events and charity campaigns, Maya found that the initial ground work for the Fall Festival was really a lot easier than she might have foreseen. It wasn't as though she was in charge of the whole thing, sure. Everyone had their part to play, while Miss Alcott… Lindsay… oversaw every component. Maya would be overseeing the elements that involved the theater, which turned out to be a lot. They were close to the park, where the festival would be held, so the theater would be something like festival central for the people involved, and some of the structures at the end of each day.

By the time they had finished going over what they could go over, for today at least, Lily had returned from her lunch, joining in on the conversation, and Maya's work day was just about at a close. As she'd gone to escort out Miss Lindsay Alcott, Maya had asked after her own life, how she'd ended up going from the middle school up to the high school. It had been a simple matter of the position opening up, and all in all hadn't been too much of a thing. Half her students would have found her again the following fall, and the other half would have been without her for a year before getting to carry on with her for the next four.

What came up after this was the fact that she had gotten married, not long after they'd all left the middle school, only to have that marriage come to a rocky end the previous spring. Maya wasn't sure if it was nostalgia or a bit of sadness for the woman who'd started her on the path of making a turn with her education, but she found herself inviting her to come over to the house that night for dinner, with Lucas and Sam – and Cecilia, probably – and herself. She'd tried to say no at first, in a way that told Maya she actually wanted to say yes but then didn't want to feel as though she'd be intruding, so she had insisted.

"It's really the least I can do in return for all you've done." It was completely honest, and seeing this, Lindsay agreed. She would go and freshen up, grab dessert on the way – she insisted – and she would be at the house for six thirty. Maya gave her the address and some directions and they went their separate ways. As soon as her former teacher had gone, Maya hurried back to her office, collected her things, said good night to Lily, and went on her way back home. She had no idea what she'd be making for dinner.

"You're here early," Cecilia looked up from where she sat on the couch, reading a book, when Maya walked through the door. Even though they told her to use the key they'd given her, it still caught them by surprise to arrive and find her there at times. In this case, Maya was very glad to see her.

"No kidding," Maya nodded, pausing when she was accosted by the dogs, moving from where they were all gathered near the couch and up to where they could greet her. "Not to pull you away from your reading, but can you help me with dinner?"

"Sure," Cecilia shut her book and slipped it back in her bag before grabbing her crutch and getting up. "What are we making?"

"No idea," Maya admitted. Cecilia blinked. "Long story short, I'm going to be working on the Fall Festival this year…"

"Oh, I love the festival," Cecilia smiled.

"Yeah, me too," Maya smiled back. "Anyway, the one who's running it was the English teacher at the middle school when Lucas and I went there, and I just invited her to dinner. Wasn't planned, spur of the moment… When's Sam coming home?" she asked herself.

"He should be here soon, he texted to say he was leaving school, that's why I came," Cecilia explained. She hadn't started her new school year just yet, unlike Sam.

"Right, okay, dinner," Maya moved toward the kitchen. Cecilia followed her, as did the dogs.

Looking through what they had on hand, once she'd reminded herself she didn't need to put out anything overly fancy, Maya had made up her mind on the menu and she and Cecilia had gotten to work. As predicted, Sam arrived just twenty minutes after Maya had done so, and he was recruited at once into the dinner effort.

"I remember, you told me about her before," Sam nodded when his sister told him who was coming over that night. "When is she going to be here?"

"Little over an hour," Maya told him, looking at the time and picking up her phone.

_Maya: ETA?_

"Should I change?" she asked her brother and his girlfriend, looking at herself.

"I don't think so?" Sam shrugged, looking to Cecilia, who shook her head.

"Okay, good," Maya looked back to her phone when it dinged.

_Lucas: Just dropped off RR. What's up?_

_Maya: Unplanned dinner guest._

_Lucas: Be there in 15. Need me to pick up anything?_

_Maya: Wine?_

"Okay…" she breathed before looking back to her brother, remembering now that today was his first day back. "Hey, Sammy, how was it today?" she asked, tapping his shoulder as though to say 'sorry I forgot to ask there.'

"It was good," he nodded. "None of the professors kept us for very long except the last one, he kept us the whole period, but I didn't mind it. He started telling us about what we would be doing over the semester and it was really interesting."

"Those are the best classes," Maya remarked with a smile. It took her back to those first days with Professor Robinson, of course, and History with Mr. Matthews, but also English with Miss Lindsay Alcott. She found it very easy to recall those early days going to school in Austin, how lost she'd been feeling, and how Miss Alcott had started her feeling just a little less lost, day by day, all starting with one book, and then another, and another… _The Giver_, she recalled with a smile. That had been the first one.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_(A/N: If you want a refresher on Miss Alcott in the old days, she first appears in **A Hart in Texas** chapter 18 :))_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	96. Their Fall in Starts

April 5th 2020

_Chapter 96  
Their Fall in Starts_

As he drove up to the house, Lucas couldn't help but feel deeply how this day had been going on for ages. That short beat of peace, waking up with his fiancée in his arms, having waffles, that all felt like it had to have been days ago, when it had in fact been all of twelve hours, just half a day… A lot of that endlessness had come from the whole situation with Ramona and Robbie that morning, but then his afternoon classes had been fairly loaded, too, for a first day, so by the end of it… All he wanted was to go home and see Maya, and Sam, and the dogs…

The drive back from school had been a lot quieter. Even though Robbie's tale had helped to smooth some of mess over, it didn't change the fact that a lot of things had been said between them on the morning drive, and those would need a bit more work to sort through. The couple had spent the ride back sitting in silence, each on their side of the back seat, in their own world. Now the radio was on to break the lack of sound rather than to mask the chaotic presence of it.

He'd just dropped them off, and as he'd watched them go up to their building, where Robbie opened the door and held it for Ramona, there had been the pinging from his phone. Maya was texting, asking when he'd be home. They were having an unexpected guest for dinner. She didn't say who, so it had to be someone she wanted him to be surprised about. Either way, as he arrived back at the house, he was kind of spent and not looking forward to company.

But then he walked in, and Maya was making dinner with Sam and Cecilia, and she had that nervous/excited air about her that inevitably triggered what _she_ would call his Huckleberry mode. He could have been dragging his feet, dead tired, and if she was looking forward to something he'd just find some reserve in his and power through. This went both ways, of course, because it was Maya. She looked up when he walked into the kitchen, and her brow shifted, like 'uh oh.'

"Hey…" she came up to him with a smile. He set the wine on the counter before closing his arms around her, kissing the top of her head, then her lips as she looked up. "Long day?"

"I'll tell you about it later," he promised.

"I'm so sorry, it kind of happened out of the blue and I…"

"Don't worry about it," he shook his head. "Being here, with you, I'm good." She smiled. "It's just one person, right?"

"It is," Maya nodded.

"Do I get to know who it is?"

"Soon, yeah," she teased, and he kissed her again.

"Where do you need me? Do I need to change?"

"Not one thing," she assured him. "And can you set the table?"

Their guest arrived, dessert in hand, right on time. Of all the surprises Lucas could have envisioned, there was absolutely no way for him to conjure up the idea that it would be his and Maya's middle school English teacher. But then he'd gone to the door at the sound of the bell, and when he'd opened it, there she was, near on a decade older but still just the image he had in the back of his mind. He was genuinely so happy to see her that his outlook on the evening soon took an upswing.

"Miss Alcott?" he blinked, his reaction not unlike Maya's, right down to his recollections of her being taller, although in his case he had gone and grown enough that he might have had a few inches over her. She was just as surprised to see him, even if in this case she did know she'd be crossing paths with him, because he _had_ grown so much. All he could think about was how she had been new to the school, the fall he had returned after his suspension, and she had treated him well, but even beyond that, he believed she would have treated him just the same if she had been there the year before and seen him suspended. The way she looked at him now, it was like he could just tell she was thinking about those days, too, like she'd hoped things would turn out alright for him and now… now she was seeing that they had. "Come in, please," he stepped aside, remembering himself.

"I think you might have even more difficulty with this than Maya did, but please call me Lindsay," she smiled as he took the dessert box while she took off her jacket. They traded again as he moved to hang it up for her.

"I'll do my best," he nodded. Now that she was here, he was very curious to find out exactly how she and Maya had managed to run into one another and ended up with the teacher being invited here tonight.

"Your home is lovely," Lindsay declared, looking around as he led her toward the kitchen.

"Thank you. It was my grandfather's, he passed it on to me," he explained. At the flash of concern in her eyes, he quickly clarified. "Graduation present, he lives in Houston now. He got married again," he added.

"Oh, good for him," Lindsay chuckled now, following Lucas into the kitchen to find the others in wait, unbeknownst to her all of five seconds after having put the finishing touches on everything. Dinner was ready to be served. "Thanks again for the invitation," Lindsay greeted Maya as she came forward.

"It's our pleasure, really," she assured her, stealing a look to Lucas, smiling at him, too. "This is my brother, Sam," she went on to introduce him as he came and offered his hand.

"Hello, Sam," Lindsay shook his hand, recognizing him from the picture on Maya's desk. "It's very nice to meet you."

"Thanks, you, too. Maya's told me about you before," he revealed before taking on the last introduction. "This is my girlfriend, Cecilia," he turned to her as she came to stand by him and shook hands with the teacher as he'd done.

As they sat down to dinner, Maya and Sam both worked through giving Miss Alcott a brief rundown of their history. The last time she'd really known the former New Yorker, Maya lived alone with her mother. There were no brothers or sisters back then, but now, nine years later, there were ten of them, four by her mother and her second husband, four by her father and his second wife, and two by her stepmother's marriage. It was as though the English teacher still lived in a former reality, where Maya had no one to claim for family but Katy Hart, when today… today, it felt as though the universe had worked overtime to compensate for lonely years that were, by now, just a small fraction of her life. A couple years from now, she would be hitting a point where she had been in Texas as long as she'd been in New York, and then she would have been here longer than she'd been there.

The tale of the many siblings, and stepparents, and long lost relatives, and the loss of Kermit had soon veered into talk of Lucas and Maya's progress through the years. Some of it Lindsay already knew about, mostly the parts that had to do with basketball, as she'd seen plenty of trophies and photos and news clippings since moving up to the high school. She was glad to hear of their time in college, in Houston, and then their return to Austin, and especially of their engagement and how it had all gone down. Miss Alcott had never taught Sophie, who had transferred to their class in high school, but she was touched to hear how they cared for her so much as to delay their wedding.

It was almost weird to realize it, not in a 'how can she not know?' sort of way, more like 'somehow they always seem to know and it's so surprising,' but she'd never heard about the band. But then to know that Maya, and Riley, and Nadine had been part of it, _were_ still part of it, she swore she would look into it when she got home, and they knew her enough to trust this was not an empty promise. Sam had been happy to brag for his big sister, sharing the fact that she was now a songwriter and had written Ree Forster's hit from the previous summer. Lindsay Alcott's jaw almost went slack at this. She'd heard that song, she loved that song, she knew it by heart…

"Tell me the truth, did I look like a tomato? I felt like a tomato," Maya declared, later, as she and Lucas sat in the kitchen after the guests had left, after Sam had gone to bed. They'd snuck out the box with the leftover cake, a fork to each of them.

"I happen to love tomatoes," Lucas informed her, his smirk leaving Maya to assume she really had gone red in the face. She laughed, making to cover her face like she was embarrassed. Lucas prodded at her hand until she'd pull it down and he could see that bright smile all over her face. "You know what this reminds me of?" he asked, and she nodded at once.

"Valentine's Day, the honey cake," she answered, taking another bite. "Man, my feet hurt that night… Good thing I had you there to carry me around."

"Good thing you're easy to carry," he countered. She 'gasped,' but it was no use and she burst into giggles. When she'd finally gotten hold of herself again, after almost sliding right off her chair before he caught her, Maya took a few breaths to calm again and turn to him.

"You know, we never got a chance to talk about today. What got you down?" For a few minutes there he'd almost forgotten, and now the memory made him frown, setting his fork down. "That bad?" she asked, serious now.

"It's not me, I just… Ramona and Robbie got into this big argument on the ride to school this morning because of a misunderstanding. It was really bad."

"Oh, no…" Maya replied with sympathy.

"Took a while after we'd made it through our first class before the explanation happened, but even after that it was all kind of…"

"Can't put the toothpaste back in the tube?" Maya guessed. Lucas shook his head. "That sucks," Maya frowned, gripping his hand where it lay on the table.

"Yeah, really does," he agreed, turning his hand over so he might grip back, palm to palm.

"They'll make it work… I hope they'll make it work," Maya told him.

"I keep thinking about them, and then I think about Zay and Nadine when they broke up, and Rebecca and Joey, too. It was different, I know, not just the outcome, but every time anything like that happens we all react the same way. We can't believe that would be them."

She knew what he was trying to say. It had hit him, made him worry about what could be, if the two of them ever… They'd been through that before, hadn't they? Right before Pappy Joe's accident. It had been some of the worst days of their lives, and all through the years that had followed they'd done their best to try and never end up in that situation again, tried to be open and honest with one another. It wasn't foolproof, nothing was, but it had absolutely left them stronger in the end.

"Hey…" Maya tilted her head until he'd look at her. "We should really put this cake away or there won't be any left and Sam will be _so_ upset." He stared back at her for a moment before letting out a small laugh. "Not saying I couldn't do it, especially if you helped me…" His laugh settled into a smile, and a nod. Whatever would happen with Ramona and Robbie, there was nothing they could do about it. But right here and now there was him and her, and that much they could do _so_ much about.

"Hey, you know me, not about to let a partner down."

"She was _our_ teacher anyway," she grinned as he picked up his fork again.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	97. Their Fall in Leaves

April 6th 2020

_Chapter 97  
Their Fall in Leaves_

Lucas returned from school a week later, the clock already running past seven. He was fortunate this semester in that he only had one day where he finished late enough that Maya and Sam would be left to wait on him for a late dinner, as they'd done over the past year, and today was that day. Most times in those last two semesters, he would arrive and find the both of them practically chomping at the bits to finally sit and eat, though sometimes it looked more like they were playing it up to amuse him. It definitely worked, whether or not he'd need it on any given day.

He returned on this day to find what he could only describe as the 'Maya Hart brand of creative chaos.' It was the kind of overall image that needed to be broken down into pieces to be fully taken in. Here was part one, which were baskets filled with… leaves? Actually, they might have been fake, cut and traced from the heaps of construction paper and other materials spread over the coffee table… part two. Part three was a very long, hand-painted banner hung to dry from the banister, or maybe it was part four, after the bits of paper littering the floor, from where the leaves had been cut.

Part five was the centerpiece. Part five was Maya and Sam, standing in the middle of all this, loudly singing along to the music playing over one or the other's phone speakers, sat on the ground as they appeared in the midst of painting another banner together. Both their heads were adorned with something like a flower wreath made of paper leaves.

It took Lucas a moment to process all of this, but once he did he knew they had to be working on Fall Festival decorations, but more importantly he knew… That was Maya's second song, the one for the girl group. He had a feeling they had listened to it a few times already. Sam was stunningly great at memorizing things, so he could have heard it once or twice and been able to sing along with his sister, though that would not account for the amount of time it would take to get him to sing in the first place. He had given himself away for having a solid singing voice over the years, though it would take a lot to get him to show it on purpose in any way where he couldn't just get lost in a mix of voices like he did now.

"Hey!" Maya finally happened to look up and spot him standing there. Setting her brush aside and minding that she didn't knock anything over or stick her hands anywhere while she had wet paint stains on them, she stood and came up to him. "I can't touch, but you… well… I'm not finishing that sentence, I promise," she stole a look back to her brother, who looked at them like 'I'm sitting right here!'

"Kiss okay?" Lucas smirked.

"Not only okay, it's highly encouraged," Maya grinned, stretching up on her toes to press her lips to his. "I ordered pizza about twenty minutes ago, should be here soon," she revealed.

"Perfect," he breathed. That sounded great right about now. "I like this," he prodded her leaf wreath.

"Made you one, too," Maya informed him, which made him chuckle. "Hey, listen," she tapped his chest with her elbow, nodding to the phone on the ground next to Sam.

"I heard," he nodded.

"Turn it back to the start," Maya asked her brother, who was already on it, holding up the screen so Lucas might see. The image showed four girls, he'd guess, somewhere about late teens, stood together two by two and back to back so that the two on the end stared out and the two in the middle looked to one another. _Keeping Secrets (Hush) – The Violets._

"It played this morning, too," Lucas pointed, realizing.

"You heard it?" Maya asked.

"Well, no. We were just pulling into the lot, they mentioned the group right before I turned off the ignition," he explained. "I would have stayed if I'd realized that was what it'd be."

"How was it today?" Maya inquired now, the mention of the morning now taking her out of creator mode and back to where she remembered about today.

After the first day, with the fight, and the talk, Ramona and Robbie had decided it might be best if they both took a few days to reflect on their own. It wasn't about splitting up, just… breathing, stopping themselves from accidentally stoking a flame they were trying to put out. Robbie had been crashing at a friend's place, driving himself to and from school, leaving Lucas to drive Ramona both ways as well. He didn't mind it at all, if it could help. It didn't change the fact that the two of them were still in most of the same classes every day, but they couldn't help that.

Now, today was to be something of a test. They were all three of them driving up and back again together, Robbie once again joining them.

"Awkward…" Lucas finally replied to Maya's question. "Not sure what tomorrow will be like, if he'll be there again or if he'll drive himself again. If I had to guess… I think it'll just be Ramona and me again." He hated to see his friends like this, but he knew this was just not one of those things where he could step in. They had to make up their own minds, and from there… all he could do was offer support.

Maya pulled her hands into her sleeves before giving him a proper hug. The shirt already had paint stains on it anyway, which she realized only after she'd put her arms around him would also mean she might cause a transfer on to him anyway. He didn't look like he minded. The best medicine, in being stuck watching his friends' troubles from the sidelines, was just to hold on to the good things he had waiting for him back here.

"Wreath me, please?" he asked, and Maya laughed, moving to find this third wreath of paper leaves and placing it atop his head. He stood back, trying to find a reflective surface so he might inspect himself. "How do I look?" he turned the determination to Maya, who looked like she really wanted to giggle right about now. She turned to her brother. Sam seemed to be much of the same opinion, so Maya looked back to her fiancé. She could just imagine him with small horns protruding from the top of his head, or elf like ears…

"Like an autumn sprite, and I am digging it," she finally declared, which immediately veered into imagining what Dora, the original woodland creature in the family, would look like with one of those on her head. Now she wanted to make more.

The pizza arrived, and the three of them were left to the conclusion that their habitual delivery guy was getting used to something like whimsy being part of the day to day at the house on the lane. Leaf wreaths were just something that happened. The headwear was left in the living room along with the rest of the leaves and banners and materials as they went into the kitchen to eat.

"So, all this is for the festival," Lucas looked back into the living room with a nod.

"Doing my part, pitching in," Maya happily nodded back. "With my trusty assistant," she smiled to her brother.

"Not sidekick," Sam chimed in.

"Only for crime fighting," Maya agreed, turning back to Lucas. "Also, I just like making lots and lots of leaves and other stuff… It's therapeutic."

"Just how many are you planning to make? Are we talking like a tree's worth or the whole forest?" Lucas wondered.

"An appropriate amount," Maya assured him. "Imagine being part of a tree and being turned into something that's pretending to be part of a tree… Want to help?"

"I have to read a few chapters for tomorrow," Lucas replied with an apologetic look.

"Right, education, good, do that," Maya sighed. "Come on, Sammy, banner time."

"Uh… Actually I kind of need to work on an assignment, too," Sam told her, finishing the last of his pizza. "No, not that look… Lucas! Make her stop!" he complained, faced with Maya's great big disappointment face. It usually worked in getting him to jump in on what she wanted to do, whether or not he had time. He didn't actually mind her trying to compensate for all the time they'd missed out on, not growing up together, doubling up on the 'big sister messing with little brother' bit. He loved to mess with her, too, just didn't have as much of a knack for it as she did.

Lucas and Sam had gone off to do their school work, leaving Maya to return to her leaves. It wouldn't be a forest, no. Once the leaves were all cut and traced with their details they would have messages and clues stuck to them, the better to be handed out, and hidden, part of a scavenger hunt. It was her one personal pet project in the festival, beyond the handling of the theater's involvement. She'd only started on it the day before, but already it was coming together and she couldn't wait to see it all unfold.

"Sam's still working?" Dropping one more leaf into the basket, Maya looked up to find Lucas coming down the stairs.

"Well, if he's not, he's staying in his room, so I'll just say yes."

"Does that mean I won?" Lucas joked, making her chuckle.

"Yes, you beat the sixteen-year-old, well done you."

"Sixteen-year-old college second year," Lucas amended. He came and sat on the couch, while she sat on the ground, surrounded by her papers.

"Right, so much more impressive then." Lucas picked up the notepad on the cushion next to him. The notes, in Maya's handwriting, looked sort of like poems, or lyrics, or… clues?

"You're doing a scavenger hunt, aren't you?" he asked, and she nodded. "We had one of those, the year you arrived," he recalled.

"We did," Maya smiled, cutting another leaf. "I didn't want to do it, because I didn't know the city enough to get the references, but you all convinced me to do it anyway, because then I could get to know all those places."

"You, me, and Asher, against Zay, Dylan, and Nadine," Lucas nodded, moving until he was sitting behind her, rubbing her shoulders. "Zay was so sure one of the others had cheated or something, when we ended up winning."

"Well…" Maya's voice pinched, in a way as to suggest…

"Wait, did they?" Lucas looked down at her, surprised.

"Uh…"

"Maya?" he laughed.

"Okay, okay, drag it out of me eleven years later," she set down her paper and scissors and turned toward him. "I was new, and weird, and feeling all… out of place… I can't help it if that inspired a bit of pity, really that just goes to speak about character."

"Who was it?" he had to know, more from curiosity than any sense of 'cheating bad, honesty good.'

"Who do you think? I mean, if you had to pick one person out of that whole group, _besides_ you, who would do something like that for the new girl?" she challenged. Lucas considered this for a moment, and it went to show who their friends were that he honestly had to think about it. Any one of them would have been considered a likely suspect, even him… especially him… If he thought back, he _had_ tried to think of a way to help her, but then why would he have needed to, if they were already on the same team, except just to give her The Win. So that ruled Asher out, too, and from there… _Wait…_

"I think I'm more annoyed at myself for falling for his whole protest act," he chuckled.

"King of the misdirect," Maya laughed. She still remembered how hard it had been for her not to break out into monster giggles, watching Zay go for that 'I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed' kind of diatribe, when all along he'd been the one slipping her clues when no one was looking. "I have a feeling this year will be perfect… for a rematch."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	98. Their Fall in Wonders

**_A/N: A new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_**

* * *

April 7th 2020

_Chapter 98  
Their Fall in Wonders_

The first day of the Fall Festival arrived before they knew it. As happy as she might have been at the thought of having one less thing to handle on top of her regular duties, Maya was actually kind of sad to see it come to an end. Alright, technically it was only starting now and what she'd been doing up to this point had just been preparation, but she had loved every part of it already… especially the parts where she'd gotten to work with Lindsay Alcott, at the high school. She would be in the building and it would be hard not to feel one of two things. On the one hand, she'd be thinking back to the years she'd been a student here, and on the other… she'd be thinking about the years she could be a teacher here, if she got to work here. The thought of being colleagues with Mr. Matthews alone was enough to make her laugh.

She'd been so looking forward to this moment that she was sure she wouldn't be able to sleep the night before, or she'd wake up so ridiculously early as to leave her feeling that she hadn't slept. Instead, after having finished a few things right before bed, she'd just gone right to sleep, and in the morning…

"Hey… Maya… I gave you ten more minutes, now you have to get up…"

"Mm?"

"Festival day," Lucas' voice finally connected with her and she opened her eyes with a gasp. It took her a moment to figure out he was crouching next to the bed, arms folded on the edge of the mattress as he stared at her. "Hey there," he half raised a hand in greeting.

"What time is it?" she yawned, burrowing down as she stretched.

"Sure you want to know?" he asked, pointing to the clock.

She tried to bolt out of bed so fast that he caught her mid-leap, dropping her back to safety before she could go and trip over her own legs and the sheets she was still tangled in.

"Right, no, good point… good point…" she breathed, sitting up.

"Packed your breakfast, filled your mug," Lucas nodded, and Maya caught his face in her hands with a smile. "What are you doing?" he laughed.

"You're being peak Huckleberry right now, just making sure you're real," she explained, leaning in to kiss him. "Where's Sam?" she asked.

"Downstairs, why?"

"Because whenever I say anything remotely suggestive he's usually right there and gives me that face like I've traumatized him for the rest of his life," Maya pointed out, which made Lucas snort for a beat before looking back at her.

"What were you going to say?" he inquired.

"Yeah, sorry, I don't have time, I'm so late already…" she replied with vague innocence, moving to get out of bed and get dressed.

"That is not fair, come back…" he 'pleaded' as her laughter ran away with her.

She'd been seeing the pieces of this giant, multifaceted puzzle that was the Fall Festival come together over the past few weeks, she'd seen so much of it in the theater's basement, and the storage rooms, all over the place, but she hadn't seen it all come together in its full display, no one had, until today. All she could say was that, for as much as she had loved and deeply cherished the festivals every year, because of what they represented to her, it was sort of impossible for her not to feel as though this one was going to be particularly special. She had been in the thick of it, she'd helped to make this happen.

They had left the theater, all the trucks packed up, the cars, some of them leaving on foot, pushing wheeled trunks… As they'd reached the park, the set-up had started, most of the people there doing their own parts, with others like Maya and Miss Alcott going around and helping where they could. It had all been so much of an effort, non-stop, that it took some time for Maya to finally stop and look around and see it, all their work… and it was amazing.

It was more than anything she could have envisioned. It was the Fall Festival.

Every year was slightly different, but overall it was what it always was, and the feeling would be renewed from year to year, like they'd just hit pause and suddenly they were back to unpause, moments later and not a year later. She could almost envy her siblings, the young Hunters having been here every year since they'd been born, which would mean that they did not know a time where they hadn't been to the festival. Last year, when they'd brought them here, the twins had remembered for the first time, had looked forward to these days, recalling the things they'd done, and seen, and eaten… Now they were looking forward to it even more, feeding their little brother and sister with tales of the 'magic' of the event and leaving MJ and Haley to look at them with wide eyes. They couldn't wait to see it all either.

Maya reached into her pocket for her phone. She had to call them and find out when they'd come out here to see it all, maybe send them some pictures. When it rang even as she'd grabbed it, she smirked. It figured that this would be them, right in the moment. _Private number._ Alright, maybe not.

"Hello?" she answered, motioning that she'd follow in a minute as some of the others from the theater were calling out to ask if she needed to swing back that way for anything.

"Oh, good morning! I was hoping I'd reach you," a woman's voice responded. Maya blinked, trying to think if any of her people hadn't arrived for the set-up and coming up empty.

"I'm sorry, who's this?" she asked, still looking around, wondering why they wouldn't just call Miss Alcott, who was actually in charge. "Hold on," she cut in again, spotting some of their volunteers arriving. "The check-in tent is over there!" she called out to them. "There, the orange one!" she pointed, and they turned on their way to the tent. "Sorry about that," Maya pulled the phone back to her ear, trying to think where they'd left off.

"Is this a bad time?" the woman inquired, thankfully sounding more amused than annoyed over the sudden interruption. She gave the smallest bit of a laugh that left Maya feeling like she might genuinely have heard a record scratch. She knew that laugh, just couldn't place it.

"Uh… No, no, I'm alright, just setting up for the Fall Festival," she explained. That laugh kept playing back in her head, like the kernel of a melody she couldn't get out of her head until she'd manage to expand on it, turn it into a song. She'd joke that this was the reason she had written so many songs over the years. Once she started, it was impossible to let go most of the time. "But, uh… I can talk, it's fine," she nodded to herself, looking around.

"Good, yes, well I'll do my best not to keep you too long," the woman went on, and maybe it was all the time she'd spent, with the band, on her songs, or even being around the Stage Ready mentors, but it was like the intonation was another bit of music she knew enough to pick up on, because that was how she'd recognized the voice at last, matched the laugh to the rest of its melody.

She almost had to bite her arm to keep from making any noise as she realized she was on the phone with Ree Forster.

"I hope you don't mind, Audra gave me your number."

"No, I don't mind at all," Maya managed to speak in a relatively even tone, even as her throat felt impossibly dry.

"I meant to keep in touch, I've been told my attention span suffers a whole lot whenever there's a new album coming, or a tour, or in this case both," Ree explained.

"That's alright," Maya nodded.

"But I did remember how I told you I'd let you know about the tour when I knew more, so that's what I'm doing now. It'll be out in a couple of days, so let's just keep that between us until then, yes?"

"Uh huh…"

"Yes, so, I will be doing three shows in Texas, one of them in Austin on December 11th, and I would love for you to be there."

Oh, what she wouldn't have given to have been back in that field again, so she might have had a proper reaction equivalent to the mad frenzy happening inside her mind in that moment. The best she could do for now, with so many people hanging about… and with _Ree Forster_ on the line… was to walk at a fast pace around the perimeter of the park.

"That… That would be amazing, yes, I… Thank you…" she finally replied.

"Good!" Ree sounded like she was smiling. "I'll send you information on how to get in touch with someone at the venue. They've already been given the heads up to get you and any others coming along the tickets you'll need, so don't be shy, bring whoever you'd like."

"That's very generous of you, I… I'll do that." How was she even keeping her voice from trembling right now?

"Still unsure exactly when I'll be getting in town, but once I know more I'll see about setting up a time for us to have lunch," Ree carried on, either unaware of the freak out being thinly contained on the other end of the line or aware but also conscientious enough to act as though she didn't pick up on it.

"Great…"

"I _would _love to get you up on stage with me, we could perform your song," Ree went on, and Maya had to stop walking.

If she wasn't so sure that this was definitely Ree Forster on the line, she would have thought this was some prank, it was… there was so much. But then she'd already been riding that feeling of a waking dream ever since Audra Watts had walked into the theater that day and offered her this new deal, the song writing deal. If she hadn't already believed deep down in the idea of things happening when they were supposed to happen, she might have believed it was too good to be true. She _had_ thought that way, once, years ago, back when it had been just her mother and her, in New York, and in those early Texas days. The last decade had been like one exercise after another in showing her just how much it could all change.

She'd walked around the park for a while after the call had ended, just trying to allow the thoughts to settle down and not feel like runaway bouncing balls inside her skull.

"Hey, is everything alright?" She looked back to find her old English teacher was walking at her side. How long had she been there?

"Oh, yeah…" Maya laughed it off. "I was just sort of… I was thinking about the festival," she told her, then, "The previous years, you know? A lot of memories…"

"That's how I started getting involved," Lindsay nodded with a smile. "I would come out here every year with my parents and my sisters. My birthday always landed somewhere in the middle of it, and we'd come out and hang around here."

"When is it this year?" Maya asked, happy for the new subject to help her get back on track and put the phone call off until later.

"In three days," Lindsay revealed, and Maya had to stop for a second and think it over…

"Wait, so that first day, _my_ first day in your class…"

"I guess it was, yes," her fellow teacher smiled. "You made it a good one."

"I was all weird and quiet," Maya frowned, having trouble believing that.

"So one of those has changed," Lindsay teased, making her laugh. "Anyway, I stand by my statement. This makes me think, I might call on your assistance on some other projects up at the school, if you're available that is…"

"Oh, yeah, put me in, Coach," Maya grinned.

Talking with Miss Alcott had helped to resettle her nerves, whether or not she knew that she was doing it, and by the time the 2026 Fall Festival was officially kicked off and people started to disperse through the park and its many stands, and games, and other attractions, Maya was right where she wanted to be.

"Maya!" Nellie Hunter came dashing for her big sister, her twin right on her heels. By the looks of their cheeks, they had found the face painters before they'd found _her_. They both had a smiling pumpkin on one cheek and a pair of fall colored leaves on the other.

"Hey, look at you!" Maya matched her tone as she braced for the full force of the seven-year-old's hug. "Let me see," she prodded at the small chin until she'd turn her face up. "That is an excellent pumpkin," she declared. "I happen to know where you can paint real ones, want me to show you?" Nellie and Gracie both wanted it very much, so off they went.

Much as she loved hanging out with her family out here, Maya couldn't help but give the gold star as far as favorite moments for the first day of the festival over to the moment where Lindsay Alcott found herself surrounded with several of her former students all at once, nearly a decade after they'd left her class. They were all just as enthusiastic to see her as she was to see them.

"This all looks great," Lucas had declared when he'd first come around and found her. Maya could barely contain herself, with how she wanted to tell him about the call from Ree. She would tell him, just him, that night once they were back home, and only because there was no way he wouldn't pick up on there being something going on with her. But for now she had to keep it in, no matter how much it was killing her to be all calm around the guy who'd seen her at her most unhinged of giddy outbursts.

"I would actually be okay with the world looking like this all year round," Maya nodded, letting out a contented breath. Fall was in the air, and that meant so many good things for them. Halloween, and their anniversary, and the holidays after that… The Fall Festival really was like the kick off to all of that, wasn't it?

"So long as they kept the pies?" Lucas wondered.

"No pies, no joy," Maya smiled up at him. "And now I want pie."

"Lead the way."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	99. Their Sounds of Fall

**_A/N: _**_Hey, so I know I haven't done deleted scenes in a little bit, but I am still going to do them, just haven't had time to do any since the last one. Taking down all the suggestions on my list and will get to them when I can! In the meantime, I am so happy to see all those ideas coming in, though also of course so very happy to hear your thoughts on the chapters themselves! :) Hope everyone is well out there!_

* * *

April 8th 2020

_Chapter 99  
Their Sounds of Fall_

The scavenger hunt had been set to round out the final day of the festival, and it had been chaotic and alive and completely awesome. By reason of the fact that she'd help to make the clues, and to hide them, Maya couldn't reasonably participate, which was something of a shame, but she didn't really mind it in the end. Seeing the participants in the park, in stores and other areas in their area of the city over the festival days, she'd be left feeling a swell of pride to find her project was doing well.

And now the festival was over. Come morning, the park would be the park again, all the stalls and tents and decorations and other items left behind would be cleared away, until the next time the season came around.

"Just going to sleep right here, good night…" Maya plopped down on the couch as she and Lucas returned to the house that night, after having helped with some of the clean-up. Sam was spending the night at the Cassidy house, him and Cecilia and Adam having a sleepover at Dora's.

"Just like that, huh?" Lucas looked at her from over the back of the couch. She nodded, burrowing herself into the cushions. "That's too bad, I mean… It's just us tonight, and… well…" After moment of silence, Maya turned her head around to look up at him.

"Go on?"

Sometime later, as they'd lay in bed, feeling as though they could only wait until they'd finally drift back down to Earth. What parts of their brains still recalled the world beyond the person at their side would be back at the festival. It had been, more or less, the majority of their occupation from the day it had started. Maya would be at the theater early in the morning, after which she'd be at the festival for the rest of the day and into the evening. Sam would go out to join her for a bit after coming back from school, but then he'd head back home to do his work, while Lucas would do the opposite, doing his work first and then spending the evening at the park with Maya.

The most memorable of those evenings had nothing to do with the festival itself, and only took place as they'd returned home. It was the very first evening, and he'd figured she would be dead tired and would want to go right to bed. Instead, as soon as they'd pulled up to the house and gotten out of the car, she'd grabbed his hand and made him follow her, into the house, up to the second floor, and then up to the attic, where she shut the trap door behind them.

"This is a new one," he'd chuckled, but she shook her head.

"That's not what this is," she told him, and she looked so frenzied right then that he had to wonder what it actually would be about. "She _called_ me," Maya told him, in a barely contained whisper, and by the way she couldn't quite stand still, he didn't take long to understand who she was talking about.

"Wow…" he blinked, grinning. "So you kept that in? All day?"

"Nightmare," Maya breathed out semi-dramatically.

"What did she say? What did _you_ say? How coherent were you?" Lucas had to tease her just a bit.

"Surprisingly very," Maya nodded, her face locked in a smile. "I just had to stand there, and I didn't want _her_ to hear me freak out, and I didn't want anyone in the park to _see_ me freak out, there was just like… no way out. But she…" she started to say before pausing and pointing at him, which he rightly interpreted as 'this stays between us.' Lucas nodded. "She's coming to do some shows in Texas in December, and she invited me to go and see her when she'll be in Austin, said I could bring as many people as I wanted," she told him, counting out the beats of their conversation.

"Your mother is going to flip out," Lucas commented, making her laugh.

"I'm going to have to make sure she's sitting down first… Where does one get smelling salts?"

"You're going to be in there when she sings your song to however many people they'll have in there, like… _thousands_ maybe," he went on to point out as he tried to conjure up that scenario. When he said it though, Maya got to thinking about it, too, and she looked momentarily shaken. "What is it?"

"Well, on top of everything else, she… she wants me to go up a-and sing it with her," she revealed. She would have been more concerned if she _didn't_ feel the tiniest bit startled at the thought of going up on a stage and facing an audience large enough as to turn into an immeasurable sea of people ahead of her. But Lucas had received this news and he'd gotten that look on his face, that look of complete and overwhelming pride and happiness for her, and maybe she could keep it together, get herself to the point where she'd be okay and looking forward to the show. "I swear I don't know how I got through today without just…" she mimed 'head imploding,' complete with sound effects.

"But you did, and now you're here," Lucas gestured around them, indicating that there was no one around. Maya beamed. She looked about to do something but paused, bracing herself by holding on to his arms before kicking off one shoe and then the other, bringing herself down two inches without the heels but making up for it with a sudden release of that energy in her, hopping about on her socks. Lucas smirked, circling the air with his finger to indicate the room, and Maya was off, taking a lap of the attic floor. He watched her go a while before catching her up in his arms, lifting her up as she squealed, allowing herself a shout that would wake no one except her brother below.

Making it through the days of the festival without telling anyone anything about Ree's call, not even that it had happened, had not been easy, but at least now she'd gotten to let out that initial surprise, and she'd gotten to talk to Lucas about it… and Sam… She didn't have a choice to tell him, not after that unfortunate wake up call. But then, as with the first day, the festival had kept her plenty busy.

Yesterday, she'd also been relieved of keeping the secret of the fact that Ree was coming to Texas in December. She'd aimed to tell people about Ree's call, and the invitation to the concert, but the duet… She'd told herself this part would remain secret, maybe a surprise on the night of the concert. But along with the tour dates and cities, Ree had also revealed the special guests she would welcome to certain of her performances, and right there, on the list, it had said… _December 11th – Austin, TX – with special guest Maya Hart._ After that, everything had come spilling out, and it was by some chance that she got to tell her mother in person before she found out for herself.

"Hey, Lucas?" she breathed now, staring at the ceiling.

"Yeah?" he asked back, turning to look at her. She had that little worried face of hers all of a sudden, which really wasn't what he would expect to see after what they'd been up to.

"You're going to tell me if it ever gets to be like it's… too much, I guess?" she asked, looking at him.

"What do you mean?" Lucas blinked. He reached over, weaving his fingers with hers, bringing her hand to his lips.

"Just… everything I've been doing, and everything I will be doing, with work, with the songs, Ree's concert… We had problems with that before, remember?"

He did remember, sure. They'd had a fight about it, and they hadn't been on speaking terms for a little while, until the day where Pappy Joe had fallen down the stairs and she'd rushed to the hospital, believing he'd been the one to get hurt instead of his grandfather. They'd patched things up afterward, and he would knock on wood with both hands, every day, over the fact that they'd never had any kind of fight anywhere near that magnitude since that one. They'd had the odd disagreement, sure, but it had never lasted very long, never got to the point where they couldn't talk it through, couldn't fix it.

"It won't be like that again," Lucas promised. "Maya, that was… like six years ago, we were still in high school, we were… so different. A lot's happened since then…" He paused now, as he started to understand. "This is because of Ramona and Robbie, isn't it?" She was at a loss for words to respond, but then before she could even get there they both heard the doorbell from below and stalled.

"Expecting anyone?" Maya whispered, which immediately made her roll her eyes at herself for acting as though anyone could hear them.

"Stay here," Lucas told her, moving to scoop up his pants and slip them back on.

"What? No way." She was already moving to get her robe and throw it on.

"Maya…" he looked back at her. Maybe he was worrying for nothing, but it was after one in the morning, which was not exactly social hours.

"Who rings the bell at this hour unless they have to?" she pointed out, tugging the sash into a knot and leading the way into the hall. Sam was just stepping out of his room, dishevelled and half asleep.

"Is it morning?" he mumbled.

"Go back to bed," Maya told him, turning her brother back in the direction of her room before following Lucas down the stairs. The automatic lights had come on outside, and they could just make out the top of someone's head through the window in the door. Curly dark hair, a girl, they'd guess. It clicked for both of them. "Lucas, that's…"

"I know," he told her, hurrying up down the rest of the stairs now and toward the door. He opened it and found it was indeed Ramona. She was still dressed as she'd been when they had seen her and Robbie at the festival earlier. "Hey, are you okay?" Lucas asked, stepping aside so she'd come in.

"Can I… Is it okay if I stay here tonight?" she asked, her voice shy.

"You don't even have to ask," Lucas nodded as she walked in, only so far as to be inside the house, like she was just in another place in her head. Maya came up to her, touched her arm.

"What happened? Are you…"

"It didn't work," Ramona shook her head. "We… We tried to get past it, but we couldn't, I… I couldn't. It all came to a head tonight, and I finally, I just… walked out. I drove around for a while, but I couldn't go back, so I… I came here… I'm so sorry, I didn't want to…"

"It's like he said, okay? You're good here," Maya told Ramona, pulled her into a hug as Lucas headed out to his classmate's car and found bags in the backseat. One of them was her schoolbag, the other three…

Lucas brought everything into the house, locked the car doors and slipped the keys in the front pocket of Ramona's bag. Right now, she was sitting on the couch with Maya, head rested on his fiancée's shoulder, and… she was asleep. Lucas and Maya shared a look. This was the last place they'd seen this day going, but now here they were, and after having been on the sidelines since the day of that first fight, they'd been brought right in the thick of it. They wouldn't let their friends down… either of them.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	100. Their Sounds of Creation

_**A/N: **Quick question, any of you guys watched/know Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Need to run something by someone who knows both that show and GMW :)_

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April 9th 2020

_Chapter 100  
Their Sounds of Creation_

Maya was fortunate to say that, for the most part, she had never had to reach very far to find inspiration. There would be notes, or words, not many but just enough to set her on the path, and from there it would all come together, until 'not many' turned into a whole. She had never set out to be a songwriter, it had just sort of happened, hadn't it? Back when TXNY had first come together, Isadora had been the one to conjure up those little jewels of songs they had then gone and sung and played together. At no time had Maya gone 'wait, I should do that, too.'

And then she'd done one. She'd written a song… written lyrics anyway, which Isadora had set music to. Even so, it was the first time she had expressed her art in this way, with words more than images. They had come to her in something like a haze, her brain overstimulated from having been on stage earlier that night. It had been enough though. She'd wedged her foot in that door, and afterward she just couldn't take it back out again, or more to the point, even if she had taken her foot out the door would not have been able to close again. It would draw her in, and she would find her way into this world of melodies, and lyrics, and… she was a songwriter.

Now her songs were known by people near and far across the world and it was just… She couldn't even quantify it, couldn't even try without feeling like she was so very small and unable to even wrap her arms around even a fraction of it all. It was overwhelming, and so far it was okay that it was that way. The day might come when it wouldn't feel that way anymore, but… No, she wasn't going to even think about it that way.

She still had her band, still had TXNY, with Riley and Rosa and Nadine and Kayla, and they would be hitting the stage in a few days, a club gig, and Maya wanted them to have something new to play up there. She'd been so caught up with writing for Audra and the people who'd signed her, and with Stage Ready's expansion, and the camp, and the festival… Their big tour plans had just never panned out, and that had not been _her_ fault in particular, or anyone else's, really, but now here they were. They were all itching to get back up there, not just this one time but really on a more regular basis, the way they used to be back in Houston. The club was the first step for that return, and this new song would be her offering to the effort.

Maya hated starting from nothing. If she had just the smallest bit of something to build up on she could create magic, but faced with a blank page, with a lack of notes to start, she felt like she was digging at the ground and finding nothing but empty shells.

Now here she was, in the basement, laid out on the couch with her guitar, just messing around and trying to come up with… something… anything…

"Maya?"

"Yeah?" she turned her head up to find Ramona standing halfway down the stairs with a plate in her hand. "Oh, hey," Maya set her guitar aside and sat up.

"I made cookies, wanted to know if you'd like some," Ramona explained, looking to the plate and back again.

"Definitely, yeah," Maya nodded. Lucas' classmate came down the rest of the way and sat next to her, offering the plate.

"I kept thinking about these, used to make them with my sister when we were little and our abuelo would look after us. They always made me feel better, especially after that summer… Anyway, I guess right now I really needed these."

"I get it," Maya told her, hand drifting to the guitar pick on the chain around her neck. Ramona smiled, holding out the plate. "These look amazing, thank you," she took one and bit into it.

Ramona had been bunking on the couch upstairs for nearly three weeks now. The day after she'd arrived, Sam had offered her his room, his bed, so she wouldn't have to sleep on the couch, but she didn't want to impose that far. To a degree, maybe she just didn't want to take any steps that would put any kind of frame on exactly how long she'd be here. If there was any part of her that believed there was a chance for her and Robbie, it would not want her to treat this as anything more than a temporary situation. Lucas and Maya had both told her she could stay as long as she needed, and they meant it. She could stay for a couple of days like she could stay a couple of months and then some. They would not turn her out while she was out here figuring out what her next step would be.

They would not push either of their friends to talk, to address whether or not there was any progress one way or another as far as reconciliation was concerned, but everything they had seen by now suggested the answer would have been no. By now, it felt as though they had passed through the event, and they were on to the next chapter. Ramona had been staying with them all this time, the car had been returned to Robbie, the day after the festival, at which point Ramona had packed up the rest of her things and returned to the house with Maya and the minivan. A lot of those things were now in the basement with the rest of the boxes and containers for storage. Maya and Lucas, after all this time, were seriously looking into setting her up in the bedroom across from theirs. She maintained her stance on taking the couch, and she picked up after herself every morning, but it still just felt like she deserved more than this.

From everything Lucas had relayed to her at night, not out of any need to gossip but really just a need to let out, to share, Robbie wasn't doing much better. When they'd show up at school, he'd do his best to look as though he was alright, but then once they'd actually be sitting in class, and people would be meant to pay attention to the professor and not one another… Lucas would look at his friend and just see despair. Whatever had happened between him and Ramona, whatever had gone and splintered the crack in their relationship rather than mend it, he couldn't help but sympathize to some degree, because it was just in him to stop and think about how he'd feel if this were him and Maya.

If it wasn't bad enough that his marriage was falling apart, he was also dealing with the mess brought on by his father's secret family and his sick little half-brother. And because Ramona was who she was, it would still be in her to worry for him, to want to know that he would be alright. She didn't hate him, but she didn't know if she loved him anymore. That part she had confessed on the ride home from school about a week ago. For all that though, she didn't feel like it was right for her to try and be there for him, didn't want to send mixed signals. So she would feed Lucas whatever information she could, so he could then go and try and to be there for Robbie in her place, in some way.

"My mother wants me to move back home," Ramona told Maya, as they sat and ate their way through the cookie plate. "Going on all about how she never liked Robbie… After my sister died, she became so much more protective of me, and I get it, I do. But I can't go back there."

"No," Maya agreed.

"I can't afford an apartment on my own though, and neither could Robbie. He came to talk to me today, said he'd have to give up our old place. He's moving in with Simon, up in Houston, but he wanted me to have the place, if I could find a roommate or something."

"Would you stay there? If you could afford it?" Maya asked her.

"I… Maybe. Without Robbie there though, I don't know. It was just… It was a good neighborhood, we had all our places, and the people, too."

"If it matters that much to you…"

"Who's going to want to be roommates with the sad girl about to… about to get divorced," she struggled to get the word out, and once she'd said it she had to bite into that last cookie or just break down. Maya scooted over, put her arm around Ramona's shoulders.

"Might not be a bad thing to have some alone time then," she pointed out, and she could practically hear the issue come up again. She couldn't afford the rent and the bills on her own. The solution presented itself with relative ease, and realizing it actually _was_ a possibility left Maya even more determined to make it so. "What if I cover the other half?" Ramona sat up.

"What do you mean?"

"I'll be your roommate, not physically but financially, until you're in a place where you're okay to bring someone else in to live with you and take up that other half."

"You…" Ramona blinked, but immediately got to shaking her head. "No, I can't ask you to do that, I…"

"You're not asking, I'm offering," Maya pointed out. "Look, I've got the means to spare it, thanks to the songs I've done for the label. I would never have gotten to this point in my life if not for someone else taking a chance on us, helping to pay for our house out here. I would not have this ability, now, to help a friend, and the fact that I do… Please, let me pay it forward?" Ramona looked at her for a moment, and then she nodded, reaching out again to hug her non-roomie roomie. As they pulled back, Ramona had tears on her face, but she was also smiling.

"I'm, uh… I'll go and see what I can do, for dinner."

"Are there more cookies?" Maya had to know, and Ramona laughed, wiping at her face.

"There are. I can make more."

Maya watched her make her way back up the stairs, a new warmth blooming in her heart. When she'd gotten that first cheque, she could have decided to splurge and treat herself to something sort of extravagant, but she couldn't make herself do it. That had not been an impulse in her, never really. If anything, she was much more aware of the need to be wise in her expenses… to make it count… Helping Ramona felt like she was doing exactly that.

Picking her guitar back up, Maya settled back into the couch once more. She was overtaken with the mixed feelings of sadness for her friends, and new joy for this move forward… All of this, mixed with the comfort of Ramona's treats, courtesy of her grandfather, felt like an image in her mind's eye. The more she brought that image into focus, it got to feel like it was translating, reshaping itself, into words, into music… She took a deep breath, resettled again, as she let her fingers play over the strings. The melody felt like everything that was in her heart and her mind in that moment, and she let it go where it needed to go, let it grow into something that felt more and more like a song, one that would only ever fit her own voice, and the voices of TXNY.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	101. Their Sounds of Play

April 10th 2020

_Chapter 101  
Their Sounds of Play_

"That was… wow…" Lucas breathed out with a smile, as Maya's hand brought the guitar strings to a still. She had just finished playing her new song for him, the first person to hear it since she'd started to work on it a few days before.

She had been… well, maybe not nervous exactly, but… She had wanted so much for this one to be good but there _had_ been the tiniest bit of apprehension over what she would come up with. Somehow, after the success she'd had with Ree's song, and then how well the Violets' song was progressing along the charts, too… it just left her in this place like she was bracing herself for the one that would flop. She really didn't want that, one way or another, but she especially didn't want it to be the case now, for her first new song for the band since she'd started with the label, which would just make it seem as though she was phoning it in for TXNY and keeping 'the good stuff' for the success and the money.

"Swear it?"

"On Archer's head," Lucas nodded, which made her laugh.

"Alright, I get the picture."

"It was beautiful," he went on either way, in all earnestness. Maya smiled at this, leaning over her instrument to kiss him. "Are you doing it for the show?"

"That's the plan, yeah," she tipped her head. "Once the others get here we'll start working on it together, and we'll go on from there. I kind of want to play it for Ramona before that though. It's not like I wrote about her, but she did sort of inspire me into writing it, so I just want to make sure she'll be okay with it, I guess."

"She should be back any minute now, I can send her down here when she comes back from the Sandersons'," Lucas offered.

"Good, I'll be here."

Though she was still riding the couch upstairs, Ramona would be returning to the apartment in a few more days. Robbie was in the process of moving out to Houston, and until he was gone she would remain with them. They would help Ramona move things around once that was over, possibly do a bit of redecorating, to help her make the place feel like less of a constant reminder. Maya had told Lucas of her plans to help Ramona keep up with the costs of the apartment until she was ready for a new roommate, and even though she'd never seen him reacting in any way like he didn't agree, she still felt a bit of relief to find he was on board, every step of the way.

She played the song for Ramona, once she'd returned from the farm. She'd been going up there in the morning along with Lucas, and Missy Sanderson had really gotten to like having her around, too.

"I won't play it if you don't want…" Maya shook her head as she finished the song and found Ramona looked just on the edge of weeping.

"No, it's okay," Ramona quickly insisted. "This is nothing," she indicated her face. "A lot of things set me off these days. I don't mind letting it out if it means it's gone after. The song is amazing, you have to do it." Maya stopped herself from asking if she was sure. Her face said it all.

"Okay," she smiled. "You want to stick around for practice?"

"Alright, yeah," Ramona smiled back.

They didn't have long to wait for practice to start. Nadine had gone and picked up the others on her way over, so they landed at the house all at once. Upon finding Ramona there, too, they had all gone about asking her how she was doing, like a band of big sisters, swooping in to shelter a little one in distress. They all had their own ways of responding, but on the whole it was all about wanting Ramona to be able to move on from this moment in time. Without a doubt, if Robbie had deserved it they would have stood like a defensive wall in between, but it really wasn't that way. In the long run, the couple might have a shot at salvaging a friendship, but this time wasn't here yet.

"Can we hear it now?" Rosa turned to Maya out of nowhere, leaving her blinking back in surprise. She hadn't even mentioned there being a new song, just in case she changed her mind about using it, or if Ramona didn't want her doing it. "You have a tell, you know that?" Rosa pointed out.

"Since when?" Maya asked, her posture shifting.

"Oh, please," Nadine chuckled. Maya looked at her, then over to Riley, who took just a second too long to look away and pretend like she had no idea. Clicking fingers made her turn her head back to Kayla.

_"I caught it before they did,"_ she signed her 'confession.' _"I didn't mean to tell them," _she went on, playing innocence and failing, possibly on purpose.

"So I have a 'new song' face, is that what you're saying?" Maya asked the group, who all nodded, one after the other. "Alright, fine," she sighed, all the while playing the last couple minutes back through her head, like she could figure out what this 'tell' was, the better to stop it from coming up again the next time.

Taking up her guitar once again, Maya played the song for the third time that day and not the last time, once they went about turning it from a solo to a group effort. All teasing aside, once she'd started singing along, her bandmates were paying attention, taking it all in as each of them would. They were already working out possibilities as to how they'd expand the track with their instruments, their voices… Once she'd reached the end, it wasn't long that they were all standing/sitting behind or holding their instruments and having her start over, one by one weaving their own sounds along. The song didn't take long to start sounding more… real, more substantial. As much as she enjoyed the actual composition part, Maya definitely loved this part most of all.

After they had gotten it to a point where they weren't adjusting anymore so much as just playing it through, Maya didn't have to wonder anymore whether or not they would be performing this one at the club. It was ready, it needed to be heard.

"I remember when you guys were starting out," Ramona spoke up, from where she'd been quietly looking on and listening on the couch in the corner. They turned to look at her. "My best friend at the time, she'd gone on to your high school, she heard about you and she sent me videos you'd posted." She'd ended up in private school herself, after they'd gotten out of the eighth grade, actually the same school Cecilia currently attended, which had led to her falling out of their close circles. "It's hard to believe it's actually been that long."

"Yeah, no kidding," Riley agreed.

"Ten years this summer," Nadine smiled.

"And a tour…" Rosa chimed in as usual, which got her a look from Maya. "After the wedding," Rosa promised. "And the honeymoon," she added with a shrug.

_"Things have a way of changing out of nowhere. It might not be a good idea to make plans like that so far ahead,"_ Kayla pointed out. _"Look at last summer."_

"I know you want this, and so do we," Nadine added, looking to Rosa. "But that's just how it is a lot of the time, isn't it? It's never the way you want it to be." Maya frowned, unsure why it felt to her like the statement was odd, maybe just the way she'd said it, like 'believe me, I know what I'm talking about' had been right there underneath.

"Plans get tricky, I get that," Rosa admitted, drawing her attention away from Nadine's words. "But it's like we haven't done half as much as we used to before we left Houston," she pointed out with some frustration. "I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, I just… I kind of came out here for this, didn't I?"

"No, you're right," Maya breathed out, reaching over to squeeze her bandmate's hand. "I'm sorry, I guess it's just been difficult to find balance out here. It was easier when we all either lived together, went to school together…"

"I've missed it, too," Riley admitted. Kayla raised her hand in adding her own agreement to this.

Looking around at the four of them, Maya felt it, too. Yes, they had done some things together, some shows here and there, but on the whole… The last year had been hectic in a lot of ways, and what it really came down to was that the band had been left to suffer for it. Right now they were preparing for a new gig and it was like all of them had perked up at once. They'd craved this next moment to get together, to make music.

"I was so worried that I'd end up leaving you guys behind with everything else I've been doing," Maya let out a sigh. "Turns out, I was already doing it."

"We all were," Nadine told her, nudging her foot with her own.

_"We can fix it now, right?"_ Kayla asked, looking around the group.

"Yeah, we can!" Riley nodded firmly, then paused. "Can't we?"

"We've got this show coming up… Let's call it our great reawakening," Maya declared, standing up. "It's not a comeback, we never went anywhere. We were just sort of… asleep on the job." Rosa practically leapt back on to her feet. Of course she was in. Maya grinned, pulling her in a teetering hug. "We are going to have that tour, one way or another," she told her fellow shorty, who fully approved of this. After that, it would have required a photo finish to know who of Nadine, Riley, and Kayla had gotten up first, as the three of them sprang up to join in on this call to awakening.

"We can do a compilation, too," Nadine suggested. "Pick one song from each year, like a timeline."

"Put it on our page, people can decide which ones they want, like a bracket or something," Riley added, and Nadine nodded in agreement.

_"Maybe the website could use a new look,"_ Kayla added. _"It's been a while since we changed it."_

"Uh… I could help with that?" They turned to find Ramona had her hand half-raised. They hadn't exactly forgotten that she was there, but with this sort of call to arms it had been the five bandmates in a circle, and then there was their friend, their audience… "I picked up a lot of tricks when I helped my mother with her shop's page, and I… well… I could use a project," she admitted shyly. Maya and Rosa both lifted out their arms to open the circle, no need to think about it.

"Welcome aboard," Maya grinned, reaching out to pull her temporary lodger to join them.

After the rest of the band had gone off again, and the household left behind had started on toward heading to bed later in the evening, Maya had gone to say goodnight to Ramona. She was in the process of making up her 'bed,' as she did every night and undid every morning.

"I'm sure you're not going to miss doing this every day," Maya commented. Ramona smiled.

"I really don't mind. Besides…" she paused, breathing out. "I don't know what I was going to say. Sometimes all I can think about is that Robbie and I were barely married a year, and I know what people must be thinking. But we were together for much longer than that, and that's kind of the part that makes it worse, and why I can't go back to the apartment yet." Maya nodded. She understood that, as much as she could, in her position. "I can't wait to get started on the site," Ramona added after a moment, a smile returning to her face. It echoed on to Maya's face, too, this solidarity.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	102. Their Sounds of Repair

April 11th 2020

_Chapter 102  
Their Sounds of Repair_

In all those months he had spent going through his grandfather`s old house, sorting through items to keep or give away or simply throw out, Lucas had been left to make a lot of decisions. At first he would ask Pappy Joe whether he wanted him to keep anything, or if he wanted to get back any of it. His grandfather would maintain, every time, that he had gotten from the house every item he wished to hold on to. The rest was for Lucas to decide on, which he joked was his way of not having to deal with the clean-up. For the most part, Lucas and his helpers had sorted through everything and dealt with it. There were just a few items he had held on to for one reason or another and put away in a rented storage space. Some were objects that had some sentimental value, whether he cared to admit it or not. Others were things that… well… he might have wanted to hold on to, for the days when he and Maya had kids… And other items were just one big hodge podge of a category, something like 'the broken and the potentially useful.'

"Right here, this is it," he called back, leading Maya and Sam toward a large, covered object. Pulling back the cover, the object was revealed to be a tall wardrobe.

"Woah…" Maya blinked.

"Holy Narnia…" Sam responded much the same way, making his sister snort back to reality.

"Is this another piece of your great grandfather's?" Maya asked Lucas, coming up to inspect the piece.

"Careful, the doors are broken, the hinges," he explained. "But yeah, it is. Considered keeping it around at first, having Aunt Dot fix it, restore it, but we already had the one in our room, this was my dad's." Maya turned back to him, a question in her eyes and maybe half a smile, too. "No, I don't know how he broke it."

"Don't think for a second that this is going to be the end of my investigation," she told him as she turned back to the wardrobe. "She's going to love it," she smiled. "If we can fix it."

The three of them worked together, carefully bringing their wooden patient from its place. The doors had been held in place, carefully, when the wardrobe had first been removed from the house. It had taken Lucas, Bishop, and Dylan together to get it out of the room, and down the stairs, and into the truck, which didn't leave this new trio too encouraged over the transport this time around. But they'd called in assistance, in the form of the Emmetts, senior and junior. Lucas' uncle and cousin helped him and the Harts as they got the wardrobe and transported it over to Dot's shop. They might have had it brought to the house, but then it would have ruined the surprise, seeing as the item's future owner was presently bunking on their living room couch.

In the spirit of renewal, Lucas had gotten the idea of refurbishing the wardrobe and gift it to Ramona, for her newly single apartment. Now all they had to do was fix the doors, give the whole thing a new bit of shine… The day had presented itself, so they'd set out to get it done. It had just been Lucas and Maya at first, but Sam found out what they were up to and offered his help at once, so here they were.

"Oh, would you look at this…" Dot came up to have a look at the wardrobe as it was carried into the back of the shop, where she worked. She inspected it with the eyes of someone with that skill, that craft, in her blood. "This one is older than yours," she turned to her nephew and his fiancée.

"Really?" Lucas stepped up to try and see what she saw, even as Maya and Sam approached, too. "Does that mean we can't…"

"No, of course not," Dot smiled. "You just give me a shout if you're unsure about anything. I'll be over there, finishing up an order that has to go out tomorrow morning. You have everything you need," she pointed out the things she'd set out for them ahead of their arrival, turning a nod to Maya, who would know what needed to be done well enough by now.

So, the three of them got started. The doors were removed, the Hart siblings taking one each to start restoring, while Lucas inspected the hinges, which would need replacing.

"Any more deliveries?" Dora came sweeping into the back shop minutes later, twirling a keychain around her index, likely holding the keys to the shop van. The seventeen-year-old girl hardly looked the type to deliver sometimes heavy looking pieces of wooden furniture or decoration, but she was stronger than she appeared and possibly enjoyed proving people's assumptions wrong a whole lot. "Hey!" she smiled, noticing the trio working over the wardrobe. "What are you doing here?"

"It's a present, for a friend," Lucas explained, indicating the pieces.

"This was at your house, I remember it," Dora declared. The way she looked at everything, she looked so much like her mother. "Can I help?"

"Yeah, actually, want to take a look at the feet here?" Lucas indicated the bottom of the wardrobe.

"Sure," his cousin replied, digging an elastic band from her pocket and going about twisting her long hair into a great big frizzy mess of a bun. "Did you look at the bottom yet?" she asked as she crouched and then knelt down to inspect the feet.

"The what?" Lucas blinked. Maya and Sam both looked just as confused. Dora sat up again, staring at the trio with some amusement.

"That's a no then," she declared. "It was like his signature, on pieces like this, to have this sort of… hidden compartment." Frowning as she felt around at the underside of the wardrobe, Dora smiled and stopped, motioning for Lucas to come and join her. "Find my hand," she instructed, so he did. She pulled hers away. "Do you feel it? Like a groove, a cut."

"Yeah…" he paused.

"Good, now just push up like a quarter inch and twist counter clockwise until it releases," Dora instructed.

Lucas did as told, while Maya, Sam, and Dot all stood by and watched, inevitably curious. When the panel released, he gasped with surprise at the sudden weight. He pulled the lot out from under the wardrobe to find the panel – roughly the size of a magazine – and the contents of the hidden compartment, which turned out to be an old spiral bound notebook. The cover was a mess of stickers, and pen drawings, giving the distinct impression of having belonged to a high school student.

"This was in your father's room?" Maya turned to Lucas, trying not to grin, imagining what it might contain. Before he could reply, Dot just laughed.

"That's Tom's alright, I gave him that one sticker there," she pointed to the corner, where Batman prowled mysteriously next to a baseball player in mid swing. They could make out that the cover must have been a bright yellow in the beginning, and Lucas knew instantly that his father had gone out of his way to rid himself of this, out of a noted distaste for the color yellow but also a lack of pickiness at taking what he could get his hands on and using it.

"What is it?" Sam wondered.

"It's… his… so he gets to decide," Lucas decided, rising to set the hidden treasure aside. Had his father forgotten it was there?

"This is amazing…" Maya was all wonder, using her phone to get a look under the wardrobe and see the now open compartment. It wouldn't have held vast amounts of objects, but it was still big enough to be useful. "Wait," she sat up now, looking back to Dora. "Are you saying…" The girl grinned.

"I spotted the ones on your pieces back when we were working on them, but I didn't want to say anything, it's always more fun if you start finding them by accident, but since you're giving this one away, I thought you should know so you could see if there was something inside. I didn't look inside yours, I swear."

"Is it bad that I really want to run home and look now?" Maya chuckled. Looking back to Lucas, he seemed to be right on the same page as her.

As intrigued as they all were now, about Thomas Friar's notebook, about the compartments and their potential contents, they had come here today with one goal, and that was to restore the wardrobe for Ramona, so they got to work. The cover was put back in place underneath, and little by little everything was seen to. As they waited to apply second coats to still drying elements, the four sat outside the shop, getting some air and a late lunch.

"The place where you're playing tomorrow night, can I come even if I'm underage?" Dora asked Maya.

"Yeah, of course," Maya nodded. "Sam's coming, Cecilia, too. I can get you and Adam in, no problem."

"Oh, just me, it's fine," Dora shrugged, picking at her BLT.

"He can't come?"

"No, we broke up." She said it so plainly, which must have made the surprise on the rest of their faces seem borderline comical.

"When did that happen?" Sam asked of his friend.

"Last night," Dora told him. "We were talking about college, he said he wanted to go away, leave Texas, and I said I didn't, and we didn't think long distance would work for us, so we decided to end it now, before things got weird and we couldn't even be friends anymore." She looked around at all of them. "It's fine, really. We realized we might actually be better that way, nothing has to change. Anyway, we're trying to do our own things right now, and I know he's going to be hanging out with his friends from the football team tomorrow, so he wouldn't have come anyway."

"I… I'll get you the ticket," Maya told her, and Dora smiled, getting back to her sandwich.

None of them had said a word on this amicable break, or on the mystery notebook, as they got back to work on the wardrobe. They finished the work and left it at the shop, where they'd pick it up when the time came to transport it to Ramona's place. Maya, Lucas, and Sam returned home, unable to pretend as though the first thing they wanted to do wasn't to seek out those compartments on their own furniture. Every piece they had which was made by one of Lucas' family members was inspected, and each one sooner or later had its secret space discovered and opened. Most of them were found empty, which was only partially disappointing, as they were now left with the idea of what they might put within those spaces…

The one they found to contain something was in fact the drawing desk that Dot had made for Maya as an early wedding present. She had carried on the tradition, though they couldn't say for sure if she'd only done it here, to match the rest, or if it was on all the pieces like this one. Inside, she'd hidden what was soon identified as another wedding present. This one was wrapped, and had a small card attached, with express instructions not to unwrap if this was found before the wedding. With a sigh, it had been returned to hide until the following summer.

"Imagine if you didn't find it until like fifty years from now," Sam had laughed, heading out of the attic to find the barking Archer. After he was gone, Maya had turned to Lucas. From the look on his face, she'd guess he had the same concern brewing at the back of his mind. Knowing the history between Sam and Dora, the poor unfortunate crush of the previous year, they couldn't help but worry about potential trouble ahead, now that Dora was no longer attached. Sam and Cecilia were solid, they were, and they couldn't imagine either Sam or Dora doing anything to jeopardize this, but what if… what if…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	103. Their Sounds of Truth

April 12th 2020

_Chapter 103  
Their Sounds of Truth_

It would have been perfectly normal for them to cancel their plans for the evening after the hours they had spent at Dot's shop. But since none of them had even raised the possibility of staying at home after they'd returned to check for secret compartments, they had just showered and changed and gone on their way toward Zay and Nadine's place. On the way, they made a quick stop over at the Friar house.

"Where did you find this?" Thomas Friar laughed when his son handed him the sticker-covered notebook.

"We were restoring the old wardrobe from your room and Dora showed us the trap underneath," Lucas explained as his father leafed through the pages. They could vaguely see a number of magazine and newspaper clippings mixed with handwritten charts of some kind, possibly sports statistics. Why it would have needed hiding, they couldn't say, though the looks on their faces had to be doing plenty of asking, as Lucas' father casually closed the book again, not halfway through it. The bulk of the added clippings seemed to stop around there, so maybe in the later pages the notebook had been repurposed. There was no telling what this new purpose was, but now that it had been returned to him, the man looked happy.

"I must have hidden it there once when my father was being particularly nosy and completely forgot about it," Thomas nodded.

"So… _so_ much to unpack," Maya raised her eyebrow at him before sighing. "But we have to go now, have fun with your secrets," she teased, making her future father-in-law laugh. As they left, she just looked at Lucas with a smirk.

"What?" he asked.

"Whatever place he went to in his head just now, it was like he was our age again… It's like he turned into you for a second."

"No secrets here," he assured her. She smiled, tracing a cross over her heart.

It had taken a year following their wedding before Zay and Nadine went and achieved the next goal on their 'future plan,' but they had done it. They now had a house of their own. They lived just two streets away from Riley's parents' house, which had led to a growing relationship between the two couples that inevitably amused their friends. Zay especially would be going about this as though they were all just old friends and totally not former teacher/former students, or parents/daughter's friends. He would call them by their first names, which was unsettling for a number of reasons, but then you almost couldn't say anything because it was also funny as hell.

They were also very willing and nearby babysitters whenever someone was needed to look after two and a half-year-old Hunter Matthews. When Maya, Lucas, and Sam arrived, they discovered tonight was one of those occasions. The boy was standing at the window panel next to the door, looking out and waving at the approaching party. Having known both of Riley's brothers all their lives, Maya was always so amused at the sight of the littlest Matthews and how he bore an uncanny resemblance to August at that age. He could have been his clone.

"Hey, bud!" Maya laughed when, the moment she'd opened the door, he'd pounced to hug around her legs. She had to hold to the door frame so not to be knocked off balance. "Happy to see you, too, come here," she pried him loose and pulled him into her arms. "What are you doing out here?"

"His parents dropped him off like twenty minutes ago," Nadine came along with a smile. "Something about an errand," she explained, all the while signing _late birthday present_. Lucas had replied in kind, pointing out that Hunter's birthday was back in April, more or less exactly half a year back – or forward – at this point. Nadine shrugged. "Did you get the wardrobe done?"

"Yeah, check it out," Lucas pulled up a photo on his phone and showed it. Nadine laughed and nodded, sounding like she was remembering something. "What's up?" Lucas asked.

"Well, it's just… One of those summers where we all went camping with Pappy Joe, when we were still at the house, Zay and I were just… You know that point where everything's new and you're starting to get a bit… handsy?" she asked, trying to sound as casual as possible, even though the young Matthews would likely not understand what they were going on about.

"Yeah," Lucas chuckled.

"Definitely," Maya whispered, stealing a look to her brother when it sounded like he was about to chime in but caught himself at the last second. He did his best to act natural and failed miserably.

"Anyway, Zay and I were upstairs, and we were just…" she cut out the word and instead signed _kissing_ with some intent. "We heard noises, so we bolted into the first hiding place we could find," Nadine went on, pointing to Lucas' phone. There was a beat of silence at this, even as Maya had to swallow back a laugh while Hunter played with her necklace. Lucas, for his part, was realizing…

"_You_ broke the doors," he accused with surprise.

"Who broke what now?" Zay appeared at this, coming down from upstairs.

"No one, nothing," Nadine assured him, happily brushing off the whole thing. "You guys hungry?"

Heading into the kitchen, Maya attempted to set Hunter Matthews down on his feet, but the boy would not be released, squealing in complaint and gripping tight, so Maya stood back up, keeping him in her arms. She really didn't mind at all. Hunter was a funny little kid, happy and so, so curious. He was getting to be very close friends her little 4H Haley sister, the two toddlers running at one another the moment they saw each other, as though they hadn't seen one another in years, and pitching a fit whenever it was time for either of them to go away back home.

"A Hunter and a Matthews, go figure," Topanga would love to tease, especially whenever her husband and her old friend would look upon their children like the sight of their friendship pleased them so. If ever they were around at the time, Maya and Riley would go out of their way to play up this feeling like 'oh, sure, just forget about us, it's fine.'

The impression started to come to Maya midway through dinner. They were all sitting here, eating, talking about the wardrobe, and the secret compartments, and the notebook, and the next night's gig, and her eyes kept going to her friends. Something was up there and there was no explaining it. At the same time, her memories pulled her back to when they'd had practice, and the look she'd sworn she'd seen on Nadine's face… She'd sort of let it go at the time, but now she was thinking about it again. Maybe she was overthinking it, but with the troubles Ramona and Robbie were going through, and now this breakup for Dora and Adam, she wouldn't have been surprised at herself for being just a bit concerned at the first sign of trouble with others of their friends.

When dinner had been over, an opportunity had suddenly gone and presented itself. The Matthews had picked up their son not long after they'd started to eat, much to the boy's dismay. When Maya, Lucas, and Sam had been about to go, they had noticed that he'd left behind his favorite toy. They offered to take it back on the way, but Zay insisted on seeing to it himself, taking the short walk over to the house. Before they knew it, Lucas was accompanying him, and then so was Sam, which left the girls to themselves. Almost as soon as the door had shut, Maya was turning to her friend and bandmate.

"Alright, what's going on?"

"What do you mean?" Nadine stood up straight. Maya pointed at her, shaking her head.

"You have zero poker face with me, Zhu, talk."

"You are so dramatic," Nadine whispered, chuckling.

"I'm fragile and I care about my friends, sue me."

"And here I thought I was the one who played the violin…" Before Maya could lodge another protest, Nadine raised her hands in surrender. "Alright, alright, calm down, geez. Everything's fine, I swear." Maya tilted her head, pointing out without saying it that _something_ was up. Nadine sighed, considering her options before indicating the couch and moving to sit there even as Maya did the same. "I might as well tell _someone_, just in case I need to kind of…" her sentence trailed off. "This is ridiculous, I'm in med school and I can't even say it," she rolled her eyes at herself. Letting out another breath, she turned back to the increasingly puzzled Maya. "Zay and I have started trying for a baby," she finally revealed, making her best friend gasp. "No thumbs up yet, just…" Nadine specified.

"Yeah, I get the picture… I mean…" Maya replied, almost immediately squeezing her eyes shut. She didn't want an actual picture in her head.

"Right," Nadine laughed. There was a beat of silence, and then Maya laughed back and hugged her. "This stays between us for now, yeah?" Nadine asked as she hugged her back.

"Lucas?"

"Knowing Zay, he won't be able to keep it from him much longer, go for it," Nadine nodded as they pulled back. She looked so happy, and now Maya knew that what she'd taken for concern had actually been Nadine's attempts to keep herself from displaying this smile right here. She pictured Zay right about now, bursting with excitement at the thought of having a kid, and it was just too good.

"So he's very… motivated…" Maya stated, barely keeping it together. Nadine shook her head at her, like she was trying very hard to argue the choice of words, but then she just gave up and burst out laughing.

The conversation had hit such depths of double entendre in the minutes that followed that, when the guys had returned, they'd found the bandmates in such fits of giggles as to be collapsed shoulder to shoulder and red in the face. They'd taken one look at the three of them standing there staring at them and the laughter had managed to redouble.

Maya had bid goodnight to their hosts for the night, following Lucas and Sam out to the car and back toward home. On the plus side, after the shop and then that giggle fit, she would likely go right to sleep once they made it home, which was needed now, so she might be rested before the following night's gig. Sam was very curious about what exactly had gotten into his sister, but she insisted that she would not corrupt him, which only served to baffle him even more.

"So, did you two just get very drunk after we left?" Lucas made his attempt at getting to the bottom of that curious scene they'd come to find.

"Completely sober," Maya assured him, as they walked into their room, by going along as though following a straight line. "If you don't know what this is about, then I really feel I need to keep my mouth shut until you do find out for yourself. It'll be a lot more fun that way, trust me."

"Doesn't sound fair to me," Lucas declared, trying to hold in the smile she was conjuring in him.

"Tough," she raised her chin, only to find herself swept up and pulled into a fall to the mattress and squealing for the surprise. "Hey!" she laughed.

"Tell me!" he 'demanded,' laughing along.

"Not doing it!" she insisted, twisting about until she could face him.

"I will break you," he insisted.

"You're welcome to try," she tapped his cheek. All it took was a kiss and he succeeded.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	104. Their Sounds of Harmony

April 13th 2020

_Chapter 104  
Their Sounds of Harmony_

"So why now?"

The next morning, with the band hitting the stage in the evening, the rest of the band was due over at Maya and Lucas' house for one more practice before they packed everything up and headed to the club. Nadine had turned up a good couple of hours ahead of time, all because Zay had learned that she'd told Maya about their baby plans and he wanted to go and tell Lucas. They'd come through the door, and Nadine had kept just behind her husband, so she might discreetly sign to their friends and ask that they pretend like Lucas didn't know yet. The girls had excused themselves to head into the basement, where they settled down on the floor, each with their instrument in hand. They weren't playing any one song, but one would start something and the other would come in with their own bit to expand on the rest. Maya had asked her question as they paused for Nadine to adjust her violin.

"It was just… Zay was ready, you know? I'd see him with Hunter, with Willow and Lion's kids, and Ada, and your siblings, and he just becomes this other, really bright person," Nadine tried to put the feeling into words, and Maya could see it in her head, thinking back.

"Okay, but what about you?"

"I have wanted kids since pretty much forever," Nadine told her. "And looking at what the next however many years of my life are going to be, with school, and then every step that's going to get me to where I want to be as a doctor, there's never going to be a right time. So I just looked at him, and I saw what I saw, and I looked at myself, taking all the career part out of the equation, and… I told him I was ready if he was."

"Which he was," Maya nodded.

"Oh, I came back from school the next day and he had books, and videos, and articles about what to do and not do and the best ways to get pregnant," Nadine chuckled.

"Wow," Maya laughed along.

"Sometimes you might think he's forgotten the part where I'm a medical student with the way he comes at me like 'did you know that…' If I didn't love him so much…" Nadine shook her head with a smirk. "There have been a few times where I've been tempted to mess with him and make him think we'd succeeded, but I'm almost scared that he'd be halfway up the stairs and turning the spare room into a nursery before I had a chance to tell him it was a joke."

"He's going to be one of those guys who passes out in the delivery room, isn't he?"

"He's going to drive up to the hospital and realize he forgot me back at the house," Nadine countered, making Maya laugh.

"Here I thought that after seeing Farkle and Isadora have a kid it wouldn't be as weird when any of our friends from way back when would start down that road, too, but… no, it's still so weird to imagine him up there as a dad," she nodded upward. "In a good way," she specified, looking back to Nadine.

"Oh, I get that," she added her own slow nod. "The guy goes all wobbly around blood… but he's also got such a good heart… When it comes down to it, I couldn't think of anyone I'd rather raise kids with more than him." Maya smiled at this, giving a few strokes of her guitar in a lullaby like tone. It made Nadine laugh even as she motioned for her to stop, repeating the up nod to indicate Zay's presence on the floor above.

Maya and Nadine looked up at once, hearing sounds from upstairs they had to assume would be Zay's finally getting around to saying his bit, and possibly Lucas overcompensating in order to hide the fact he already knew. The girls looked back to one another.

"I say this with all the love in my heart, but those two are just a couple of giant nerds," Maya shook her head. Nadine echoed this sentiment with a shake of her own.

"So what about you two," she turned to Maya, who looked back at her.

"Us two… have a wedding to think about first," she pointed out with a chuckle. "After that…" she let out a breath, considering the question. "After that, it's game on, I guess." The idea had her smiling, no doubt about it. "Lucas and me, we've _been_ ready. If things had happened differently, right now… we could have had a three-year-old already," she calculated, the result leaving her just a bit awed. She still thought about it, now and then, their maybe baby that wasn't. That Halloween night being nearly four years ago already though, that was the wild part.

"How are we even here, now?" Nadine remarked. Maya shook her head.

"Not a clue."

They carried on playing around with their instruments, challenging themselves from time to time to take any one of the band's songs and twisting them over to a different genre. Nadine, of course, had her violin, which made it all too easy for her to go and create 'the classical mix.' Maya would just sit and listen to her, finding it near impossible to think of anything else as her friend played along.

"One of these days, we need to work something like that into an album," she told Nadine with a hum. "Got a few classical singers in Stage Ready, we could so make it work."

"Yeah, that would actually be great," Nadine agreed. "You know who else you could get to do that though…"

"No?" Maya frowned, not following.

"There was that interview the other day, wasn't there? Ree Forster was talking about her tour, and her new album, and she said how her daughter was doing a duet with her? She's training for the opera, isn't she?"

"She is, yeah, but it's not like we're all old pals all of a sudden, I can't start asking for favors, which is what this would be. Anyway, TXNY has always been our thing, local. I'd rather give a chance to someone around here to make something happen."

"Yeah, that's fair…" Nadine agreed. "We could do it for Christmas this year," she went on, and at this Maya was all smiles.

"Liking that so far," she set her guitar aside. "How would it still be 'us' though? I mean I can't sing like that, don't think any of us can. And once you remove that, even the instruments don't exactly fit, except maybe you, and Riley…"

"Then let's not make it us," Nadine told her, even as the thought seemed to occur to her. Maya looked back at her, rightly confused. "We can organize it… produce it… but put other talents in the spotlight. And we can do like you all did two years ago, donate the proceeds…"

"Liking this more and more…"

By the time the rest of the band started to arrive, they had an even more solid plan put together, which they wasted no time to share. To no surprise, it was received with much the same levels of enthusiasm as the two of them had been experiencing, putting all these pieces together.

"How come you were already here?" Riley already asked. "We thought you were picking us up."

"And why does Zay look like a firecracker up there?" Rosa added, pointing back toward the stairs.

"He was just really eager to talk to Lucas about something, I have no idea," Nadine shrugged, and for knowing that this was a flat out lie, Maya was impressed at how seamless it came off.

_"I thought you two went to dinner at their house last night,"_ Kayla pointed out, turning to Maya.

"Yeah, we were," Maya confirmed. Kayla gave her a look which, sign or no, was easily understood as 'so what happened between then and today that was so important?' "How should I know?" Maya shrugged, turning to Nadine as though to ask 'do _you_ know?'

"No idea," she shook her head, and later they would laugh over how smoothly this had gone over.

"Hey, so I have the lists for the compilation brackets," Maya got up to get a small stack of sheets from the shelves under the stairs and set them in the middle of their circle on the ground.

The others all went in closer to have a look. Ten years, ten lists of songs they had put out in that time… Almost like school years, they would go from summer to summer, each anniversary of the band's creation. The most recent one, of course, running from summer 2026 to summer 2027, was very short and would continue to be updated along the way, so it would have to go last, but in the meantime there was plenty for them to look at from the previous nine years. The lineups would be indicated for each, from the original four, to the new additions when they'd been brought together in Houston, and then to the current set back in Austin again.

For a while, they just talked and signed over one another, pointing out one song and bringing up some memory or another relating to it, from creation to performance… They never forgot any of their songs, but just looking at these lists, and the vast numbers of songs they contained, it was understandable if any of them had slipped somewhere in the recesses of their minds. Soon, they were making predictions for which songs were likely to either win the years or come near to the top.

"Ramona says she's going to do her best so the new site can go up by December at the latest, we can get the brackets up around then, yeah?" Maya looked around. The others were on board.

"Christmas album, brackets, anniversary, do you know what all those things have in common?" Rosa asked, rising to her feet and getting her bass.

"Not today?" Riley guessed, moving to her keyboard as Kayla, Maya, and Nadine moved to get in position, too, so they would get their practice underway for the thing that _was_ today, which was the club gig. Soon, music floated from the basement and up through the rest of the house.

When they'd done as much as they would do, they went upstairs to get changed as the guys went down to pack up the instruments and get them into the minivan. Maya shared a quick knowing smirk with Lucas as they passed one another, the two of them being the only ones – save for the couple in question – to know what was turning Zay into a motivated helper as he presented himself. You'd think he and Nadine had already succeeded in their attempts, going off the cheerful bounce in his step, and it was really amusing to see, though again, for those who had no idea what this was about.

"Can I just say, I love show days…" Lucas shook his head with a smile as he came back into the house sometime later, just as Maya came back down the stairs, changed from 'casual Maya' to 'stage Maya.' She reached the bottom of the steps and gave him a full slow turn for the complete effect. "Very… sparkly," Lucas declared, getting a laugh in return.

"So, Zay's big news?" she asked, while they had a few seconds to themselves.

"He is going to pass out when it's for real," Lucas estimated.

"That's what I said, too!" Maya whispered.

"Alright, let's go, let's go!" Rosa came bounding down the stairs a moment later, and Maya and Lucas both went into discreet mode at once. "Why is everyone being weird today?" Rosa sighed, walking past them.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	105. Their Sounds of Glory

_**A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!**_

* * *

April 14th 2020

_Chapter 105  
Their Sounds of Glory_

Waking up the morning after a TXNY show, Lucas would open his eyes to find his fiancée in her most 'I didn't fall asleep, I passed out' pose as she slept on. It was the kind of thing you could only find as cute as he did if you loved the person as much as he did. When she would finally start to stir, he would patiently wait until she slowly acclimated herself to her surroundings all over again and eventually looked over to him.

"I had a dream that I crowd surfed. That was a dream, right?" she mumbled.

"A figment of your imagination," Lucas confirmed.

"Oh, good," she nodded. "That thing needs to be restrained."

"Your imagination? Never," he refused, which earned him a smile and some cuddling.

"That was a really fun show," Maya hummed, tracing her finger along the curve of his jaw, paying no mind to the prickling of the stubble soon to be shaved. "I think they really liked the new song."

"Sounded that way, yeah," Lucas agreed, never so happy as he was when they could just have this, when he could hold her in his arms and think of little else. "I really liked what you all did with it, from when you played it to me the first time," he told her, thinking back to the moment when they'd started to play it at the show. He had heard those first notes and known that this was the song she'd played for him in the basement, with only her voice and her guitar. The audience had heard those first notes and known that this was something new, and the rise of curiosity and excitement was always so great for the rest of them to see, like 'yeah, those are our people up there.'

"Do you have to go to school today?" Maya asked, in the right tone to convey her _actual_ question went something more like 'won't you just stay here with me?'

"You know what I'd do if this was up to me," Lucas gave as his response, setting a kiss at her temple. She grumbled, scrunching up her nose at this.

"No comments," she declared as he carefully reached to push hair from her face when it slid over her eyes. "What are we doing about tonight?"

"I talked to Dot, she'll get the wardrobe delivered around six, so we should all be out there by then."

After they had all come home from the club the previous night, Ramona had declared that she wanted to get started with the apartment revamp, wanted to get moved back in before Halloween, which was a great little event in her building, with all the kids going around. The previous year, Ramona and Robbie had waited until after the passage of the trick or treaters to finally make their way out to the house for the party, and from all they'd told of it, the wait had been worth the delay. Now, even though she was coming into this solo, she didn't want to miss it. So, she needed the apartment to be ready.

"We can start tomorrow night after you get back from school," Maya had declared, possibly a bit post-show delirious. Either way, the others were on board, and checking their texts that morning after the show, there was no doubt that the rest of the band would be up for pitching in, too. Along with those calls to assistance, Lucas had checked in with his aunt on the status of the wardrobe delivery. He'd gotten a response shortly after having written to her, while Maya had already been down for the count.

Once Lucas and Maya had finally relented and left the comfort of their bed, they had joined Sam for breakfast and headed off on their respective days. Maya had a full day of phone calls ahead of her, in her efforts toward the expansion of the Stage Ready program. More than likely this day would also involve a vast amount of thinking about the band's new Christmas album plans. They had a few classical singers within the main Stage Ready attendees, and the summer campers, too. Those who came to the regular sessions would train for their singing specifically, while the campers already had teachers of their own and simply wanted to be at a camp where they felt surrounded with kids like them. This past summer had created some connections for Maya, connections she hoped would come through for this new project.

Meanwhile, Lucas was school bound, along with Ramona. The rides to and from school had been sort of awkward in the beginning, after his classmate had started staying at their house, and after Robbie had stopped being a part of their road team. In those days, it had just felt like his absence made the whole time a bit off, like something was missing. One could have assumed someone had died, with how quiet they would be, when Robbie was very much alive and would be out there at school when they arrived. In time, the trio turned duo had become more of a thing they were used to, and so the conversations had started again, all for the better. The more the wound started to heal, the better it was for everyone.

Ramona would still get the news regarding her soon to be ex-husband and his family situation via Lucas. From what they'd been hearing, Robbie had finally met his secret half-brothers. It had not been smooth sailing from the beginning, and the waters were still very much on the choppy side, in some parts more than others. With the older two, Dale, who was sixteen, and Billy, who was twelve, the arrival of this new, blue haired older brother, had not been met with much enthusiasm. They were starting to bridge the gap, but there was still a lot of resistance.

But then there was the little one, who had been the cause of this revelation even happening. His name was Scott. He was four, and he was sick, and when he'd met his new big brother, the first thing he'd said to him was 'Are you an alien?' with such a smile as to suggest he would have thought this to be the coolest thing in the world if the answer had been yes. Even though Robbie had to inform him he was only human, Scott had been happy to know him nonetheless.

"How's he doing?" Lucas asked Robbie when they met up in their first class of the day. He could just sense Ramona not far behind, just within earshot and likely listening in.

"I don't know," Robbie shook his head. "He was looking better for a while, but then it was bad again this weekend." As much as Ramona was standing by, pretending like she wasn't listening, Lucas had a feeling, looking at his other friend, that Robbie was aware of his ex's tactic, and he spoke out well enough that she could hear him without straining. He wanted to keep her in the loop, wanted to contribute toward the potential for a friendship if not a marriage.

By the end of the day, he would have to lead the conversation for the ride home, or else there was a risk of their sinking back into silence. Lucas asked Ramona what she wanted to do first once they got to the apartment.

"Not sure yet," Ramona shrugged. "I was thinking though, I need to get my own car again. Our car was Robbie's so he has it now, but I still need one, too. Do you think maybe you and Maya could come along when I go looking?"

"Absolutely, of course," Lucas agreed at once, glad to see the smile on his road buddy's face. "Does that mean we're going to start alternating again? Not that I mind the drive, but I kind of miss the old way."

"Yeah, so do I," Ramona nodded, letting out a sigh that suggested she was left thinking that she could do with a bit of the old times returning.

They arrived at the apartment building to find they had been preceded in this arrival by Maya, Rosa, Riley, and Dylan, the four of them sitting on the low stone wall next to the entrance. They all had this look about them that said 'we are here and we are ready to get to work.' They'd also brought dinner and drinks. Lucas met Maya's gaze as they drove up, catching a discreet sign that told him his aunt's truck was somewhere nearby, waiting to unload the wardrobe when the time came.

"We really need to go inside," Riley addressed Lucas and Ramona as they walked up from the car.

"Gotta use the bathroom?" Ramona asked.

"No, the food just smells really good and we're all hungry," Rosa informed her, as Maya and Dylan nodded firmly.

"I can only guard it for so long, okay?" Maya pointed out, holding up the bags and immediately pulling them aside as Dylan made as though he was about to snatch for one of them.

Into the building they went and on to the elevator. One look at Ramona showed how nervous she was, no matter how hard she tried to keep it hidden. She hadn't been back here since a few days after she'd walked out and shown up on Lucas and Maya's doorstep. Since that day, Sam had volunteered himself to go and get her mail for her, on his way back from school every day. Robbie was all moved out by now, but that was equal parts a good and a bad thing, wasn't it? He was gone… The place was clean, on the whole, which suggested that Robbie had intended to leave it as orderly as he could. For all that though, there was nothing to be done for the fact that the things he had removed and the things that remained left the apartment looking like a half made puzzle. He had left a lot of the furniture, anything he wouldn't need once he moved in with Simon.

"Right, where do you want to start?" Maya asked Ramona, even as the others who'd been waiting outside with her were now giving her looks like 'seriously?' Thankfully, Ramona replied by saying they would have dinner first. They had barely gone into the kitchen and distributed plates, utensils, and food and drinks when there was a knock at the door. Everyone but Ramona knew what this was, but it would have been wrong to let her go alone while the rest of them sat and ate, so they followed.

When she saw the wardrobe, as it was carried into the apartment, she was in awe. She was confused, too, naturally, but very much in awe. They had done a truly wonderful job in restoring Thomas Friar's old wardrobe. It had in no way been falling to pieces – save for the doors and their encounter with the sneaky Babineaux pair some years ago – but it had needed that bit of care to bring it back to shining life and it had gotten it.

"What did you…" Ramona started to ask, looking to the others.

"It was my father's when he lived at home, growing up," Lucas explained. "It's been in storage since I started the work on the house. We got it out of there, worked on it. It's yours now," he smiled.

"For new beginnings," Maya beamed. Ramona may have started as 'Lucas' classmate,' and 'our old classmate from middle school we hadn't seen in years,' but even before she'd started sleeping on their couch she had become a friend, through and through, and even if she hadn't been… It would have felt like the right thing to do. And to look at her now, to see how happy she was to receive this gesture, there was even less doubt about it.

The wardrobe sat like a great monument in the middle of the living room as they all finally went and had dinner. When this was done, they'd made a plan, to tackle the task ahead of them. They needed to make the place feel new again, to welcome Ramona back into the home she no longer shared with Robbie. In time, she would need a roommate, one who actually lived with her and didn't just pay half the rent and the bills, and they would probably have to move some things here and there all over again, but that could wait.

The six of them split off in teams of three. Dylan, Riley, and Rosa went one way, while Ramona, Lucas, and Maya went the other. The wardrobe was carried into Ramona's room only once the furniture there had been reorganized. It found its place, and as they stood back and looked around, they could just see how well it fit with the rest. Ramona had wanted to do something for the walls, too, paint or wallpaper, but in the end it really wasn't important enough. Maybe she'd get around to it with her future roommate, over Christmas, over the following summer…

"So, what do you think?" Lucas asked, when all was said and done and they were going around the apartment to see what the others had made of their tasks. Ramona looked at everything, and it was hard to tell what was going through her mind. She wanted to come back, and they wanted that for her, too, but maybe she'd come to the conclusion that it was still too soon, or that no matter what she would still think about what had been and how much it hurt to see it end.

"I never would have thought to put everything like that," Ramona finally spoke, gesturing around the living room, which had been handled by the others. "The room looks so much bigger now. In a good way," she added, turning back to them with a smile. "Thank you," she nodded to Riley, Rosa, and Dylan.

"Do you think you're good to come back?" Maya asked.

"If it's alright, I'd like to stick around a few more days? It's just I promised I'd help Missy out with something and…"

"Absolutely, yeah," Lucas cut her off, assuring in this way that she didn't need any reasons.

"Oh! We haven't even told you about the secret bit!" Maya blurted out, moving to pull Ramona back to the room and the wardrobe, to show her the compartment underneath.

"That's amazing," Ramona laughed as the panel was pulled free.

"Any idea what you want to use it for?"

"Not yet, but I'm sure I'll think of something," she nodded, and Maya was glad to see the smile on Ramona's face felt a lot like what she'd told her before… a new beginning.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	106. Their Road to Returns

April 15th 2020

_Chapter 106  
Their Road to Returns_

More often than not, Lucas would do his school work at the desk up in his and Maya's room. He had his set up, and after a year or so, the familiarity almost felt part of his routine. Following along those lines though, it was also part of his routine that, on those particularly important or complicated assignments and study sessions, he would take it one step further and retreat into the attic. It hadn't been his idea so much as it was Maya's suggestion, her offer to him. He had insisted it wasn't necessary, that he didn't want to take her away from being able to use her desk, but she had insisted right back, telling him that she wanted nothing more than to give him that space 'and all its powers.'

He had to admit, being up here, there was something about it… the view from the windows sort of highlighting the height off the ground, the skylight bringing in the light of the day or the moon and stars, the string lights still lining the walls and then of course the great surface of the desk crafted by his aunt… It really was something. He was up here tonight, putting finishing touches on a paper that was due to be handed in first thing the following morning. He hadn't intended to be cutting it so close, and he might have had it done days ago, except he'd made a conscious choice to allot his time to another task over the past week.

After having spent weeks living with them, Ramona was finally back at her apartment as of earlier that day.

The rearranging of the apartment, with the introduction of the wardrobe, had been step one. Since then, there had been a few more. They'd brought out all the things Ramona had been storing at their place. They had gone shopping with her for some new additions to her décor, helped her assemble, place, install everything. After having decided to wait, Ramona had changed her mind about the walls, so there had been a painting blitz. And then, the last thing, they had gone with her and helped pick out her new car. It was used, in a green shade that felt at once like the kind only a specific kind of person would love, but then Ramona had gone up to it and right in the first seconds the impression had come along that… yeah… it was made for her.

"One more night?" Maya had asked Ramona as they'd all returned to the house, the new car next to Sparkles the minivan. On the declaration that it _needed_ a name, Ramona had decided that whatever her new car was meant to be called, it would need to be driven around for a while first. For that, or maybe really just to break in this new chapter of hers, as she'd move back into her apartment, she would be making her way to and from school on her own this coming week. That would also mean Lucas would be driving alone in the 'Huckleberrymobile,' as Maya had baptised it in that same conversation.

"One more night," Ramona had agreed. While he had been up in the attic at that time, as he was tonight, the two of them had spent most of the evening working together on the new TXNY site design Ramona was doing for the band. It was nearly done, and Maya had expressed in full confidence that it was already fantastic and Ramona should consider doing some more of this. Their temporary roommate had looked so pleased at the idea.

That morning, they'd woken up and soon climbed into their cars – Ramona in hers, and the others in Lucas' – before heading to Ma Maggie's for breakfast. After the meal had been over, they'd left the restaurant and had their 'goodbyes,' even though it was only really that they were all going home. Sam had estimated that they had all been way too dramatic, seeing as Lucas would see Ramona again the next day at school. Maya had hushed her brother, pointing out that he had hugged her just as much as the rest of them and challenging him to deny that he would miss having her around as much as the rest of them. Sam had said nothing, and his silence had been enough of a confirmation.

Right now, they were outside, Sam and Maya. He could just barely hear the telltale thump-thump of a basketball being dribbled, like the sound was just built into him after all these years of playing, both on the school teams and with his friends. If he focused a little harder, he could also hear Maya's voice, her laughter, as she played with her brother. He tried not to, as he had to finish his paper, but the closer he got to the end of it, the more it got to feel as though he might be able to piece together how this one-on-one game was unfolding. Maya was definitely outpacing Sam with ease.

When he had finished his paper, Lucas finally stood and went to look out the window. Two floors below, there they were, the lights from the porch flooding the surroundings just enough to enable the Hart siblings to play around with the ball, which Maya now tossed at the hoop with a jump she had made flawless after years of practice, and it sailed through the net. She made a victory lap around Sam, hugged him until she nearly yanked the pair of them off their feet.

Lucas tapped at the window, enough that it got his fiancée's attention and she looked up. He signalled for her to come up and a moment later she gave Sam's shoulders a tap and jogged back toward the house. By the time Maya had made it up to the attic, Sam had picked up the ball again and was now making throws at the hoop, practicing.

"Done?" Maya asked, just a bit out of breath from playing more than from the steps.

"Yeah," Lucas pointed to the laptop on the desk. Maya went and had a seat and started reading. "Water?" he asked her.

"A gallon of it," she hummed. "Wouldn't say no to a cookie or three."

"On it," Lucas smiled, heading out of the attic. After having being cooped up there for hours, since the three of them had dinner, it felt good to come back down again while Maya reread his work with eyes that hadn't been spinning for a while.

Lucas went and got water and cookies for Maya, while also bringing the same out to the porch for Sam to get to once he stopped tossing the ball.

"Lift your elbow," he called out, as he watched him aim.

"Okay!" Sam called back, taking the shot. It just barely missed.

Reaching the attic again, Lucas found that Maya had switched positions, taking the laptop down to sit on the beanbag under the skylight. He sat on the floor with her, holding out the glass and placing the plate at her side.

"Thanks," she nodded before taking a sip. "It's looking good so far," she tipped her head to indicate the screen.

"Yeah?"

"There was one sentence so far that looked like it could use reworking, and a couple typos, but other than that, you're solid. I'm only on page three though, so…" she made a gesture he took to mean 'let me read,' so he did so. He sat there, sometimes watching her, other times looking up at the night sky through the window. "I can't speak for your professor, but I thought it was really good," Maya finally declared when she was done, handing the laptop back to him. Lucas scanned through for her markings, fixing the issues along the way. Finally, he launched the printing, faintly hearing the machine start up from below.

"Thanks," he set the laptop aside.

"Anytime," Maya smiled, eating one of the cookies.

"Good game?" Lucas asked, nodding in the general direction of the window, or more specifically to the boy he'd watched play ball from that window.

"I tried to be the good big sister and downplay a little, but who am I kidding? Anyway, it wouldn't be right, would it?"

"Not really, no," Lucas agreed.

"Got to hand it to him, he's shaky with the basketball, but the rest…" Maya tapped the side of her head. "He's definitely on to us, knows we've been wondering about Dora and him now that she and Adam broke up."

"He said that?" Lucas was surprised but also not. It was like she said, Sam had that brain of is working very well, beyond the qualities that had allowed him to start college at age fifteen.

"Not with exact words, but yeah," Maya replied.

In hindsight, Lucas doubted that Sam would have really needed any sort of above average intelligence to catch on, would he? Sure, both Lucas and Maya maintained in both heart and mind that Sam was a good kid, who liked his girlfriend very much and would never want to cause her any pain. On the same line, they also maintained that Dora was just as good, and she would never go about wedging herself between two people who were some of, if not her closest friends. But…

But sometimes that wasn't enough. They had seen people who would have fit those categories very well make just the kind of mistake they were now concerned about. And they knew that feelings had a way of complicating matters, the very feelings they knew both Sam and Dora had held for one another a year ago. It had all more or less fallen away as the months had gone by, and they'd both been in their own relationships, so it was easy to think of the whole thing as a done deal, a thing of the past, but now… Now Dora's break from Adam had the potential to reawaken some parts of them, and that was the part that left others to worry about, in particular Maya and Lucas, who had been right there at the heart of it with the two of them.

"So…" Lucas slowly asked. Sam knowing was one thing. How would he feel about them being on his case like that?

"I don't know, I think he just thinks it's ridiculous, like he doesn't see why we would even think it," Maya explained. Neither of them said a word on that, but they were of the same mind. Sam may not have been able to see it, and maybe that would be a good thing in the long run, but it would take his sister and her fiancé a little more time to put their concerns aside.

"So, Halloween," Lucas breathed out, a new subject being as good a way as any to bypass this thing for now as any. At the mention of the word, Maya brightened at once.

"Yes?" she asked, her voice almost deepening to vampire-like levels. He laughed, reaching to pull his laptop open again and show her a site he'd kept open.

"I was thinking, and I know the thirty-first is your territory…" he stated first, getting a nod out of her. He handled November 1st, the anniversary. Maya had full dominion over October 31st, the spookversary. That had been the rule, for years now. He showed her his idea for their costumes though, and she was all smiles.

"You know, I have a crazy idea…"

"_You?_" he asked, 'shocked,' and got kicked playfully in the leg for it.

"What if we swapped this year? You do Halloween, and I do the day after." Alright, he was intrigued at the thought.

"A lot of pressure, following the HalloQueen," he gave a small bow, finding her with a gasping smile at the nickname.

"You show respect for the title, I have great faith that you'll make me proud…" she spoke dramatically, royally.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	107. Their Road to Family

April 16th 2020

_Chapter 107  
Their Road to Family_

Monday morning had come along and with it an idea for this year's Halloween party. Lucas had been feeling out plans for his and Maya's anniversary already, though thankfully not so much that this switch of duties would require him to cancel or reimburse anything. He could always put those bits of a plan away until the next anniversary he'd be planning… They'd have two of those pretty soon, wouldn't they? Halloween and the day that followed could not be swept aside once they got married, no way.

Right now though, there was _this _anniversary, which was just a few weeks away, and he might not have been in charge of November 1st this time around, but he had Halloween, and the party, and he already knew what he wanted to do for costumes. The idea had only come as he'd already hit the road, on his way to school, and he could have waited until that night to explore it, but he had an hour ahead of him and no one to talk to, so he put in the call and sound of Maya's voice soon floated through the car via the speakers.

"Miss me already?" she asked, a smile in her voice.

"You know the answer to that one," he smirked. "I wanted to run this idea by you for Halloween."

"Wow, that didn't take long. I get to be told, too?"

"It's just not the kind of thing I'd be able to keep a surprise until then, people would have trouble picking costumes."

"Good point, yeah," she laughed. "So, what's the idea?" From what he could make out of ambient sounds, he guessed she was driving, too, off to the theater.

"Well, I was thinking about seeing my grandparents this afternoon, and that made me think about Halloween, when I was a kid, and how my grandmother, Marianne, would always come around on that day so she could get her picture of me in my costume…"

"I really wish I had known you back then…" Maya commented, which made him smile.

"Me, too," he assured her. "Which is sort of where I got the idea. A lot of us didn't know each other back then, so I thought it could be funny… and interesting… if we sort of dug up one of those old costumes and had them again. Not the actual costumes, just like… a reproduction… an update… We could have everyone bring one of their old pictures, if they have them, in their original costumes." He paused. "Is it bad? Too corny?"

"No, it's great," Maya laughed. "I'll have to do some digging on my end, but I'll get back to you on that." After they hung up, Lucas drove on in silence for a few seconds before putting in another call.

"Good morning!" Melinda Friar cheerfully greeted her son. _Her_ voice emanated from the speakers like caffeine turned loose. "Are you on your way to school?"

"Yes, I've got you on speaker," Lucas informed her, before she got it in her mind that he might be driving and calling at the same time. He explained how he and Maya had switched 'assignments' this year on Halloween and the anniversary and he was finding himself charged with the Halloween party. "You know all those pictures Granny Marianne would have taken every year?"

"Oh, you were so adorable in those…" his mother immediately slid into that other register in her voice, the one that came with memories of _her_ mother, dearly departed as she was. "My favorite will always be that first one, five months old and just the sweetest little pumpkin…"

"You got those pictures in an album, right?"

"Yes, of course. Mama had them all set, with the inscriptions in that fine hand of hers."

After Marianne Sullivan had passed on, Melinda had done her best to keep up the tradition. Lucas had a distinct memory of that first Halloween after his grandmother's passing. He was eleven, and the idea of just taking those pictures with his mother now had left him with this pit in his stomach, reminding him of how much he missed his grandmother and how this had been _their_ tradition. It had taken his father pointing out how much it would mean to his mother, and how his grandmother would have wanted him to do it, before he could be convinced to even put on his costume. Now that he was grown, and especially since he had moved away from home, they didn't do the whole thing every year, but he still made sure to send a picture to his mother, knowing it would remind her of Marianne and make her happy.

"Would it be alright if I borrowed it? I'll give it back after, I promise."

"By all means, yes. Would you like to come and pick it up on your way home tonight, or no, I forgot, you finish late today, don't you?"

"That's fine, I can come and get it, I don't mind…"

"No, no, that would be silly. I have to go out this afternoon, I will bring it to Maya at the theater," his mother replied with a chuckle he swore could only be classified as 'knowing.' In this case, it was 'knowing that Maya will have a field day with these pictures.' He guessed he could deal with that, on the compromise that making Maya Hart happy was one of the things he loved to do the most in life.

Lucas didn't explain specifically what he wanted the pictures for, knowing that was an invitation to his mother going on and on about this year or that year and what he'd worn and how she had acquired or made the costume and what she thought of it and how much candy he had and how the weather was… He would reach school and she'd still be going. So, he just thanked her and wished her a good day and that was that.

As his mother had recalled, today was his 'long day' at school. It wasn't that he was overloaded with classes, no. And he didn't even finish that late, but with the drive back, it made the day seem even longer. The fact was that he had two classes in the morning, then most of the afternoon off before his last class of the day, which was the thing that kept him back so late. The semester had barely started before the routine had kicked off for Pappy Joe and Patty to drive up from Houston and have lunch with him every Monday. By some chance, Professor Robinson was not teaching at this time, which allowed for her to join her husband in spending some time with the young man who'd become her grandson at the tender age of twenty-three.

It was kind of amusing to see how widely known Professor Patty Robinson was known in academic circles. The first time she'd come to visit at his university, he'd caught more than one professor going around and stealing a look toward them as they went by, the slender white-haired woman being led along on her grandson's arm. It wasn't even for support, more like she was having him escort her through these halls which were presently _his_ 'domain.' Pappy Joe would laugh and insist it was more to do with her essentially marking him for her family, as though to tell any and all 'this boy is important to me, treat him well.' Lucas couldn't say that he had gotten preferential treatment in any way, or that he would seek to have it, but there would still be those who would suddenly go and address him when they clearly hadn't known him or cared about him before. Maya had taken to refer to him as Prince Huck from time to time, as though he didn't have enough nicknames as it was.

Driving home after his last class that day, Lucas thought back to his lunch with the grandparents. They had ended up back on to the subject of Halloween, as he'd mentioned the album from his maternal grandmother. Pappy Joe remembered Marianne Sullivan fondly. She had gotten close to Susannah and him from the time Thomas and Melinda had become part of one another's life, of course, and she had been something like a sister to his late wife. When Susannah had passed, Marianne had been on her last years as well, whether they knew it at the time or not, and she had been right there to support him in his loss.

"I remember, when you were four years old, you told your mother you wanted to be me for Halloween," Pappy Joe laughed. "Your grandmas had you over at the house, looking around, deciding what would be the most me, and then they worked together to get everything right for you, little as you were."

"I thought I was dressed like a firefighter that year," Lucas had blinked, trying to remember.

"On the day, you were. You saw what all the neighbor kids were going as, and you changed your mind, an hour before trick or treating. Your dad had to go to the store all in a hurry to get you a new costume," Pappy Joe revealed, fishing his wallet from his back pocket. "I didn't mind. I still had this," he pulled out a folded image and handed it over to his grandson. There they were, as promised, twenty-one years younger the both of them. His grandfather's hair had been darker at the time, though the gray already showed. There he sat, on the front steps of what was now Lucas and Maya's house, fixing the hat atop his young grandson's head. Little Lucas was looking up at him, smiling and dressed identically to him, a perfect mini me.

His grandfather had agreed to let him borrow the image, which presently sat wedged in the pages of one of his textbooks, in his schoolbag on the passenger seat. He knew Maya would get a kick out of it, almost as much as Marianne's album. For his part… Lucas was left with something of a dilemma. On the one hand, his original thought had been to talk Zay, Asher, and Dylan into reuniting the Ninja Turtles of old, for one more ride, but now… Now it almost felt like he'd been handed this perfect idea. He had backed out of his original plan all those years ago, when he had been meant to go as his grandfather. Maybe this was his chance to make up for that time. It wouldn't be the flashiest of costumes, and people might not get what he was going for, but it was entirely possible that he didn't care whether they understood or not. His friends, they would know. Pappy Joe was nothing short of a legend in his closest circle.

"It's a miracle that it took eleven whole years for me to get a hold of this… masterpiece…" Maya declared with rousing drama when he walked through the door that night and found her waiting with the album still in her hands. Sam was off in the kitchen, setting up for their late dinner. Lucas leaned over the back of the couch, looking on as she slowly flipped the pages, showing all Halloweens, the costumes… His grandmother's smiling face was what made him happiest.

"I've got one more," he pulled out Pappy Joe's photo and set it on the open album. Maya gasped, picking it up. "How would you feel about me letting my beard grow out for a little while?" Four-year-old Lucas hadn't exactly been able to reproduce that part of his grandfather's look, but twenty-five-year-old Lucas didn't have that problem…

"I would be lying if I said I haven't wondered what that would look like on you," Maya turned her head up to look at him. "What if I love it so much I start lobbying for you to keep it?" she teased. He chuckled, giving the thought a bit of consideration.

"I'll have to think about it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	108. Their Road to Detours

**_A/N: Hey guys! _**_I haven't done deleted scenes in a little while, I've been having some weird days, but I'm going to do my best and get more done in the next few days!_

* * *

April 17th 2020

_Chapter 108  
Their Road to Detours_

With the plan for the party's costume theme officially accepted between its hosts, the invitations had gone out late on Monday night. To no surprise, Tuesday thus began with response upon response, in e-mails, in tweets, in texts and other messages. He'd discovered this by waking up to feel a weight over him which turned out to be Maya. She had leaned over him to grab his phone from the night stand and had since remained there, browsing through the responses.

"Hey?" he yawned, casually rubbing her back.

"Your phone was having a seizure over there," she revealed, in absolutely no rush to move away.

"So you rescued it."

"I did."

"Great… Is it okay if I breathe now?"

"If you have to, I guess," she pulled away and plopped down back on her side with a grin.

"Do you mind?" he held out his hand and received his phone.

"I can't help it, I've been on this side of the… planning divide… for years now," she reminded him, with something like innocence in her eyes.

"A tragedy," Lucas smirked.

"Like you wouldn't believe…" she 'sighed.'

They had only gotten to look through some of the responses before Sam called out that breakfast was ready and they had to go. Tuesday was an early start, for Lucas especially, and soon he had to take off on his way to university. The curiosity brought on by the responses, some of them featuring some childhood photos their guests had already dug up for costume inspiration, would have to wait to be fed somewhere between classes, or around lunch.

He had the radio on, he'd willingly admit, mostly in order to catch any of Maya's songs, if they should happen to get airtime. He'd say he caught Ree's at least once a week by now, and the Violets' at least two or three times, if not more. The group was really starting to take off, and a lot of that went to this song penned by his future wife. His pride knew no bounds. Every once in a while he'd also hear some of TXNY's music. Their local station had been good for it for many years now, like they had adopted the local talent as part of their team. Lucas loved when this happened maybe most of all. That was his girl, those were his friends…

He was having one of those special occasions today, halfway up to school, when one of his tires got a flat.

It had all happened very fast, though he still managed to pull to the side of the road before he got stuck in the middle of oncoming traffic, and for a few seconds he sat there, breathing, as Maya's voice sang along from the speakers. He had to silence it, as he turned the key and the car stilled.

This was not good. Alright, that kind of went without saying, but in this case it was made particularly problematic by the fact that he didn't have a spare. He'd taken it out when they had moved Ramona back to her place and now, when he needed it, he remembered that it still sat where he'd left it, back at the house. After getting out of the car now to get a look at the damage, he had to consider his options. It was really only a matter of swapping out the old for a new. He could do that, no problem, no need to call anyone in, he just needed that tire…

Maya was going to be in this important meeting at the theater today, he wasn't going to call her out here with the tire from back home, even if that would have been the easiest solution. All he could do was at least reach out to her, let her know what was happening.

"Are you okay?" she asked, as he finished telling her about the situation.

"Yeah, yeah," he confirmed at once. "Just kind of stranded, not sure who to call, I don't want to have to make anyone go out of their way and…" The idea came to him like a flash, a face popping up in his mind's eye.

"You call him then call me back so I can keep you company until he gets to you," Maya instructed.

"How do you know…" he started to ask, getting a chuckle in return that sounded like 'oh, please.' It made him smile. How could anyone doubt the power of the HalloQueen?

As promised, they hung up and he called her back once he'd called in his assistance.

"Well?" Maya asked.

"He should be here in a half hour or so," Lucas replied, leaning on the side of his stalled car. "Are you at the theater?"

"In my office, yeah," Maya confirmed.

"If your meeting starts, I don't want to hold you back."

"I've got about twenty minutes, and I can spend every last one of them coming up with puns about you 'holding me back,'" she informed him, the air quotes present in her tone.

"I'm sure you could," Lucas replied, feeling just a bit ridiculous in his instinct to keep his voice down, as though any of the other drivers whizzing by in their cars could have caught any of his words. "Or you could hold on to those until tonight, when you and I get to be in the same room…" he went on, taking another look around.

"Now that you mention it, yeah… I like that idea even more," Maya agreed, sounding as though she was trying to keep quiet just as he would. It created this small bubble of existence where the two of them were essentially in a shared space, even though they were miles away from one another.

They had to leave it before long. A little over fifteen minutes of Halloween talk later, Maya had to head off to her meeting, which brought the call to an end. Lucas was left to keep on waiting by his car. Luckily, he didn't have to wait much longer before he spotted a car coming up and pulling on to the side of the road just behind him.

"Now, I know you were eager to hear my lecture today, but that's taking it a bit far, isn't it?" Hank Hillard laughed as he approached his nephew and greeted him with a quick hug and a clap on the back.

"Maybe my car had a mind of its own," Lucas nodded.

The faculty may have been very impressed for his connection to Professor Robinson, but as far as he was concerned, Lucas felt that they should have shown the same attention to his uncle. His class certainly did. Hank would come and guest lecture for them, once or twice every semester, and today was to be one of those. He'd forgotten for a moment, until he'd remembered, while talking to Maya earlier. He'd remembered about the lecture, but more importantly he'd realized it would mean there was a chance Hank was already at the university, which was not too far away from where been brought to stop.

So, Lucas had called him, and he'd explained the situation. He'd asked his uncle if he might have access to a spare tire that would fit to his car, and by chance he did.

"Good thing you didn't have too much trouble out here," Hank declared, as he went and got a look at the flat tire.

"No, I know," Lucas agreed. It could never be a good thing, but out here on this often very busy long road, the incident could have been so much worse.

The two of them went about getting everything set and started with the tire changing. Later, as he'd be driving back home at the end of the day and he would pass the point where he'd been stalled, Lucas would just smile to himself, thinking about how they'd talked about his idea for the Halloween party and his plan to finally follow through on a twenty-one-year delayed goal to dress as his grandfather. Hank had found the entire thing very amusing, especially as Lucas revealed his intention to go all in with the facial hair. He would keep looking back at him like he was trying to imagine what his nephew would look like. What he was left to know, of course, was that he'd look… well, a lot like him, and like his father, and his grandfather… He called it the Friar gift, and requested to be sent a photo once the whole look had been put together. Lucas happily agreed.

After they'd finished with the switch, they'd picked up everything and started off to the university, one behind the other. Everyone was intrigued to know what had held him back and he'd explained it all. With no real harm done, the conversation had quickly turned back to Halloween, all of them wanting to know if he'd seen this photo or read that reply…

To Lucas, it felt as though this Halloween was taking on a life of its own, becoming about something more than costumes, and food, and music… It had started taking that turn in steps, barely noticeable in the beginning, and now it was all just there for him to find. Most of his life, there'd been his father and his grandfather, and then a few years ago he had been reunited with his uncle, who had just not been part of his life, not by choice but circumstance, and the three of them together… Already the family resemblance was enough to make it clear they belonged as a unit, but now Lucas was made to realize – possibly a couple of years after the fact – that he had grown to become part of that unit, on the other side of some divide that, someday, his own kids would occupy.

To find himself here, he was finding it difficult to put into words how much it meant to him, but it did… it meant so much…

When he pulled up to the house, he found he had a welcoming committee. Maya sat on the porch steps, sketchbook open in her lap and drawing, with the forgotten spare tire used as a foot rest. As he came up to her, she lifted up her feet, so he might take up the tire.

"Thanks," he smiled.

"Uh huh," she replied without looking up, though he could feel her eyes on him as he carried the thing back to his car and put it away. Said eyes were back on the page before her as he turned back and walked to rejoin and sit at her side. He leaned over and kissed her temple, which made her smile and turn her attention to him at last, the better to give and receive a proper kiss hello. "Weird day?"

"I've had weirder," he shrugged.

"You're welcome," she tossed back, making him laugh.

"What are you working on?" he asked, nodding to her sketchbook. There was a picture tacked to the corner with a paperclip. She pulled it free now and held it up for him to see. It showed what he'd estimate to be a nine or ten-year-old Maya, Riley, and Farkle, posed together and sitting at a bay window he recognized as being Riley's old bedroom in New York. "Oh, is this the one?" He couldn't help but smile, seeing all three of them that small, smaller than he'd known any of them, Maya especially.

"I think so, yeah," Maya confirmed, holding up her sketch of herself in the updated version. "The girls at the theater already said they'd help me put something together."

"Would this be the same girls who helped you with that dress I still haven't seen?" he pondered.

"The very ones," she confirmed in the same intonation.

"Can't wait to see what you all come up with."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	109. Their Road to Work

April 18th 2020

_Chapter 109  
Their Road to Work_

With Wednesday morning came a shorter drive. This was his day off from school this semester, which also meant it was his weekday on at the bookstore. It wasn't as though it was the only day where he didn't need to get up as early as he sometimes did when he had class, but by virtue of the fact that it was on its own, sandwiched between four days when he did, that somehow made it special.

For one, of course, it meant things could start at a more leisurely pace at home. His body still felt compelled to wake early, most of the time, but on those bookstore days he was in less of a hurry to get up and start moving to prepare and leave. If Maya was awake, too, which she usually was, it meant a little more time together, and this was never put to waste.

Eventually, no matter the destination, he would still have to get started on his day.

"At least you're regaining a few minutes from not having to shave," Maya teased, locking her arms to him so he couldn't move to stand just yet. He chuckled, feeling at his face. It had only been two days, so he was nowhere near where he aimed to be, but it was still enough that it felt like 'the start of something.'

"For now, I guess so."

"For now, yeah."

"Such a bad influence," he shook his head in mock reproach. She laughed, victorious.

Driving off to the bookstore, Lucas was left thinking about the point in his life where he wouldn't just have a job to have a job, to make money. He looked forward to a time when he would have a job where he got to do what he had wanted to do for a long time. He knew that this wasn't something that everyone got to do, and he was not about to let this opportunity slip him by. He had ideas for his future career, what it might look like. That didn't mean he would shut himself off to other opportunities if they presented themselves, not at all.

He would get to thinking about Sullivan Stables a lot of the time. If all else failed, his grandmother's place remained a standing option, thanks to the clause in her will. It was something of a safety net for him, which wasn't to say he was ungrateful, or that he saw it as a last resort, a cord to pull if his parachute failed and he was sent hurtling through the air. To work at Sullivan Stables would be a great opportunity for anyone, but to him... To him it would be about legacy, his grandmother's legacy. She had built up the place from nothing, and it continued to thrive today. It was a family business, even if his family didn't currently have much more of a hand than the occasional times where his mother and his uncle would be called upon to help make certain decisions.

The last couple of days, he had been brought to think about himself, about his starting to take his place in the grand scheme of things, in his family, in his adulthood, and now there was this. He thought about Sullivan Stables, imagined himself out there, carrying on the family line. He may not have been a Sullivan by name, but he was one by blood, his granny's blood, his mother's...

It would be that same blood carried on by those who would come after him... and he had been thinking a lot about that, too, the last little while. Between meeting little Ada Minkus, and Zay and Nadine quietly trying for their own baby, all of the plans for his and Maya's wedding, it was sort of hard not to feel his thoughts pulled back in that direction. The subject had been installed in his mind a few years back, on another Halloween night than the one a few weeks ahead of them. Even if that had been a false alarm, it was like the space had remained there in his brain all along, and every so often something would bring him sailing past, recalling that the space was there. And today, with all these ideas of his future, he had such a clear image...

"I think I'm going to take the job," he told Maya when he called her. He'd just pulled into his parking spot and immediately taken up his phone. "At the stables," he went on, before she could wonder what he was going on about. There was a pause, which he soon interpreted as her having leaned back in her office chair with a smile.

"Figured you would," she declared, which made him smile, too.

"Not today," he specified.

"No, might be best if you finished school first," she pointed out.

"Good plan, yeah," he nodded.

"So what got you to decide all of a sudden?"

"I don't know about sudden, it's just that the last few weeks have really gotten me thinking, and... it feels right."

"I was thinking that, yeah," she agreed, and he could picture her slowly nodding to herself.

He could picture how his mother would react, too. She would look at him with that face that was a battle ground between emotion and composure, and emotion would deliver a crushing defeat to her composure. She would cry, and she would embrace him, and she would tell him what he was already thinking, that his grandmother would be so proud, and happy.

Like he had told Maya, it wouldn't be immediate, what with his still having two and a three quarters of a year left in university, which he would of course have to get through, but he still made it a plan to touch base with Juliet, up at the ranch, so that he didn't show up out of the blue one day. He may have had the job per his grandmother's will, but she had the business to run.

That would be something for another day though. For now, he had a day of work ahead of him, and what a day it would turn out to be. By the time he would be back in his car at the end of the day, headed back home, it would be with that sensation like he couldn't wait to get there, to share what his day had been.

He had walked in, making his way for the stairs that would take him up to his floor, as he always did when he didn't need to stop by the café on the ground floor. His eyes would still make a stop in that direction though, like his brain needed a moment to decide whether he needed anything, and when he looked over today, he found Maeve sitting at one of the tables, looking as though her mind had left her body behind and it just sat there, a little paler than usual.

"Hey, is everything alright?" he asked his friend and coworker as he walked up to her. She didn't respond, locked in whatever thought she was having, so he touched her shoulder. "Maeve?" he asked, and she blinked, looking up at him.

"Wh... Oh..." she breathed, blinking still. For knowing her to be so energized all the time, to the point of being too much for some people, this was a sight that could only instill concern.

"What's wrong?" Lucas asked, pulling up one of the chairs so he could sit with her.

"I don't know..." Maeve replied, in a way that left Lucas feeling as though it wasn't that she didn't know what was troubling her, but more that she didn't know what was or wasn't wrong about it. "You want kids, right?" The question came very much out of left field, and he looked as surprised by it as he was, but then it wasn't like he needed to consider the answer, was it?

"Yeah... wh..."

"How did you know? What made you be able to stop and go 'yes, this is what I want for my life' like that?"

"Well, it wasn't..." he started to respond, before he could give it any thought. "I don't really remember the first time, it was just there, I guess. But then with me and Maya, we've been together all this time, and after a while it was something we both knew we wanted... Wh..." he tried to ask why again, but again he was cut off with another question.

"But you've been sure about this, you know this is what you want, so that... that's a good thing, yeah?"

"Well, sure, but..." It wasn't so much that something clicked, more like he had been faced with a number of roads, and now he had an idea of whereabout he needed to go. From there, with the look of her in this moment, well, the rest sort of had no choice but to fall into place. Maeve was looking at him and she could see he was putting the pieces together.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do now, I don't even know how to feel about it... I never had what you had, I never set out thinking about being someone's parent someday, and I still don't feel that way now, which is really going to become a problem in a few months' time if this... if I..."

"How long have you known?" Lucas asked.

"About..." she looked to her phone for the time. "Eighteen minutes. I went to the clinic, unrelated, there were tests, and I guess it came up somewhere in there. The woman just called to let me know, like 'surprise, you're knocked up, have fun at work today!'" Maeve intoned, letting out a sigh as she set her head down to rest on her arms, folded on the table.

"It just happened, you're still in shock..." he pointed out. She sat up again.

"I've got no one," she confessed. "The guy... the father..." she said the word with that awkwardness that came when you said something for the first time and couldn't completely commit to it yet, for the impact that it carried. It reminded him of Maya, the first time she had said out loud that her father was dead.

"What about him?"

"I don't know how to reach him, I barely have a memory of his name or what he looked like, I... There was a party, okay, and..."

"You don't have to explain yourself," Lucas told her.

"No, but I do, I do, I'm..." she sniffed, touching her face like she expected to have cried or to start crying any second now. Lucas wasn't sure if she wanted to be hugged right now, but again she picked up on his cues. "I just need a few minutes to pull myself together, okay?"

"Absolutely."

"Can you get up there, get things going until I get there?"

"Consider it done," Lucas nodded, and Maeve nodded back, like at least one thing was taken care of and she had needed that.

The rest of the day had felt on par with how it had started, from the point where he had walked into the store. Maeve didn't tell the others what was going on, so Lucas hadn't said a word either, though he could just tell it was all still turning around in her brain, and really how could it not? This was a lot for her to think about.

"If you need to talk, about anything..." he told her as he was heading out at the end of the day.

"I know," she nodded. "Thanks. Say hi to Maya for me." It was as clear of a coded message as there could be. She was opening the door, allowing him to let his fiancée in.

Even so, it wasn't until much later, as they were getting ready for bed, that he read her into that part of his day. He had told her the rest at dinner, the two of them with Sam and Cecilia, told about this customer or that one, but now it was the main event.

"What do you think she's going to do?" Maya asked, concern in her eyes, for their friend.

"I don't know..." Lucas shrugged. There really would be no telling, not until Maeve herself had more time to think it over. Unless she reached out before then, he guessed he'd find out on Saturday, on his next shift at the store with her.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	110. Their Road to Houston

April 19th 2020

_Chapter 110  
Their Road to Houston_

Waking up on Thursday morning, Lucas just managed to catch the sound of his phone vibrating on the night stand. His first thought was that it could be Maeve, reaching out for the willing ear he had extended to her. Instead, it was a text from Sophie, to confirm that he was still coming up to Houston that afternoon for a visit. He texted her back and told her that yes, he would be there.

The last couple months had done a lot in improving Sophie's overall physical condition. She was allowed, in growing degrees, to put weight on her leg, to actually walk. Two crutches had become one, and from there a sometimes wobbly but on the whole unassisted motion. Between this and her physical therapy, she _was_ on her way to where she'd eventually need to be in order to get cleared for duty, but the outlook was that it would take a few more months to get her there, and this was really where the struggle heightened. The more normal she got to feel, all she'd be thinking about would be that she was ready to push on, to retrain herself for what her job demanded… and she just wasn't _there_, not yet.

The improvements weren't just about physicality, of course. Sophie had been taking strides in dealing with the more emotional and psychological component of her recovery, of the whole incident, and on that she wasn't alone. Chiara may not have suffered any bodily harm, but anyone who'd been by her side through that horrible night and the days and weeks that had followed could tell that Sophie's wife had been dealt a wound of a whole other kind. It wasn't until Sophie had finally reached her breaking point, over the summer, that both she and Chiara had been able to do what they had been meant to do all along, to just talk, in all honesty. From that, from what Lucas and Maya and the rest of their friends had been able to glean, they had started to work at those scars that no one could see.

It manifested in Chiara by way of something like freedom. This wasn't to say that she was trapped before, and if she was then she was her own jailer. Ever since that night when she'd been told that her wife had been severely injured on the job, that there was genuine fear for her survival, it was as though she had started to hold her breath. And even as time had passed, even as the danger had retreated and disappeared, she couldn't let it go. It became the vast majority of what her life was about, and even though it became so by her own choice, for her love toward Sophie, it in no way diminished the effect it had on her.

Sophie had been seeing it, all this time, and it had instilled in her this fear that sooner or later it would get to be too much and Chiara would just leave. But then _she_ had been so caught up in her own issues that she'd been left feeling sort of helpless to do anything about it, to even say that she was aware. Instead, she had been working overtime with this goal to see everything go back to normal, like she'd been turning the music up to deafening levels, rather than to hear her very own cries for help. That day over the summer when she'd finally broken, the music had gone silent, and her voice had started to come and be heard.

Much as it had left Lucas and Maya with that feeling all over again, where they just wanted to be in Houston, with their friends, to act as support, they had to carry on with the normal pace of their own lives and all the while stay updated with calls, and texts, and visits. They went up at least once a week, and Lucas had been going every Thursday, as his classes ended at two, which enabled him to head up to Houston for a little while before returning home to Austin.

When he would go up there, up to the house which had been his home of four years throughout college, he would find Sophie… That was really the best way to put it. He wasn't being met with anything less than the girl who had been his friend for the past seven years and some. Chiara may have been holding her breath, but Sophie had been carrying a mask, and now all that was in the past.

On last Thursday's visit, he had been met with Sophie the Romantic, who had apparently been thinking a lot about his and Maya's wedding. She had moved past feeling that bit of guilt over the fact that they had displaced the whole thing for her sake. Now, what she instead felt was a fervent determination for it to be 'the best wedding that's not mine.' Lucas didn't want her to go and think she had to dip into her mother's money and connections to get them anything extravagant, but she assured him that wasn't her intention. She didn't believe the big stuff was necessary in order to make this a memorable celebration of Maya and his love story.

"So, what does that mean exactly?" he'd asked her, like 'alright, I'm game, try me.'

"It means 'make me your wedding planner,'" Sophie had grinned, chin up. "I might not be able to work, but I'm mobile again, and I need…"

"A project?" he'd guessed. Sophie nodded firmly.

When he'd told Maya all this, she'd been on board without a moment's thought. Thinking about it only convinced her even more; it meant she'd get to see and talk to their friend even more.

Lucas drove out to Houston that afternoon, after his classes were over, wondering what the house would look like when he got there. The bits he'd been overhearing in the past week left him picturing Wedding Central camped out in the middle of Sophie and Chiara's living room. Considering that the wedding wasn't for another several months, he would also imagine the other inhabitants of the house might take issue with it.

The first thing he did notice as he drove up the street had nothing to do with Sophie or the wedding. Instead, his eyes were drawn across the street from the old college house. Just a few weeks ago, they'd heard through Chiara that the Shaws were moving. He'd seen he sign planted out front when he'd been over the last few weeks, and now he came up to find an addition to the sign, indicating that the house had been sold. Even though he and Maya hadn't lived out here for over a year, they would still get the occasional call from Mr. or Mrs. Shaw, checking in on them, and it was really appreciated. The couple was moving to be nearer to their children and grandchildren, and Lucas knew he would miss seeing them whenever he visited.

The addition to the sign wasn't the only thing that caught his attention. After he'd parked in front of Sophie and Chiara's, Lucas climbed out and jogged across the street to where he'd spotted Asher and Ray standing on the lawn, looking up to the house as they spoke.

"Hey!" he called out to them, and they turned.

"Afternoon," Asher tipped his head with a smile.

"What are you doing out here?" Lucas asked. His former teammates shared a look that felt very much like 'should we tell him?'

"Just looking at our house," Ray declared, pointing over to the door. Lucas' face did its own bit of talking, probably coming off like a lot of surprised words.

"Wait, _you_ bought it?" he finally managed to speak, gesturing to the 'sold' sign. "When was this… I mean, you never said…"

"We weren't going to say anything until we got an answer," Asher explained. "We only told the girls, because it would have been weird to just go up to them one day like 'hey, guess what, we bought a house right across the street from you, surprise!'" he intoned.

"Wow…" Lucas laughed. Now that the surprise had started to wear off of him, he was only left with happiness at the thought of having all of them stay this close to one another. It made him think of Maya and Riley, who might have envisioned a similar set up if not for the fact that he and Maya had their house, out on the lane. "How did they react?"

"Chiara blurted out something in Italian I _think_ was like a good swear?" Ray chuckled.

"Sophie declared us the starting line of our very own Pride parade," Asher indicated the stretch of road that separated the two houses.

As he would tell Maya later on, once he'd made it back home, Lucas had followed the guys back over to Sophie and Chiara's for the rest of the story. There he had discovered that the living room had _not_ been taken over by wedding items. That honor went instead to the one of the spare rooms upstairs, though he had been prohibited from seeing anything as of yet. He had also been met with Sophie, who was happy to share her excitement over the guys buying the Shaws' house.

"They're only moving in the spring, and she's already making plans for tag team decorations on Halloween and Christmas," Lucas told Maya. This made her laugh out loud. She was already mirroring Sophie in her reaction to the news, declaring it to be a brilliant choice.

As exuberant as Maya was, Lucas was generally more reserved, but it in no way diminished his own feelings over their friends' news. Already he had been so thrilled in the last year to have the two of them back living in Texas, even if it was two hours away from them. That was nothing, after four years of cross country distances. Without diminishing the place that Ray had in his life, he couldn't pretend as though he hadn't missed Asher especially, and Zay while he had been in Boston.

Those two guys, and Dylan along with them, had been his oldest friends, as good as brothers, and then they had been gone. They had reached a point in their lives now where none of them were tethered to wherever their parents were, and it would make it easy for any of them to suddenly follow an opportunity, which their friends could only support. Last year, Zay and Nadine had returned to Austin, they had gotten married, moved into their house, just as Lucas and Maya had moved into their own. Meanwhile, Asher and Ray had been living at Sophie and Chiara's house, and all the while it made for a feeling like they could have gone off again at any time.

Now, with this house, they were setting down roots, and it made Lucas eager to see what the future would hold for all of them, for his oldest friends and him.

"Oh, by the way, they're all coming up for Halloween this year," Lucas told Maya, who got excited all over again. "Asher tried to talk me into reviving the turtles, but I told him I couldn't," he pointed to his face with its growing coverage.

"A bearded turtle…" Maya pondered with a laugh.

"Chiara said that she never got to dress up for Halloween as a kid, but Sophie said they'd figure something out. And Ray doesn't have pictures from when he was little, his parents still have those. I told him I'd try and do something about it." Maya took all this in with a slow nod.

"I have to say, I am really looking forward to this year's party," she told him. "And just you wait until the night after that…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	111. Their Road to School

April 20th 2020

_Chapter 111  
Their Road to School_

Friday mornings had a way of starting off with an extra bit of energy. Yes, there was still a day of school ahead of them, but then it would be the weekend. Even if that still meant a couple of days at the bookstore, Lucas could still appreciate the shift in routine.

This morning however, his 'Friday extra' was found along with an empty space at his side. It took him a moment to remember that Maya was headed out of town today. She had told him she would be gone before he got up, but now here they were, or here he was, on his own, and he just wished she was there. When he sat up and looked at his phone, he found a message waiting for him.

_Maya: I may or may not have taken a picture of you while you slept. Missing your face today, see you tonight! 366 and then some!_

Lucas let out a breath, smiling to himself before getting out of bed and starting along on his new morning. He went and had breakfast with Sam before he could head out to the Sanderson farm for a little while. The mornings where it would be just the two of them were so few and far in between that they became something just a bit special. On this one in particular, Lucas quickly got the sense that there was a whole lot happening in his brother's head.

"Big test today?" he asked. Sam looked up.

"Huh?"

"You keep scooping milk and no cereal," Lucas pointed out, nodding to the bowl sitting in front of Sam. "Do you have a test today?" he repeated his original question.

"Oh… no, I was just thinking about stuff…" Sam shrugged, digging into his cereal in earnest now.

By the time Lucas had gone and returned from the farm, Sam was already gone off to school, so whatever had him distracted would have to remain a mystery a while longer. He tried not to go for 'the obvious' of wondering if this had anything to do with either Cecilia or Dora… or both… but as Maya would have said 'who are we kidding?'

He would have to put all this out of his head for the time being, as he got in his car and started on his way to university. By some chance, he pulled to a red light just as he had passed by the high school and looked to the side just in time to discover a familiar face in the next lane. In her new car, Ramona had spotted him, too, and the two of them waved to one another with a smile. Shortly after the light had turned green and they had started driving again, his phone rang, and he answered the call.

"Feels kind of wasteful, doesn't it?" Ramona's voice sounded over the speakers.

"Just a bit," Lucas agreed with a nod.

"Next week we can start sharing and switching again."

"Good," he smiled. He missed having company. He wished it could all be as it was before, with him and her and Robbie, to, but that was in the past now. "Car's alright then?"

"Oh, you mean Olive?" Ramona asked. He laughed.

"Finally picked a name then?"

"I wasn't going to, but then I kept thinking about it, and yesterday I climbed in to head back home and… it was Olive. And yes, she's great, we're getting along very well."

They could have stayed on the line the whole way, but eventually they had decided it might be best to hang up and return their whole focus to the road. At some point she had ended up pulling in front of him, so they spent the rest of the ride to school like they were sitting in class, one desk behind the other. That mostly made him think about Maya, middle school, high school…

The return to the apartment and the addition of the newly named Olive seemed to have given Ramona the balance she had lost in the weeks following her split from Robbie. It had taken a few days for it to really become evident, but then just the day before Lucas had seen the two of them sitting together, talking together, for the first time in a long while. As far as he'd been able to gather, Ramona had been asking after Robbie's newfound brothers, about the little one especially. The contact did Robbie a whole lot of good, too, that much was clear. To not have her there at his side while this shift was happening in his life, it had been genuinely difficult, and now she was there…

Much as he'd been talking about it all with Lucas and the rest of their small group, when he got to talk to Ramona it felt like there was a whole deluge of things he had been keeping to himself. He could tell her, no one else. This was not going to end up in a reunion, and they both looked like they knew it, but they had wanted to save the friendship, and this was the first step.

When they had pulled into the university lot, one car after the other, they barely had time to park and climb out of their cars that there was Robbie running toward them. He had recently had his blue hair dyed again, which made him look like a beacon speeding after them.

"What's he shouting?" Lucas tapped Ramona's arm when he spotted him coming.

"… atch!"

"I don't know, but he looks…" Ramona blinked, right as Robbie rounded toward them enough that they made out what he was saying: there was a match, for Scott. "Oh!" Ramona bolted at once, and it was a draw as to who had reached to hug the other first, a small celebration Lucas let them have for themselves before stepping up to join in. Robbie looked like he hadn't stopped smiling or crying since he'd found out. For having known him for so little time, right here it became clear how much he had gotten to care for his little half-brother.

As he drove home that night, Lucas was still turning the day's developments over in his head. From the moment he had arrived at the university until he left it again, it was all about Robbie, and Scott… and Josie.

There had been little time for them to talk about this match as they headed into the school and toward their first class of the day, except that it had been found, and that the surgery would be happening the following morning. After that, they would get bits and pieces as they'd be between classes, at lunch… It took some time before any of them noticed something was different, took most of the day really, before Lucas picked up on how little of Josie they were seeing today. She was there, she was in class, those classes that they had together, but outside of that she was kind of scarce. It was hard to explain, but the impression he was left with was that she didn't want to be around this discussion over Robbie and his brother's surgery.

It was sort of by chance that he ran into her and got to talk. He'd needed to go to the university bookstore before starting back for Austin, and he'd run into her, almost literally.

"Sorry!"

"Sorry! Hey…" Lucas realized it was her. "I didn't see you."

"Don't worry about it," Josie nodded, moving around him. It still baffled him how different she was now than how she had been when he'd known her through those four years in Houston. Ever since they'd all started coming here the year before, it was like she was a whole other person. He didn't want to qualify this as being a 'better' person, as though he was in any place to judge her character, but it was still very startling, for anyone who had known her as she'd been.

"We barely saw you today," he remarked, as he was left to head in the same direction as her, in need of much the same thing she was looking for.

"I just had a lot to do," she shrugged. "People to see." After a moment, she paused and turned toward him. "You take the best notes out of all of us," she stated. Lucas blinked.

"Thanks… Do you need to borrow any?"

"Not yet, but I will after today, so do you think you can e-mail them to me, like once a week until the end of the semester?"

"Uh, sure, but aren't you going to…"

"I'm going to be out of class until January, but I talked to all the professors, we figured things out. I just need notes, and you never miss a class, and you have…"

"The best notes, yeah, but… What's going on?"

"Can you do it or not?" Josie asked, sounding like her old self for a moment. When she heard herself, she almost looked like she wanted to apologize, but then the found the middle ground and looked at him, waiting for an answer.

"Sure, I'll… I'll send next week's on Friday night?"

"Great," Josie nodded, letting out a breath. She found what she was looking for and looked at him again. "Happy Halloween… and Thanksgiving… Christmas… and a Happy New Year. See you in January." And she was off. Lucas felt like he'd gotten whiplash.

He didn't find her again, and all the others were gone already. As he was walking back to his car, the first idea he had was to call the one person he felt most at ease asking: do you know what's up with Josie?

"Hey!" Willow smiled, as her face appeared on his phone screen. Lucas could vaguely hear what sounded like Zola and Sekani laughing or possibly singing in the background. There was baby William held in the arms of the former member of TXNY. The third Obi child was already five months old, which didn't seem possible.

They talked for a couple minutes, the usual catching up, before Lucas got around to explain the reason of his call. He relayed the conversation he'd had with Josie at the bookstore, filling in of the day and how she hadn't been around.

"Did she say anything to you?" he asked, realizing he wasn't sure just how much contact the two of them would be having, but then there was a look on her face, barely visible, like she did know but wasn't sure whether to say or not. What she chose to say took him by surprise.

"Did Josie ever tell you about her brother?"

"I… No, I didn't even know she had one," Lucas shook his head.

"Yeah, he died when they were nine. He was sick, they couldn't save him in time. After he was gone, it was like… she didn't know how to be anymore, didn't know _who_ to be, if she didn't have someone who was like her." A thudding noise in the background was followed by a childish screech, and Willow looked aside for a moment before turning back to the phone. "Lucas, I have to go, take care!" And she was gone.

As Lucas had gotten into his car, Willow's words kept turning around in his head, and Josie's words, too… All the pieces were there, he just…

He had no way to know for sure, not unless he asked outright, and he wasn't sure if she'd say it either way, but in his mind it was just about certain now. Scott had his match, and Josie… Josie was going to be out of commission for weeks to come. He had no idea how it had all come to be, and he was just about certain that even Robbie had no idea, but now he understood. Josie was the match for Scott. Even after five years, they really barely knew who she was.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	112. Their Road to Halloween

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

April 21st 2020

_Chapter 112  
Their Road to Halloween_

With Saturday morning came a new weekend, and Lucas felt as though the week had gone for so long. So much had happened, on top of his classes, that it felt as though he had to compartmentalize it all, day by day, and drive to drive. His parents, his grandparents, the flat tire, his uncle, the stables, Maeve, Sophie and Chiara, Asher and Ray's house, Ramona, Josie… And through all that, Sam's general… Sam qualities… and then Maya passing the Halloween duties on to him while she took over the anniversary… On the whole, he only vaguely recalled his classes when compared to the rest.

"When do you have to leave for work?" Maya asked, and Lucas realized then that she'd been awake and he hadn't noticed. She was still spooned in his arms, though halfway turned to look back at him. She was also giving him those eyes that felt a lot like 'do you _have_ to go, you'll have a lot more fun if you stay here with me' and he had to take a breath not to get pulled in.

"The books won't sell themselves," he smiled, looking at her like he was trying to calculate some kind of compromise.

"I'm sure your customers are smart enough to handle it…" she shifted over, a little closer, and he could just feel his resolve slip away. Before he knew it, he was kissing her, and she was kissing him, and he was pressing her closer…

There was a crash and a thump from above, followed by the yelping barks of Archer the pup.

"Sam…" Maya bolted out of bed, all thoughts of anything else pushed aside for the both of them. Lucas followed, and they made it into the hall, one behind the other, only to stall briefly at the sight of what they realized had to be paint, dripping out from the open attic trap, falling along the stairs and down to the hallway floor underneath. "Sam!" Maya called up as they both moved toward the stairs. Archer was planted at the bottom of the steps, and Lucas scooped him up before he could go traipsing in the paint.

"I'll go see where the others are," he told Maya, taking the fretful dog with him, sidestepping the paint.

"I'm okay!" Sam finally called out, as his sister still came up and found the mess over the attic floor and him, at the heart of it, looking like a big of paint splash art, covered in various patches of color even as he tried to pick himself up without making more of a mess.

"What are you _doing_, it's like seven…" Maya sidestepped the puddle of paint which continued to dribble down. As far as she could see, there had been many cups of the very liquid colors involved in this project of his, whatever it was supposed to be, though she had no concept of what it was now, with how the colors were now all running along, mixing together.

"I tripped one of the cups, it spilled, then I slipped and…" he gestured to the various cups tipped over or crushed, likely by the weight of him falling on top, which thus sent the paint splashing everywhere. The bean bag was soaking in it, the telescope… "It'll wash off, right?" Sam asked, like he was finally getting to take in the spread of his blunder. He touched the side of his hip which had taken the brunt of the fall – and the cups and its contents – and winced.

"One thing at a time, yeah?" Maya soon abandoned any attempts in not getting paint on herself, helping Sam step away from the mess and down the stairs. Lucas was just coming back up from getting the dogs to the basement and he stalled at the sight of the Hart siblings covered in paint. It was possibly appropriate with those two, but more than anything it left him wondering what had happened. "Help him?" Maya asked. "I'll take care of the attic and… all this," she pointed to the drips.

Lucas had helped to get Sam to the bathroom and into the shower, where he could peel off – almost literally, thanks to the paint – his clothes behind the curtain and start to wash the rest of it off. It was in his hair, over his hands, and feet… Lucas did his best to keep the clothes from touching anything but the towel sacrificed to the cause. There was no saying for sure if they'd try to wash these or simply throw them out.

"I'll wash everything after," Sam was heard from behind the curtain. He sounded so upset, at himself, for sure.

"What were you doing up there?" Lucas asked, imagining what all that running paint would do in there, the floor, the faucets… There was a pause, where he imagined Sam was debating what to say before deciding he had no choice but to tell the truth.

"I was just… I had to find a way, to make it all… make sense."

"What do you mean?" Lucas frowned as he tried to follow. Another beat of silence.

"I guess I thought that, after all this time, I wouldn't still have feelings for her."

Oh… _Oh…_

"You didn't…" Lucas stared at the closed curtain.

"No, no!" Sam promised at once. "I would never," he insisted, and Lucas was inclined to believe him, although there was always that human variable, wasn't there? He and Maya had been trying so hard to tell themselves this wouldn't be an issue, after how it had been the year before, but now here they were. "I would never do that to Cecilia, I…" _I love her…_ "The other day, I ran into Dora on my way back from school, and we were talking, and I don't know, there was just this moment where I looked at her and… and I could tell she was more upset about her and Adam than she was letting on. He already has a new girlfriend. I was just there, as her friend, and it was like it all came back."

He poked his head out from around the curtain appearing much less painted. Lucas offered him a clean towel so he might emerge. When he did, his skin and hair still showing a bit of color but overall clean, he looked momentarily less open, like the cover of the curtain had allowed him to speak openly.

"I don't know what's right… Is it possible to have those feelings for two different people? I tell myself that it's not, that there could only be one, but… what about my mom and James? Or Maya's mom and her stepdad? That was real both times, wasn't it, except not at the same time and… I'm never going to do anything about it, but it's there, I feel it, and it just feels like… like I'm not being honest. But if I tell Cecilia about any of this…" he shook his head. The flare of panic was clear; he didn't want to lose her. "Is it going to be better than if I _don't_ tell her, and she finds out anyway?"

Lucas had never been in that kind of situation, nor did he ever foresee himself being in that kind of situation. Even without that, he could see how this would be very confusing for Sam. He wanted to help his brother, he did, but there just didn't seem to be any solution that wouldn't come without hurt, for more than one person.

"You know Cecilia better than I do. All I can say is… whatever solution is best, you're going to have to make the choice. Think it through, just… if you're going to go with the first option, don't wait too long, yeah?"

"Right…"

"Now, go get dressed, and go help Maya with the paint?"

This was not how any of them had intended for their day to start, he knew, and yet now here they were. Sam went off to get dressed, while Lucas took a brief look at the inside of the shower and let out a sigh. He might have felt bad about making Sam clean it all up as punishment for his own actions, but he knew that, even without being told, he would have gone and done it anyway. Meanwhile, in the time while the two of them had been in the bathroom, Maya had already sorted out the stains on the floor and the steps. Climbing up to get a look inside the attic, Lucas got his first look of the disaster zone, which was presently being seen to by Maya. She was just now gathering the paint cups and what was to be Sam's canvas, while the pool of colors continued to exist and threatened to become a permanent staple.

"I can call in and take the morning off or…"

"No, you won't," Maya let out a breath, dumping another cup in the trash. Her hands were getting to look like a mixed up rainbow. "Where's Sam?"

"Getting dressed. I already told him to get up here to help you after that."

"Oh, the second he gets up here, my cleaning is done." She was upset, and she didn't want to be, not by the time Sam came up. He probably deserved it, but she couldn't make herself do it, could she?

"I think he'd agree on that," Lucas replied, and she let out a breath, looking at him.

"What did he tell you?" Rather than speak where Sam might overhear, he gave her the rundown with signs. The look on her face now was probably not too far off from the one he'd had earlier. They had expected something like this, and now here they were, in the thick of it.

He would have stayed there with them, doing his best to help, but he had to get ready and go to work. With the delay brought on by the incident, he just got dressed and drove off to the bookstore, where he stopped at the café downstairs for something to eat, which he brought along on his way up to his floor.

When he arrived there, he found he was the second to arrive, in the pre-opening hours. There was Maeve, casually hanging up Halloween decorations. There were already some of those here and there around the store, but as Lucas had discovered the year before, there could never be too many decorations where Maeve was concerned. Maybe this was a sign that things had taken a turn for the better as far as her situation went.

"Morning," he approached, which made her jump in surprise and drop her bag of fake cobwebs, which she had been unspooling and setting. "Sorry, didn't mean to startle you," he reached down and picked up the bag for her. "How are you?"

"Well, I thought I was doing pretty well, then I got here and had something to eat and… it didn't stay… Which wasn't the food's fault," she added, seeing the bag in his hand. "Just something I get to look forward to for the next I don't know how long." The look on his face must have carried the question, as she gave the answer. "One way or the other, it's going to get born, and people are going to find out eventually, but right now I'd rather it stayed between us."

"Got it," he nodded.

"I'd ask if you could go and get some books for me so no one sees me, but I wouldn't want them to get the wrong idea about you and Maya."

"Right… Well, I could…"

"I found him," Maeve cut him off, and he knew who she meant without her saying it. The guy she'd met at the party, the baby's father.

"You talked to him?"

"No, I said I found him. I looked through my friend's friends, figured he'd be in there, and he was. Now I just have to figure out what I'll tell him, or… _if_ I'll tell him… any of it… From what I saw, before I stopped looking because I didn't want to come off like a stalker, he seemed like the same good guy I met that night."

"That's good… The other day, you said you didn't want to… or you weren't sure…"

"If he won't take it…" Maeve started, cutting in again, in what felt like she was doing everything not to waver in her choice, not to let emotions fill her with doubt. "If he won't take it, then I need to make sure this kid goes to a good home, with people who can give it the life it deserves. That won't be with me." That much she looked very certain of. There would be no changing her mind, and he knew it wasn't his place to try. All he could do was be the friend she knew him to be, the friend she had confided in.

"Want me to tell you what Sam did this morning?"

"Please," Maeve nodded.

Lucas told the story, all the while trailing after her as she decorated and he ate his breakfast. They continued to play this 'game' all through their day at the store. Whenever they found themselves on their own, or whenever he saw her looking like she was drifting back into her brain, he went over and talked to her, not about the baby but about the other big – if much smaller by comparison – thing that was coming up, which was Halloween. It helped her get back in touch with that livelier side that was more herself than the distracted face she'd been up to this point.

At the end of the day, she came up to him and presented him with a photo.

"I almost forgot. For Halloween," she told him.

"Wow," he grinned, looking at the small girl posing in full witch regalia. She couldn't have been more than five or six here, and it might have been that she would have gone for the cute little witch, but instead she'd gone for the scary, and whoever had made the costume, clothes, hair, _and_ makeup had clearly shared her spirit.

"There was this kid who thought I was evil because I had black hair. So I said 'fine, I'll be evil.' When he saw my costume, he ran off screaming like a baby."

"Served him right," Lucas nodded. "Maya can get you set for the makeup, anything you need, look," he took out his phone and pulled up some pictures, in particular their old standard of the severed head. Maeve was rightly impressed.

"Good to know," she nodded. "I'll think about it and let you know tomorrow." She was looking forward to Halloween, to a bit of normal. He hoped for her sake that she would get it.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	113. Their Transformation Into a Bride

April 22nd 2020

_Chapter 113  
Their Transformation Into a Bride_

For as long as Maya had lived in Texas, and for as long as her mother had worked at the theater, she had known that the place was always a prime spot for candy around Halloween. It was Siobhan's favorite holiday, because of course, as a theater person, she could appreciate the 'call to transformation.' Every year, all through October, her mother would share in that extra candy with her, and now that she worked at the theater herself, Maya naturally found herself partaking. Her treat of choice tended to be the lollipops, and she was absently rolling one around so that it clatter at her teeth while she worked, when her mother walked into the office and sat across from her. Maya turned her eyes up, waiting to know what her mother needed. There was a strange look on her face, not bad, more like 'I did a thing.'

"Mom?" Maya raised her eyebrow, having disengaged her lollipop. The two of them had always had this dynamic about them, where Maya could be more imposing than her mother, which would more or less turn Katy into 'the child' in the scenario. This had become less of a thing over the years they had spent in Texas, but right now… Her mother looked like she was about to get grounded.

"For the record, I would like to say that I was _not_ snooping, there was just a mix up, and when I saw it I didn't even know what it was that I was seeing, except Ilsa got this look on her face and then I just… figured it out…"

Maya closed her eyes, understanding now. She had been keeping her wedding dress out here, because no matter how little of a snoop Lucas or even Sam could be, she didn't want to take the chance that either one of them would accidentally find it. And now, this was exactly what had happened, only with her mother instead.

"When you say you saw it…" she slowly asked.

"Oh, only a little, from the side where it was hanging," Katy replied at once.

"Right…" Maya sat there for a few beats, considering her options as her mother remained in limbo. Finally, she picked up her phone, typing up a message which was soon sent off. Within a minute, she had her replies, and she looked back to her mother. "Got any plans for lunch?"

It had never been the intention for this dress to remain in hiding for as long as it would still need to be, but then there had been the delay by a whole year, and so there it would have to stay. Everyone who worked at the theater, anyone who was in any position to potentially come upon it was aware of its existence, and its presence, but that was all. Maya _had_ been just a bit concerned that someone would find it and any number of things could go wrong, but she'd put that aside… until today. Now her mother had seen it, seen part of it, and it would be easy to just put the incident behind them, leave it at that until July, but… but wouldn't it be fun just to say to hell with it and just… show them?

So, she'd put out the call, easily predicting that the response would be favorable, with how so many of them had been giving her the general impression that she had robbed them of an experience by making her own dress instead of going into a shop to try on dress after dress for them to look at and tell her if they liked it or not. Her mother especially – not to be outdone by Melinda Friar – had given the impression that she had envisioned, after all those times Maya had joined her in watching those wedding dress shows, to have that experience with her. She was her firstborn, the first of her children to get married… So, more than anyone else, she had decided to do this for her, to finally show her dress in all its splendor.

As lunch time rolled around, they started to arrive. Lucas' mother, to no one's surprise, was the first to arrive, a half hour before anyone else. She was soon joined by Riley, Nadine, Rosa, and Rebecca, and – thanks to Skype – by Sophie, Chiara, and Isadora, and Abigail, Luna, and Elizabeth Hart. There were plenty more she could have called in right about now, but she'd known they wouldn't have been able to make it, and anyway… she wanted to keep some of the surprises for the day she'd walk down the aisle.

Ilsa had come along to help her get changed. She kept on apologizing about Katy seeing the dress, saying she should have acted quicker before she saw it, or simply not reacted as she'd done, which would more or less guarantee she'd figure out what she was seeing. Maya countered this string of apologies with insistence that she didn't need to be sorry, but it wouldn't change anything, so she focused on getting the dress on.

She didn't have her shoes picked out yet, so she'd just have to barefoot it. Accessories were also a 'to be determined,' along with… well, pretty much everything. The only thing that was a lock was the dress. She didn't know how she'd want her makeup by then, and she didn't know what her hair would be like by then. At the moment, it was somewhere about halfway down her back, even more so if she'd straighten it instead of leaving it wavy as it was. The wedding wasn't for another eight months, so who knew? She might cut it, might not… For the time being, she pulled it into a tall ponytail and let it swish down her back, where it brushed against her skin.

Much as it had not been planned for her to put on the dress today, or any other day until somewhere in May or June of the coming year, now that she was wearing it again, it took her back to the first time she had put it on when it had been completed. At the time, she had still been supposed to get married the previous July, and she could just remember how it had filled her with this bit of thrill. It was finally happening, she was going to marry the man she loved, the man she had loved since he'd been the boy she loved. To see herself in that moment, she had cried, and she had really started to understand why all those brides on those shows would start to cry when they saw themselves in The Dress.

With her impromptu party gathered in the storage/fitting room where the dress had been stored away before being discovered, they had assembled something as close to what Maya would see when she thought about the shows, and the dress salons. Ilsa, Denise, and Lily had helped her, all of them amused by their own bit of staging, at the heart of the theater. It had certainly amused her guests, too, especially the mothers of the bride and groom. They were all sitting there now, with Katy, Riley and Nadine in charge of the phones that connected them to their friends in Tucson, Houston and New York, talking amongst themselves while Ilsa helped her get ready.

"You are all set now," Ilsa declared, as Maya looked at her reflection in the mirror mounted behind the curtain that kept them both hidden from sight. "I go now and look surprised."

"They know you helped make it," Maya chuckled, turning to look at the woman. "You can't be surprised, you have to be proud. It's exactly what I had in mind, you did amazing work." Ilsa could barely contain her smile, so she simply nodded, briefly cupping Maya's face in her hands before clearing her throat, stopping herself from getting teary eyed.

"I will stand outside, waiting for your signal," she nodded, stepping away.

If she allowed this beat, standing on her own, to last much longer, she knew she would get stuck somewhere in her own head, thinking about whether this person would like her dress, if that person would think any part of it needed to be different. So she did not wait, and she told Ilsa to pull back the curtain.

The shift of light had her blinking for a moment, but then there were all friends and family here, looking back at her, and she took a breath, taking in their reactions. It was a mix of surprised sounds, and stolen voices, as they processed the reveal and really took in the various details of the dress. Maya had to pull up the skirt enough that she might step forward on her bare feet without tripping. She walked up closer so they could really see the front, the back, the sides…

Rosa had that look like 'I'm not much for dresses but this is a real good one.' Riley, Nadine, and Rebecca, who had been her friends the longest out of the ones in the room, all looked like they could barely contain themselves with how much they loved it. On the phones, she could just see her stepmother, aunt, and grandmother talking amongst themselves while never looking away from the screen where _they_ could see _her_, and you would think they were right here in the room for how emotional they looked. On the next screen, there was Isadora, with Ada in her arms, observing with those curious eyes of hers and an appreciative smile. On the third phone, Sophie and Chiara filled the whole screen with how close they were to their screen and each other, ear to ear and looking like they would have loved nothing more than to be out in Austin with them. If it hadn't been so short notice, they could have driven out to Austin, but that didn't seem to bother them one bit.

As was to be expected, the two mothers in the room, hers and Lucas', were to be the most reactive in their own ways. She would have been lying if she said the one she'd been most worried about was anyone but Melinda Friar. It wasn't that she had previously been in any way critical of her choices in clothes or anything of the type, but she had been looking forward to this so much, with Maya being her one and only daughter in this life, thanks to her being about to marry her only son, but she was also just so… Melinda… and she expected some kind of critique.

Instead, she got shining tears, and a smile to challenge all smiles. To anyone else, it could have looked so comical, but to Maya it was everything she could ever want. Lucas' mother had taken her on like a daughter, yes, for even more years, she'd say, than the two of them had been a couple. The same could be said of Thomas Friar. She took this as an honor, and she cherished it.

Her mother, though… Next to Lucas, next to her father, her mother was the one she had been anticipating showing her dress to the most. It was everything, it was those nights watching the bride shows, yes, but also all those years in New York just the two of them, and coming to Texas, and finding more and more love within one another than that girl just arriving in Austin all those years ago could have imagined. Looking at her mother, she could just see the reel of her entire life, from this moment down to the very first time she had moved within the young mother's belly, just running on a rapid loop through her mind's eye. There were no words, but she could see it all anyway, and she was happy for this day, this revelation. July could not come fast enough.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	114. Their Transformation Into Spooks

April 23rd 2020

_Chapter 114  
Their Transformation Into Spooks_

Driving up the lane toward the house, Maya would always love getting to the point where she could see the house in the distance. Right from the start, it had hit her with this feeling like it was simply the most beautiful house she had ever seen. There were bigger houses out there, she had no doubt, bigger and more rich looking, but that did not matter. This one, the home she and Lucas had together, was the best there ever was or would be, with her parents' place, her first small house in Texas, as a close second.

Coming up to it now, the day before Halloween, she could just make out figures standing outside. Getting nearer, she could see Lucas, and Sam, along with Missy Sanderson, her father, and her grandfather, taking the outside of the house from being mildly decorated for fall and Halloween, to the spook central it would be for the following night. This would be their second year here, their second night of games and haunts for the kids in the area and then the party for their friends. The way she saw it, as wonderful as the first year had been, this one would be even better. People had seen what they could do the year before, and now they were about to do it again.

Maya honked the horn as she pulled up, and the decorating 'committee' looked back her way. Missy was the first to come toward her, even as she was climbing out of the minivan.

"I want to be a zombie," the fourteen-year-old informed her.

"Uh, well, I'm sure if we go around the graveyard or something we can find one to take a bite out of you," Maya rolled right along with the statement.

"Not like that," Missy laughed. "For outside, with the kids," she specified. Maya tried not to chuckle over the look on her face which made it clear that she did not consider herself one of those anymore. Maya and Lucas both waited on the day when she would come along and decide she wanted to be called Melissa now, because Missy was for kids or something.

"I thought you were coming in your own costume, don't you want to play the games?" Maya asked, hooking arms with their young neighbor as they walked back toward the house.

"I changed my mind," she shrugged.

"Want to try that again?" Maya gave her a burrowing look. Missy tried so hard to keep a straight face, but eventually she let out a sigh.

"There's this boy in my class…" she started, and Maya stopped them getting any closer to Missy's father and grandfather, guessing she did not want to go talking boys around them.

"And he's really into zombies or just really not into what you were going to be before?"

"Okay, yeah, he's into zombies, but I'm not just doing it for that. See, he's new to my school this year, and the first day, he had to introduce himself, and that was one of the things he said. So, I just sort of… started watching zombie stuff and now I kind of love it, too. I want to be a zombie ballerina, then it's still me under there, you know?"

"Is he coming here tomorrow?" Maya asked, finding Missy genuinely motivated by her new zombie appreciation.

"I don't know. I told him about it, without being too obvious…" she blushed just a bit.

"Alright, then, I'm going to need a few things from you."

A moment later, Missy was bolting back up the road toward her house, as Maya continued over to where Lucas was hauling one of the large decorations into place.

"What's the over under on me objectifying you right now?" she asked, watching him there as he set down the large tombstone and turned to her. The beard was more or less as it would be by the time of the party, and she had to say… she wasn't hating it.

"I think you know," Lucas smirked, moving up to greet her with a kiss before locking his arms around her. "I got a very strange message from my mother earlier today… You wouldn't know what that's about?" Maya bit back a laugh, keeping as much of a straight face as she could.

"I don't know, what did it say?"

"She wanted to know about what I was going to wear for the wedding, like suddenly she had some ideas, which leaves me to think…"

"Alright, okay, she saw the dress," Maya cut in, rather than let it go on. "My mom saw it by accident this morning, so I just decided 'oh, what the hell' and had a bit of a… fashion show over lunch," she explained, ending with a pose.

"Not gonna lie, now I just want to see it, too," Lucas teased.

"Eight months," Maya reminded him, which only made him give a semi exaggerated performance like he could barely hold on for how much he wanted to see it now. "It will be worth the wait," she promised, and he let out a sigh.

"Alright, if I have to," he declared.

"That is very brave of you," she nodded 'seriously' before kissing him once more. "Still need to get used to that," she felt at his growing beard.

"It could be gone in two days' time," he pointed out.

"I have not decided, and this year _I'm_ in charge of the anniversary, so I get the say so on whether it goes away or not," she told him.

"Don't let the power go to your head," Lucas grinned.

"But it's kind of hot," she whispered with a shrug, prodding at his facial hair with curious fingers which finally curled back, following along to the mindset of 'focus now, Halloween.' "How's the decorating going?" she asked, turning toward the house as he released her.

"It's going," Lucas reported. "Some of it won't go up until tomorrow, but we want to get most of the structures in place for today."

"Put me to work, chief," Maya nodded, redoing her ponytail into a quick bun before pushing her sleeves up. "Also, dinner…"

"On its way," Lucas confirmed. On a night like this, take-out was more or less a given, and in this case it turned out to be pizza. "Also, we have _that_ going on," he gestured over to where Sam sat on a bale of hay, applying glow in the dark paint to wooden arrows they'd be staking in the ground.

Maya still wasn't used to seeing her brother with his shorter hair. That had happened after a few shampoos still wouldn't free him of the rainbow happening over his head after his tumble in paint. The attic floor wasn't free of it either, but she had decided that it kind of worked so she wasn't so worried over it anymore. Sam however had not wanted to show up to school looking the way he did, so out had come the clippers and Lucas had gone to work. By the end of it, the sixteen-year-old had very short sandy hair left to cover his head and all the paint was gone.

Right now, the new style only seemed to intensify whatever brooding mood had overtaken him. Maya didn't have to wonder very long over what was the cause of it, and even though Lucas didn't know it for sure either, he was on the same page.

"Want to flip for it?" he asked.

"It's fine, I'll take this one," Maya told him. She walked over to where her brother sat, painting away. "You know, when we're done with these, we could totally use the rest of this paint and make a galaxy on the attic ceiling or something," she noted. When he didn't reply, she resisted the urge to make a joke. "What happened?"

"I told her," Sam replied in a flat voice.

"Right…" Maya breathed, stalling his hand so he'd put down the brush and the arrow. "How'd it go?" She couldn't even put herself in his place if she tried, or Cecilia's place either. She had never had feelings for anyone, not in that way, except for Lucas, and to her knowledge – which was just about guarantee – he had not either. She tried to think of how she'd react if he came and told her he had feelings for someone else, feelings he would ignore because he still wanted her more than anyone else… She couldn't even conjure up how she would ever react to that.

"She said she kind of knew," Sam replied. "She was upset, said she'd been upset for a while but didn't want to let it out or think about it too much, because maybe she was overthinking it."

"But she wasn't," Maya slowly filled in. "Did she end it?"

"Not exactly. She said she needed time to think about it. Is that good?" he looked at her now, with all this fear he had in him at the thought of losing Cecilia. Maya wasn't sure what to tell him, and the pause only fuelled his worries. "She's going to dump me, isn't she?" he bowed his head.

"Hey, come on, Genius," Maya pushed his chin up to make him look at her again. "You don't know that. If it was a done deal it would have been done right when you two talked. If she wants to think it through then let her. Don't push, don't try and sway her, just let her think. Waiting means there's a chance. I'm not saying it's a guarantee, but it's… fifty fifty, you know?"

"Yeah…" he tried to look optimistic. He didn't exactly get there, but he got about as close as he was going to get, with the way he was feeling.

"I like the arrows," Maya commented, looking to the ones he had already finished and left out to dry on a tarp on the ground.

"I'm going to glow in the dark tonight," Sam showed his hands and arms, dotted with paint here and there.

"That should be fun," Maya grinned, before immediately regretting where this thought took her. Going by the smirk which tried to come free from her brother's face, he'd realized it, too. "Forget everything I said and please don't mention it to your mother, between this and your hair I'm at like two strikes on the big sister screw ups and no amount of wedding dress reveals are going to get those off."

"You showed her your dress?" Sam asked, getting back to work. Maya confirmed that she had, relaying the story once again. "Can _I_ see it? I won't say anything," he promised.

"I will think about it," Maya told him with a laugh.

Now that the woes of her young brother had been dealt with about as much as they could be, it was time to get to work. This didn't last very long before the pizza arrived, though once that was done they had all gone back to the Halloween eve preparations. The Sandersons had gone on home in time, leaving Maya, Lucas, and Sam to finish up for the night and finally head back inside. To keep Sam away from his romantic problems, they had piled on to the couch for some scary movies.

"Now he gets to have nightmares about slashers and vampires and zombies like a 'normal' person," Maya air-quoted after Sam had gone upstairs to get ready for bed. Lucas took this statement in stride by dramatically capturing her in his arms, giving off something like a werewolf howl, which soon mixed with her own howling laughter. "Oh, no, save me from the monster!" she declared with a breathy high-pitched voice.

"No saving," the wolf growled, hoisting her into his arms and up the stairs. Maya did her best to play along but mostly couldn't stop laughing. Halloween was officially upon them.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	115. Their Transformation Into Others

April 24th 2020

_Chapter 115  
Their Transformation Into Others_

Something about having Halloween land on a weekend was like a gift. When they had started throwing their parties back in college, more often than not it would be a weekday, and because that never would get in the way, not even classes the following morning, there would be a party that night of the 31st.

Now, here they were, and while Lucas would be working at the bookstore most of the day, Maya had the day off. With that thought in mind as she woke up, it filled her with an instant bit of glee, anxious to get started with the day. For his part, Lucas woke up in full expectation of this.

"If I open my eyes now, how close is the fake spider going to be?" he mumbled. The quiet giggle he got in response was enough to tell him what he needed to know. "Take it away, please?" he requested, eyes still closed.

"Take what away?" Maya innocently asked, walking her fingers along his arm like a skittering little critter.

"It's on my beard, isn't it?"

"Is it?" Considering his options, he cracked one eye open just a sliver so that a hazy vision of his fiancée swam overhead as she sat in a ball next to him, even as he caught sight of the shape perched on his face. He gave his head a shake so it would fall, and when it remained there for a second or two it just set Maya to laughing some more.

"If that's how we're going to do this," Lucas opened both eyes now before sweeping his arms up to catch her and pull her down into a roll until he was looking down on her laughing face, and that most certainly had him smiling bright as she did. "Happy spookversary..."

"And to you," she nodded, frowning as she dug the plastic spider out from under her back. "Better," she breathed as she held up the toy for him to see.

"You are such a weirdo," he declared, in a tone that sounded more like 'I love you so much.' Her face said it clear enough.

After Lucas had gone off to work, and Sam not long after him, Maya was left to get on to her own pre-party tasks. Even though Lucas was in charge of the party this year, he couldn't very well take over the makeup components she always handled, so she had to get all that set up and ready for when her 'VIP guests' came along in search of their transformations. And before any of that, she had a zombie ballerina to sort out.

"Welcome, step into my lab..." Maya spoke in her best spooky scientist voice as she opened the door for Missy. The girl walked in with the ease of one who was always welcome, dropping the bag she carried on to the nearest surface she found before starting to pull out its contents.

"This one still fits, but it's just like a backup, and there's this hole under the arm here," she explained, showing a very standard looking lilac leotard. "I have this one, too," she showed a wine red leotard, and Maya snatched it up at once. "Okay then if that's one..." Missy fished back in her bag, which burst with tulle until she got hold of a matching tutu, and then matching lace up slippers. "I have ribbons, and tights, too."

While Maya worked to transform the clothes into something closer to zombie wear, Missy practiced her walk, or half walk and half dance, to go with her undead dancer. Maya would find herself looking at her every now and then, at once impressed and inspired, for the eventual hair and makeup she'd make for her as much as for drawings she was itching to put to paper.

"Right, go try it on," Maya finally stood from the kitchen table, and Missy flitted off to change.

"My teacher would pass out if she saw all this," she declared as she returned.

"Why does your voice sound like you'd be okay with that?" Maya smirked as she went to have a look.

"She has a French accent, but a lot of us are sure it's fake and she's just trying to be all snooty."

"If you want, I can help you find out for sure," Maya bit back a chuckle. "Right, want to try that zombie walk again?"

"What are you going as?" Missy asked, giving her demonstration.

"Alice," Maya smiled as she observed, which made the girl pause with a smile.

"Like 'in Wonderland?'"

"The very one," Maya nodded, pointing to one of a trio of photos on the refrigerator door. There was the one Pappy Joe had given Lucas, and one showing a younger Sam roughly six or seven years old, dressed like a knight, complete with helmet and plastic sword. The third showed a girl of five years, in a plain blue dress and white apron, on her father's shoulders, asleep with her head laid on top of his.

"Awww..." Missy beamed, and Maya laughed.

"It was the first Halloween I really remembered, growing up. It was also the last one before my father left, even if I didn't know that at the time. I think I sort of held on to that for a while, in the back of my mind."

"Like you were Alice?"

"Searching for Wonderland, through whatever door... or window... I was going to do another year's costume at first, started making sketches and everything, but then I think that after looking at Lucas' picture for a while it made me go down another line."

With the zombie ballerina's clothes taken care of, Maya and Missy moved on to the actual transformation, to take the girl from a human in tattered clothes to the walking dead... or dancing dead...

"How decayed do you want to be? If your guy shows up, it wouldn't hurt to still look a bit cute, would it?" Maya asked with a smirk as she watched Missy's whole posture and expression shift at the mention. "What's his name?"

"Kai," Missy told her, and it was a wonder he didn't know she was into him, if she could barely say his name without smiling like that. "He's on the basketball team, and..."

"Hold on," Maya cut in, with rising intrigue. "Kai Avelino?" Again, the reaction said enough. "Oh, my prima zombierina, if he's anything like his brother and sister, I think he'll definitely be here tonight."

"Oh..." Missy made the connection now. "You were on the team with them?"

"I had Keilani on the girls', Lucas had Kamani on the boys'," Maya nodded. "They were two years behind us, and they lived basically right across from Lucas when he lived with his parents."

Even as she said this, she also realized this must be 'that sweet boy across the way' who earned extra cash by doing chores and errands for people on the street where the Friars lived. He mowed their lawn and walked the dog. According to Melinda, Duke would be a frenzy of happiness whenever his walks would come, as he loved his young friend very much.

"Okay, just decayed enough that it shows and it's... enough gross that it doesn't look like I don't know what I'm doing," Missy nodded, and Maya motioned for her to have a seat.

"We can do that."

The completed work had sent the girl giddily honing her zombie walk, which was confirmed as effective when Sam returned from work in mid afternoon and screeched when she appeared. Maya couldn't help but burst out laughing at this, while her brother realized it was only Missy and started to relax.

"Well if it isn't Sir Samuel of House Hart," Maya gave a half curtsey.

"I don't know if I want to get dressed anymore," he frowned.

"Hey, no, no, we are not going down that route, okay? It's going to be a lot of fun, and you're going to be right in the middle of it, so might as well be involved. Plus, if a certain someone shows up and you're not there..."

"Fine..." Sam breathed out, heading up the stairs at a slow pace.

"That's the spirit!" Maya called after him before turning away with a groan to herself. She knew that there had been no easy way out for him, and he had done the noble thing by being honest with Cecilia, but now he was hurting and she couldn't help and it was just... so much... "I should go and get changed before the others get here," she finally told herself.

After slipping into the dress Ilsa had helped her with, and cleaning her face to go from day makeup to Alice makeup, and giving her hair over to the straightener, she was satisfied enough to get the rest of her accessories on and head back downstairs, where she found that others had started to arrive. Missy and Sam - in his knight costume, borrowed from the theater - were on the couch, playing a video game, while Riley, Rosa, Dylan, Kayla, Nadine, and Zay were comparing pictures. Some were already dressed in their costumes, others had them in bags.

"Alright, step over here if you need anything from me?" Maya called to them, and half the group split off to join her. "Who's first?"

It wasn't long that they all got the ball rolling, with the makeup and costumes but also with the continuation of the setup, both outside for the games and such for the trick or treaters, and then with making space and setting things up for the party inside the house. By the time Lucas arrived, which wasn't too long before they expected the first of the kids, the place was in full swing.

"So you don't really need any makeup from me this year, do you?" Maya came to meet him on the porch, briefly amused by the reaction he had to her own costume. "No severed neck or anything like that..."

"Afraid not," he smiled. "You can help me with the hair though," he offered, and it was all she needed to take his hand and lead him up to her 'station,' in the upstairs bathroom. The bathtub was thankfully back to the color it was meant to be. The curtain hadn't been so lucky, but again the faint splash of color was not unappreciated.

"Right, let's see what we've got here," Maya stepped up behind Lucas once he'd changed into his costume, as he was made to sit and she could started running her fingers through his hair, inspecting her options, maybe getting distracted by how nice it all was... "Hey, so are you ready for some updates?"

"Hit me," he nodded.

"Missy's zombie lover guy? Kai Avelino," she told him, causing much the same reaction as she'd had before. He'd see him around the neighborhood whenever he'd go to his parents' house, and every time it would be amazing to see how much he was getting to look like his older brother, when he had been all of, what, eight years old when the twins had joined the reunited basketball teams. Now he was fourteen, same as Missy, and following in their footsteps.

"I think that's good like that," Lucas declared, as Maya finished with his hair. He turned on his stool until he could face her. "What do you think?" She observed him, scooped up his bearded face in her hands.

"I think this evening could be very traumatic for the both of us if I think too hard about the fact that you look this good while pretending to be your grandfather..."

"Let's not even think about it like that..."

"I knew it was a mistake the moment I said it..."

"Meanwhile, I'm never going to be able to think about Alice in Wonderland anymore without picturing you as her." This made Maya smile.

"See, that's much better."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	116. Their Transformation Into Tricks&Treats

April 25th 2020

_Chapter 116  
Their Transformation Into Tricks and Treats_

If there was ever any doubt among them as to whether this year's festivities would be a comparative success to the previous year's, it was soon removed, as they went and followed the sounds of eager voices waiting. There was really only so much they could do to keep their outdoor installations clear until they went and had their real start, except to count on parents to keep back. They had a 'gate,' to give the impression of an entrance, and this gate indicated in some fashion that they were not yet ready to receive. Coming from the house now, Pappy Lucas and Alice in Austinland soon unblocked the gate welcomed their guests. They were for the most part families from the area, and after living here for over a year now, they were really getting to be familiar with one another. They couldn't even begin to express how much this meant to them, except to carry on this tradition, year to year.

"Okay, so hear me out. Next year? We build a maze," Maya declared, sweeping her hands to indicate the space around their house.

"A maze," Lucas repeated, as they watched the rest of their 'attendants' and volunteer creatures – like the zombie ballerina – spread out and interact with the arriving trick or treaters.

"Yeah, you know, big walls, do I go left, do I go right, oh no, I'm lost… Maze…"

"I get the concept, I'm just not sure where you'd want to put it," Lucas pointed out.

"In the back," Maya shrugged, like it was the most obvious thing. "Get a tunnel going toward the back of the house, and then it begins!"

"We can… explore the idea, I guess. We have a year," he smiled. It was hard to tell her no, wasn't it?

"At which time…" Maya trailed on, pointing to her ring finger.

"I was just thinking that," he nodded.

"Our last unmarried Halloween," she intoned.

"This is going to be like senior year all over again, isn't it?" he chuckled as she grinned.

"Building up anticipation, you know?"

"I can tell you one thing, with absolute certainty: my anticipation is through the roof as it is."

"So mushy…" she 'scolded,' all the while leaning in to kiss him. "Okay," she breathed, once she'd pulled back. "We need to… you know," she gestured loosely around them.

"We do," he agreed, and so off they went.

Lucas couldn't help but feel particularly amused by this whole set up. Here he was, at his house, which had once been his grandfather's house, dressed _as_ his grandfather. He wasn't sure exactly what message this was passing on, but he chose to believe it was his way of maintaining the legacy of his family, and keeping a long broken promise, and just… getting in touch with what was at his heart.

"Oh my…" He turned at the sound of a familiar voice, discovering a laughing Asher approaching, along with the rest of their Houston quartet. They all looked ready to bust out laughing, but Asher especially, as he undoubtedly had flashbacks to when the two of them had been kids, coming to visit Joseph Friar out in this house. "There are… so many words… so many… and I can't say any of them."

"Why do I have a feeling you and Maya are on the same page right now?" Lucas teased.

"I'll have to see what she said, but I do think we are," Asher teased right back.

"What costume is this about?" Lucas asked, indicating the suit he wore. Asher presented his photo for evidence.

"Double-o seven, right here," he gave his best steely expression. "Minus, you know, all those odd named women," he followed, back as himself, as he turned a smirk to his boyfriend. Ray nodded approvingly.

"Anne Shirley?" Lucas pointed to Sophie, who proudly extended her own photo.

"I was really getting in touch with my fellow gingers back then. No bad wigs for me, just the genuine article." Lucas loved to imagine a tiny Sophie schooling the masses on why redheads were great. Chiara was all smiles, too, looking to her wife. She'd needed a bit more of a process to even come up with a costume for today, seeing as she'd never done it as a kid and thus never had something to reproduce and update here.

Eventually, Sophie had helped her find a compromise, in the form of Hermione Granger, Chiara's self-proclaimed first crush, and first and forever favorite witch. Lucas recalled her telling them she had spent one particular summer in full Hermione mode, with robes and a wand and her own – at the time – frizzy hair. If that didn't qualify, then what did?

"I still can't believe you pulled this off," Ray declared, holding up his own picture, showing him at age ten, dressed as he was now as a vampire. He didn't look like a bloodsucking fiend right now, more like a very thankful friend.

"I had help," Lucas smiled.

They had all hated the notion that Ray's memories of his childhood, most of them anyway, had been left behind when his parents had kicked him out. It was the kind of thing you didn't realize could feel so bad until you actually stopped and thought about it, thought about what it would be like to lose all that when they still had it themselves. For a while, they had wondered what had happened to all that had been left behind after he'd gone, if Mr. and Mrs. Choi had kept any of it or just thrown it all away.

Lucas had soon come up with a plan, as the instigator of this year's Halloween. It involved a bit of spying of his own, thanks to Ray's cousin Min, who had been reached through Mr. Matthews, who taught her back at their old high school. She had always loved her cousin very much and had been caught in the middle of this rift instigated by her aunt and uncle, and then her own parents enforcing the same decision. So, she was ready to help if she could. There was no telling if it would all pan out, and then one afternoon she'd come to him at the bookstore, with two duffle bags.

"It was everything I could find," she'd told Lucas, which was what he'd passed on to Ray, a few days ago when he'd gone back up to Houston. Two bags to contain all that remained, but to Ray it had been nothing short of a treasure, and it had brought him to tears.

As the quartet moved along to say hello to the others, they briefly got a chance to say hello to Maya, who was trying and failing just a bit in her efforts to pretend as though she wasn't seeing the encounter between a knight and a fairy.

She'd spotted Cecilia as soon as she'd arrived, brandishing what was recognizable as her crutch, disguised by Sam's hand as it had been in the past. Today it looks like a great branch to go with her costume. Maya had been told how she had loved fairies for as long as she could remember, and her mother had made her a beautiful fairy costume for Halloween one year. She'd loved it so much that she would wear it whenever circumstance permitted it. She had made this one herself, as an update to her mother's long since outgrown creation, and the result was magnificent, especially paired to her red-dyed hair.

Maya had followed her progress, from where her father had dropped her off just outside the gate, until she'd spotted Sam and started toward him. Her little brother was on candy duty, passing the treats into the kids' bags and buckets. Then he'd done a proper double take, noticing his girlfriend coming toward him. Rather than abandon his post, he'd let her come all the way to where he stood, while she had taken up the charge to help with the candy, which she had been meant to do. There was an awkwardness to start with, and if someone didn't start talking soon, there was no telling…

"He's here!" a voice whisper screeched behind her, and Maya nearly started the bow right off her head. She turned and, jolted as she was, did another small jump when she spotted Zombie Missy.

"Wh-what?" she asked, fixing her bow.

"Kai!" Missy whispered, attempting to point him out as discreetly as possible. "Careful!" she begged, when Maya started to turn.

"I'm not new at this, give me some credit," Maya told her before doing a seamless sweep of their surroundings. She spotted the boy at once. He was the spitting image of his older brother, or what he would have looked like a couple years before she'd first met him. "What do you know, a zombie…" she turned back to Missy with a smirk. "Now, if only he could find himself a zombie girl to spend the rest of his unlife with," she sighed dramatically.

"I-I don't know," Missy looked much less like a dead girl and more like really alive girl, young and sort of terrified. "I've never… talked to a boy… not like that. What if he laughs at me?"

"Would he though?" Maya pointed out, and her little zombie friend seemed to get some vigor back in her cheeks.

"No, I guess not…"

"Alright then, you stagger yourself over there and say 'grr' or whatever sound that means 'hello' in zombie talk," Maya gave her best impression of her old basketball coach. It seemed to work, and soon the ballerina was making her disjointed way across the yard.

With the sun setting over them, she went for something of an approach as though she'd just been going along, in search of brains, as one would… when suddenly she noticed her fellow zombie and gave a head tilt. _Hello?_ And then, giving hardly a fraction of a second for either Missy or Maya to wonder if this would crash and burn, the zombie boy fell into the scenario, making a curious advance of his own. His costume and his makeup were really good, too, and Maya wondered if he'd done it all himself.

To Missy's credit, she didn't crack once, as they somehow communicated their way toward one of the games without breaking character, even though she knew her young neighbor's mind must have been a cacophony of nerves and reactions. As the outdoor portion of the night progressed, Maya never once saw them apart. Sooner or later they would have to be themselves again, and she hoped this led to a good conversation. This all didn't necessarily mean that Kai felt for Missy the way she did for him, he could simply have been thinking 'cool, someone else who's into zombies the way I am' and ended up seeing her as no more than a friend, in which case Missy might be in for a bit of a bittersweet conflict, but that wasn't going to be happening just now… she hoped.

As time advanced, and some of the families went on their way back home, more of the guests for the party started to arrive, take a turn around the games, and then head into the house. Lucas would point out the photo wall they had installed, ready to receive the various guests' offerings, along with those already posted. The more it grew, the more it felt like his idea really panned out. They were all excited to see the others' images, to laugh and reminisce…

"I think we're ready to close out the games," Maya reported, a few minutes later, walking along with a handful of gummy worms. Lucas pulled one from the bunch when it was offered to him. "Gotta say, I know I'm usually the artistic one here, but this is definitely something…" Maya nodded to the wall with a smile.

"At the risk of being told I'm being mushy again, I did learn from the best."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	117. Their Transformation Into Everything

April 26th 2020

_Chapter 117  
Their Transformation Into Everything_

"Hey, I remember this," Lucas laughed as he turned to find his cousins walking into the party. Emmett Jr, Dora, and Alex were dressed as the Animaniacs, just as they were on the picture soon added to the wall, showing them aged nine, six, and five. Eleven years onward, the dynamics were mostly identical.

The whole thing had been spearheaded by firstborn Junior, who had loved the old cartoon as a kid. He had convinced Dora first, pointing out that the girl Animaniac was called Dot like their mother, which made it all the better, and then in turn Dora had been able to convince Alex, which was the real stroke of genius here, as Emmett could never talk his little brother into doing anything, whereas their sister had all the power. Now here was Junior, aged twenty and pleased to jump into this old love, and Dora who found the whole thing funny, and Alex, who looked like he'd been talked into this more than anything.

"It sort of made more sense when we were this small," Dora pointed out, looking at the picture as she clipped it to the wall. Alex gave her a look which Lucas interpreted as 'that's what I've been telling you, why are we even doing this then?' All the same, as sulky as his youngest Cassidy cousin could be a lot of the time, one only had to see how much genuine love he had for his older sister to know the heart underneath the sulk.

"When was it that you dressed as Luna Lovegood? You and Chiara could have matched," Lucas pointed over to where their Italian friend was leading her wife in a very cautious sort of dance. Sophie looked so happy to be doing it, she barely gave a mind to careful she still had to be. She was getting closer to the point where they would kick things up a bit in her PT, but until then a slower dance was better than no dance at all.

"Two years after this," Dora recalled.

"And three," Alex pointed out.

"And seven," Junior nodded.

"Took a bit of a break, huh?" Lucas chuckled.

"Now I wish I'd done that…" Dora frowned at the missed opportunity. Her expression changed when she noticed her friends across the room, chatting with Missy and Kai. Lucas watched her, getting a flashback to the previous Halloween, where she'd gone to have a breather to clear her head, hearing aids out and everything. It really got to be that this year felt like an echo, with some of the elements slightly different but on the whole…

"Hey," Lucas tapped his cousin's arm and she turned back to him. "Everything alright?"

"Yes, I just…" She waited a moment, as her brothers headed off further into the party, leaving her and Lucas to talk. "They've been acting weird for a few days, and I… I think it's because of me."

"How?" Lucas asked, playing innocent.

All this time, it had felt as though Sam, Cecilia, and Dora had all played with various parts of a single deck, while Lucas and Maya had all the cards. They knew Sam had feelings for Dora from the year before, and now Cecilia knew it, too, hence this weirdness Dora had picked up on. Meanwhile, they also knew that Dora had had feelings for Sam last year, too, until Adam had happened. As to the state of those feelings at present time, Lucas couldn't say, although he suspected he might find out. For all that though, Sam and Dora both seemed unaware of the reciprocation of their feelings toward one another, which could really be the hidden charge waiting to burst.

"I think maybe I said something I shouldn't have, and now Cecilia knows how I felt about Sam. I think she believes I'll get in between them now that me and Adam aren't together anymore." As Lucas had suspected, it was half decks all over again. She hadn't read the situation exactly right, but then again, it might have been that she wasn't entirely wrong. Now Lucas suspected Cecilia _did_ find out about Dora, which would mean that she, along with Maya and him, held all the cards, too. If that was the case, it'd be no wonder she'd need time to think.

"Is that what you want?" he had to ask Dora. He'd be the only one able to ask it without coming off as accusing. She looked at him now, with a face that told him the answer even before she managed to speak it.

"I wouldn't do that," she shook her head. "Not to him, not to her. They're my best friends." But she still felt something for Sam. That much was clear, even though she tried so hard to stamp it down. Knowing his cousin, even if Sam and Cecilia were ever to break up, she could never date one friend without feeling like she was benefitting from the other's heartbreak. And for all that, Lucas wondered about the power she held without knowing. What could happen if Sam realized it had never been a one-way crush as he would have assumed all along?

"You don't know how to talk to them right now, huh?" Lucas guessed. She shook her head. "You never will if you don't try." Dora looked at him for a moment, taking a breath before she made her way over to where Sam and Cecilia were now making to grab something to drink, after Missy and Kai had gone off to have themselves a zombie dance with the others in the middle of the cleared living room floor.

Lucas turned back to look at his cousins' picture on the wall, smiling at the memory of the three of them in their hyperactive glory back in the day. That was the year Maya had arrived in Texas.

His eyes drifted along the pictures on the wall, as more than one guest would end up doing throughout the night. It was a feature built on curiosity, drawing people in to want to look at the photos and then around the room to find the counterpart. He stopped on Asher's contribution again, and there was just something about it…

"What's on your mind, Pappy?" Maya appeared at his side, one cup in one hand, the other extended to him. He took it almost without breaking eye contact with the image.

"I don't know, there's something that doesn't add up." Maya stepped up a bit, so she might look at it, too.

"What do you mean?"

"I just remember the James Bond thing, except I also don't remember what year we weren't all sort of following some kind of theme, or doing a group costume…"

"Like the Turtles?" Maya grinned.

"Like the Turtles," he nodded with a small laugh. Maya squinted at the picture again, and then…

"Wait a second, look, here," she pointed at something in the picture. Her nails were each covered with things like a bottle, a cookie, a flower, a door… The Cheshire grin was presently directing his eyes at the small boy's neck.

"I don't see anything," he shrugged. Maya stared at him like 'yeah, exactly, which means…' "That's not him," he blurted it out even as it came to him. The boy in the picture, if he was Asher, would have had a scar on his neck, from one perilous incident the summer before, but he didn't. It stood like an equation in his head. One Asher-looking boy minus one scar equals one… "That's Joey," he revealed, even as Maya nodded. It was all coming back to him now, but then there was a new question. "Why is Asher pretending that's him?"

"I…" Maya frowned, looking back to find the friend in question so they might ask him. She blinked. "I think I know…" her expression shifted as she physically took hold of Lucas and made him turn around and see for himself.

Ever since he'd arrived at the party, Asher had been working up his suit with a comically on point impression of 007 himself. If he didn't do this, he would just look like a man in a suit in the middle of a Halloween party. Now it looked as though he was dropping the spy and keeping the man, because James Bond may have been all about his 'odd named women,' but Asher Garcia was all about his perfectly named man. Once upon a time their romance had been forced to be kept in the dark, but that was far in the past now, and today… Today he had fooled them all into thinking he was wearing a costume, just so he might proclaim his intentions before one and all and look damn good doing it.

One could have pinpointed exactly where each one of the couple's closest friends were standing in the room when Asher got down on one knee, holding his vampire's hands. They all reacted in what might be called 'the squeak of a stolen breath.' Ray looked stunned as well, showing he'd had zero idea this was coming, at this point in time. Some kind soul had the presence of mind to silence the music, the better to let Asher's words reach their intended audience.

It didn't make it across the room, to where Maya and Lucas stood, hears thudding in harmony with their friends', but the intention and the message were as clear as the answer was. Ray had given a solid nod, a yes read on his lips, and even before Asher had the chance to rise and kiss him, the room was an eruption of cheers. The music returned in a most upbeat tune, as the scattered friends came through to join the newly engaged pair and congratulate them.

"I thought you were going to figure it out the moment I gave you the picture," Asher revealed, once the chaotic hugging session had run its course. He looked all flushed and happy, which might have been the sweetest thing ever. "I almost went and added the scar in, but I couldn't get it to look right," he explained, pointing to his neck.

"What would you have done if you didn't have your brother's brief and… vaguely age inappropriate fascination with those movies?" Maya asked, smirking.

"I would probably have needed to come up with some kind of tearaway costume _on top_ of the suit," Asher beamed, looking over to Ray. They hadn't let go of one another's hand since that kiss, sealing the proposal. On this night where he already got to reclaim his childhood memories, to have this happen on top of it, there were wet streaks in the pale makeup over his face, and a bright smile to make those tears follow the turn of raised cheeks.

"I figured it out," Dylan was proud to declare.

"You two were attached at the hip more than he and his own twin, it would have been weirder if you didn't," Zay pointed out, which made the others laugh. "I had a suspicion, by the way," he raised his finger, so the record would be clear.

"This needs drinks!" Sophie decided, pulling Chiara along to help her make the rounds in the kitchen, where they had their habitual rotating bartender, especially at a party like this, where they had people who could and couldn't drink alcohol.

"You know, between this and our whole spookversary thing, Halloween is starting to feel a little more romantic than scary," Maya breathed, as she soon received a new cup.

"You want to go do something about that?" Lucas asked with a tip of his hat. The twinkle of mischief in her eye said it all, though it was followed with a look down at her costume.

"Not exactly bursting with the spooks right now, am I?"

"How much work would it take to turn you into Alice in Nightmareland?" She stared at him.

"Sometimes, your timing, I swear…" she pulled him to follow up the stairs. "You help."

"I'll do my best."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	118. Their Transformation Into Selves

April 27th 2020

_Chapter 118  
Their Transformation Into Selves_

It was very likely that her middle of the party adjustment to her costume would get in the way of one or two things relating to the anniversary. Still, by the time Lucas had helped her become – as he had dubbed her – Alice in Nightmareland, Maya was too pleased with the result to mind. If it had not been for the items she had borrowed from the theater, as a sort of rescue box for anyone missing some accessory or another in their costume, she might not have done so well, going from the innocent looking and bright colored girl to what could only be described as her dark reflection.

"I don't know if I should be concerned that this look is working for me," Lucas whispered as they stood at the top of the stairs, trying to figure out how to get her back down there. The goal was for no one to see her coming, the better to spook them, wasn't it?

"I think maybe the fact that it's me under there might be tipping your judgment a bit, no?" Maya grinned back at him.

"Might be some of that, true," he admitted, smiling back at her. "I'll go down there, see if I can get everyone looking away from the stairs, then you can sneak down and hide." She presented her fist in agreement, and he bumped it.

"Hey," she stopped him before he could go. "You did amazing tonight," she told him. He smiled again, leaning in to kiss her now before standing up again and pretending like all was normal as he went down the stairs. Maya stayed to her shadows, waiting for her moment.

From where she stood, she had a great view of the party as a whole, the people dancing, the ones standing or sitting around and talking… Lately it seemed as though she was turning into something of a mama hen, with all her chicks spinning and bumping into one another. She had Sam, and his girl trouble… girls trouble… and then Missy with her zombie awakening as she followed her own feelings for another… They were all of them important to her, in one way or another, and tonight felt as though it had the potential to make or break them all.

Downstairs, Lucas was attempting to find a way to get his fiancée clear passage to do her thing, and he could think of maybe one way or two, but neither one felt as though they'd grant success so much as chaos. And then, if that wasn't enough, his eyes had happened upon someone looking as though she needed peace more than a scare.

_Lucas: I might need a couple minutes._

_Maya: I saw her, too. Go, I'll figure it out._

"Hey, I thought you'd changed your mind about coming," Lucas approached Maeve, where she sat on the couch with a cup of pretzel sticks, munching one and then another. Her costume looked only halfway complete, as though she'd given up in the middle of the effort and then came to the party anyway. For knowing how hard she went on the decorations at the store, it was mildly troubling.

"Almost didn't," Maeve told him. "Only got here a few minutes ago." Lucas went and sat next to her. She offered her cup and he took a stick with a thankful nod.

"What's up?"

"I told my parents, about the baby," she revealed. From the look of her, he couldn't imagine it had gone so well. "It's not like I could hide it from them forever, we are going to see a lot of each other in the next six months or whatever…"

"Yeah…"

"I really wanted to keep them from getting excited, since I'm not keeping it, but then I got tripped up in what I was trying to say, and they figured it out. You should have seen them. They were so happy…" Lucas had met Maeve's father, once, when he'd dropped by the store and stopped to say hello to his daughter, and if her mother was anything like him, then yeah, he could see exactly how they would react to the idea that they were going to be grandparents.

"What'd you tell them?"

"I…" Maeve sighed. "I couldn't do it. I couldn't take it away from them. I just said not to tell anyone else, not yet. I went back home after that, to get ready to come here, and I… I don't know, my head was kind of all over the place. I wrote to him, asked if we could meet up sometime this week." 'Him,' her baby's father… She could barely bring him up like he was a person, much more than 'the guy who knocked her up.' "I sat there for a while, waiting, that's why I'm late. He hasn't replied yet, don't know if he will, but then I couldn't sit at home and wait anymore, so I got changed and I came. I forgot my costume at the store, so I had to improvise. Doesn't match my picture anymore." Lucas took in her half-hearted costume.

"Well, you're here now, Katniss… Want to dance?" It was all he could do for his co-worker and friend, to make her happy to have come here tonight, and it looked like maybe he was on his way to that.

Meanwhile, Nightmare Alice had snuck her way down successfully, thanks to a very controlled descent along the stairs, hidden behind the decorations draped from the banister. For once, she was glad for her stature, allowing her to make herself small. She got to the bottom and then darted to hide in the closet between the basement stairs and the kitchen. Now, she was in business, and the temptation to give a bit of a mischievous cackle was so strong… It was time.

She had her heart set on Riley as her first target. It couldn't be helped, could it? Her oldest friend just… spooked easily… so easily… Then again, as soon as she got out there and made her screech in frightened surprise, everyone would likely be up on her tricks, and she'd be good for no better than a few well-placed jump scares. If that was the case though… yeah, definitely Riley. She was dancing with Dylan, at the heart of the 'dance floor,' so Maya would have to weave her way through. She managed to startle a few people as she went, which only fuelled her to go forward. She also had to duck out of the way whenever she could see Riley was hearing people's reactions and clearly wondered what was going on. This only left her looking tense and on edge, which worked in Nightmare Alice's favor.

What happened next, she would only find out later, had come courtesy of Lucas and Maeve. She had spotted Maya as she made her approach, and so Lucas had told her what that was about, and then in a return of peak Maeve, she had suggested they do something to really maximize the effect. They had just barely managed it, but Lucas had made it to the power box, and at Maeve's signal, he'd cut the power. It had made everyone react, as it would, but then the power came back a moment later, and so did the lights, and a heartbeat later, several screams of surprise. In the two seconds where they had been pitched in darkness, Maya had stood to her height, bringing her to stand before the dancing pair where she had not been a moment ago. The sudden apparition made both Riley and Dylan jump out of their skins, and anyone else who happened to be looking in the direction of Nightmare Alice. To Maya's credit then, she had turned up the performance, quick on her feet as she ever was.

Lucas hadn't been in position to see it all unfold, but he heard the screams and grinned before coming back up from the basement. Maeve had had the presence of mind to film the whole thing, and she showed him the video of his beloved wife to be, prowling as their guests eventually realized who she was and relaxed.

"That was so good!" Maya laughed as she scurried toward them. Maeve showed her the video, too, and Maya demanded nothing more than to have it sent over for posterity.

Eventually, as any party had to, things started to wind down, and guests started to leave. Maya volunteered herself to drive Cecilia and Kai home, after the Cassidy siblings had gone on their way, driven by Junior. It was the first proper conversation she'd had with Kai Avelino, though she had seen him, hung out with him and his siblings years ago. He remembered her, too, as being on his sister's team as much as being someone who'd be there to play with them. Maya asked after the twins, though she was still in contact with both of them and could not wait to tell them about this night. She did not pry as to how his evening with Missy had gone, though his whole cheery demeanor said plenty.

After he was dropped off, it was just Maya and Cecilia, and after a minute and then another of silence, it was hard not to go and think about how this would come off to his brother's girlfriend… if she was still his girlfriend… She hadn't seen anything to suggest a breakup, but then there was this silence between them, which was generally not the case, so what was causing it?

But then Cecilia's phone gave a chirp, and she pulled it out to see the message, and Maya caught a quick glimpse of her new lock screen photo, a selfie of herself and Sam. His knight helmet was perched on top of her head, while her fairy crown was on his, and they were looking to one another, and they were smiling. The message looked short, but whatever it was, it left the girl at her side with a new smile on her face.

"Sam?" Maya guessed, and Cecilia looked over at her, turning the phone over on reflex.

"Yeah," Cecilia replied, still smiling. Maya couldn't keep from looking relieved at this, and Cecilia saw it. "We're okay," she nodded.

"That's good," Maya nodded back, hesitating briefly before asking what had convinced her to keep going rather than back away. Cecilia's eyes went into a thinking place, and Maya was about to apologize and say she didn't have to reply, but then Cecilia spoke first.

"I thought about all of it, about Sam, and Sam and me, and Dora… She likes him, too, I know she does, but that's not… I thought about Sam, so much, and…" She paused, that small smile creeping over her face once again as she looked to her phone, turned over in her lap. "He's got this stupid big heart, and he loves, and he loves, and he loves, and asking him to be any other way would be asking him not to be as good as he is… And he's really good…"

"Yeah, he is, isn't he?" Maya was smiling now, too, sort of touched by the girl's words, because they were so very true.

"So, if I know that, and I do, then… I can believe that he feels what he feels, for me, for her, and trust that he means what he says when he tells me he knows where he belongs, and he won't… We're good, basically. All of us."

After she'd dropped Cecilia off, and after driving back to the house to find Lucas and Sam in the midst of cleaning up, Maya had gone right along to her little brother, changed out of his armor for ease of movement, and she hugged him tight, kissing his cheek a couple times despite his half-hearted pleas for her to stop. His mood was so much lighter now, that even without Cecilia's words she would have had no doubt the two of them had mended… Halloween was over now, and it was on to the next step…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	119. Their Transformation Into the Night

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

April 28th 2020

_Chapter 119  
Their Transformation Into the Night_

"Oh, hey there," Maya smiled as she returned from the bathroom, where she had transformed back to a not so nightmare-like state, to find Lucas changed out of his own costume. "I know you," she teased.

"I know you, too," he smiled back.

"Yeah, you better," she hummed, drawn to his arms and a lingering kiss. It was after midnight now, November 1st… Nine years had now passed from the day they had shared the first of these, standing on a sidewalk on their way to school. The way he held her now, there would be much more than kissing in the time to come, they both knew it, both yearned for it. In Maya's case, it was a strong temptation to simply set aside the first phase of her anniversary plans, but she needed to keep steady. This fire in them could be tamed, if for a little while… She mumbled something, which got lost in their kiss but not so far as to go unheard.

"What's that?" Lucas asked, before reclaiming her lips.

"Anniversary," she finally managed to say, putting a hand to his chest, which finally got his attention.

"It is, yeah," he breathed, looking back at her with all that love in his eyes which only served to wobble her resolve to not just drag him to the bed right then and there.

"And it starts right now," Maya informed him. His eyebrow took a lift which felt almost like an echo of her own. "You might want to dress a bit warmer, it's getting cold out there."

"We're going somewhere?" Lucas was intrigued now.

"Somewhere, yeah," Maya smiled.

"What about Sam?"

"He's aware, and he'll be fine. Now, get ready, we don't want to be late." Looking at the clock, with the delay of her makeup removal, it was entirely possible, but she wasn't going to let it happen.

For about as long as they had been together, they'd had their 'assignments.' She would do Halloween, and he would do the anniversary. She had gotten to the point where she could do Halloween in her sleep, but the day that came after, that was new. Lucas had done this for her, for them, time and time again, and she would just look forward to the day the more it approached every year. Now that it was in her hands to put together this two-person celebration, she had wanted to make damn sure it would be a good and memorable one.

Nine years was a solid number, but it wasn't any sort of milestone like the next year's would be, but even then… It had made her realize how this would be their last dating anniversary before they were married. What would happen after that? They would have a brand new day to celebrate, in July, but even then… The whole spookversary/anniversary combo had become such a part of their lives that she couldn't imagine doing it anymore, and she was confident enough in the belief that Lucas would feel the same way, especially with number ten just around the corner, one year from now.

She wanted to get this one right. Sure, Lucas would take any scenario wherein she was somewhere and he was in that same place with her, no fuss, no frills. He loved her, and he wanted to be with her, and that was enough. That was every day. This day was about taking things to another level, something special for them to not just be in the same place physically but also in this same bond to their world, and their time together, so they might stop for a beat and say 'hey, look at us, all those years, and we're still here, and I love you as much as I did then, love you even more than that because of all these new memories we've made together since I fell for you and you fell for me.'

Figuring out what they would do had started out a lot like when she'd be trying to write a song from scratch, no inspiration already tickling at the back of her mind, just this blank page demanding content. It took several days after they had decided to switch roles before she even had anything. And then one Saturday afternoon, she'd been hanging out with Riley and Rosa at their apartment, and she'd let it slip that she was meant to be figuring this thing out. For a while, her friends and bandmates had tossed ideas at her, starting at a fairly reasonable place before sinking deeper and deeper into madness. Maya had tried to pull it all back in, to find a way to explain what she was trying to do, and in doing so…

"I need to make a call," she'd declared, dashing off with her phone. Much as she'd presumed it would all be more than fine, she'd worried just a bit that she'd be asking too much.

"Where are we going?" Lucas asked, when they had finished getting ready and gone down to the car. They'd checked on Sam, finding he was asleep already.

"First things first," Maya came around and held up a rolled scarf. He frowned for a moment, not following, before it all came together.

"Is this to get me back for the night I proposed?" he asked as she moved around him to fasten the makeshift blindfold over his eyes.

"Just sharing the experience," Maya told him with a singsong turn in her voice which just made him chuckle.

"Alright, fine, just… yeah, okay…" he felt around as she helped him get into the passenger seat.

"Hands in," she warned, and he did as told, hearing the door close next to him.

She talked to him the whole way, and if he ever tried to figure out where they were going he quickly lost track. The night's party had been eventful enough that they had plenty to talk about, and they hadn't even made it all the way through by the time they came to a stop.

"Are we… wherever we are?" Lucas asked.

"Obviously," Maya chuckled.

"Maya…"

"You can take off the blindfold now. If I take you out there like this, they'll think I kidnapped you or something," she told him. Lucas swept the scarf up from over his eyes, which were hit with a sudden burst of light. Once he'd blinked the surprise away, what he'd first thought had to be something else than what was really out ahead of them, he discovered that he had seen correctly.

There was a plane, a small one, the kind that summoned the nickname 'Air Zvolensky' to mind. It was primed to go, open and waiting for its passengers.

"Wha…"

"Come on, Fly Trap, we don't want to miss our flight," Maya smirked as she finished parking and turned off the ignition. He still looked stunned as he followed, and it was so hard not to laugh.

"Where are we going? Did you… Sophie?"

"She was more than happy to assist, as was her mother," Maya told him. "As for the where, I'm not going to tell you, because surprises are nice, but I think you should be able to figure it out. This is about you and me, and big moments," she reminded him.

Lucas watched as Maya retrieved a couple of bags from the trunk before leading the way toward the plane, which they soon boarded. They were taking off shortly, with compliments from Mrs. Zvolensky. They were settled in, their seats at the ready with whatever they'd need if they chose to sleep through the flight.

"I'm working tomorrow," Lucas realized.

"No, you're not," Maya assured him. "I already cleared it with Maeve, she took care of it. We'll be back in time for your classes on Monday." It was all a bit of a whirlwind, but then of course it was. That was to be expected when Maya was making the plans… She'd thought of everything.

Between the time difference and their flight, they landed in New York at 6:30. They had slept through the flight after all, the better not to be dragging their feet through this brief escape. Lucas was met with a new surprise when they were picked up from the airport by Farkle Minkus. He drove them over to his place, where Lucas and Maya got to see Isadora as well, and also baby Ada, who was growing more and more by the day to look like her mother.

"Take this, go on and get ready," Maya instructed, back on task as anniversary director.

"At your service," Lucas smirked, tipping his head as he received the bag she handed him. As he moved to go, he stopped and turned back to her, pointing to his face. She took this to mean 'kiss me,' and he had to grin when she did. "I meant what am I doing with the beard?" he clarified, which now left her with a similar expression as he'd had a moment before.

"I… I don't know…" she admitted, with a sheepish little smile. "I am happy… whatever your face looks like, I mean, there's this right now," she reached up to touch his cheek. "And it was weird at first, with the scratching, but now I kind of got used to it, and it just… I have a lot of feelings, you know?" Lucas chuckled.

"Yeah, I know," he confirmed.

"But then there's what's under that beard, which is just… I know that face very well," she turned her smile up to him once again. "So it's really up to you, and what you feel like doing now that Halloween's over."

"Well," he thought about it for a moment. "I could keep it through the holidays…" he finally pointed out, and her eyes lit up in understanding.

"Oh, yes, let's do that," she tapped his chest with excitement, which earned her a few more scratchy kisses and made her laugh.

So, the beard stayed, and Maya and Lucas went and changed, from post-party travelers into day trip capital-D Date mode. Once they had gotten to this point, Lucas had a fairly good idea where they were headed, and as Farkle once again served as their driver he was proven correct. They walked into the diner, and one look to the side showed a reserved sign, on top of the table where they'd been sitting, ten years ago, the first time Maya had been back to New York since the move.

This was where they'd kissed for the first time.

The dating part had taken another year, but the kiss… It had now reached its 10th anniversary, its very own milestone, and they were back at the scene of it all. She'd been fourteen and he fifteen, and looking back on it from their new vantage point, it was impossible to imagine they'd been that young at the time, that so much time had passed. Lucas' eyes went to the back of Maya's head on reflex, finding the spot where she'd bumped it from looking under the table. He had come around to get a look, and they'd been there, in that booth, looking at each other…

There had been so much going through their minds at the time, this confusion of youth and feelings that were still so new. How were they supposed to even reconcile what it all meant, and then account for the underlying issues, mostly hers… But in that one moment, it had been as though the world had fallen away, and they had found a path to truth, their truth. She had taken his hands in hers, and there had been the flicker of a look in her eyes, like she was surprising herself as much as she was surprising him. The air had felt just a bit electric, and then they were leaning in to one another, and it had happened. His first, her first, which was a recipe for uncertainty and clumsiness, but they'd gotten through it respectably enough.

"Your dad's not going to pop through the door, is he?" Lucas joked, recalling Shawn's coming in just seconds after that first kiss. Maya chuckled.

"He is back in Texas, last I heard, so I think you're in the clear," she teased.

They were led to their table, which really was that… It was theirs, they had marked it, all those years ago, which had made for the whole head bump incident. Even now, they had to take a moment and confirm, discreet as possible, that the carvings were still there.

"You know if we ever caught Sam doing anything like this we'd probably yell his head off," Maya pointed out, as they had both had their look and found their initials were indeed where they had crookedly carved them.

"That's if he would ever actually do it," Lucas countered, and Maya snickered.

"Okay, good point."

"When I called to check on him earlier, he literally told me everything he did after he woke up and all the way to when he left for school," Lucas went on, which only felt her laughter.

After breakfast, they had left the diner and gone walking through the city for a while. On that day ten years ago, they had ended up in that booth after spending time in the city, and after Maya had been left to feel that she had no place left in the city that had been her home for the better part of her life. Being back here now, as she would tell Lucas while they walked, her feelings had changed. She'd been living in Texas now for a little over eleven years, which meant they were not so far away to a point where she would have been in either state for equal amounts of time, right before Texas started to take the lead and run with it. For all that, still, she couldn't exactly account for the first three or four years of her life, so really… the scales had already tipped, her life, the most significant parts of it, the ones she'd want to hold on to the most, belonged to Austin, and Houston. And now New York… She was at peace, being back here and regarding it as where she had been born, where she had been shaped as a person, the heart of her. Some of it had been bad, but not all of it, and the parts that had been bad hadn't left her with scars alone, they'd built her up, too, in ways she could now be proud of…

"I love this city," Lucas declared, when she'd said her part.

"Yeah?" she smiled at him. He nodded.

"I look around and… I see you in it, it reminds me of you."

"I feel that way about Austin and you," Maya understood, warmed by his words.

"I think…" he started, then hesitated. She gave him a look. "Maybe, in a few years, we could try just… sharing our time, between Austin and New York. Like, in the summer." Maya blinked, surprised at the suggestion, but after a few seconds… She was intrigued.

"Alright, Huckleberry, make me a pitch."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	120. Their Rally Around Friends

April 29th 2020

_Chapter 120  
Their Rally Around Friends_

November always got to feel like it went by in the blink of an eye. They were just swept along on this river of holidays, and fall weather, and so it would get to be that one second the city was covered in spooky pumpkins, and ghosts, and witches, and then it would be turkeys and cornucopias… Thanksgiving was just a few days away, and Maya and Lucas were hosting their families for dinner, which was proving to be a bit more stressful than they had anticipated. It wasn't as though they'd never had one side or the other or even both at once over for dinner before, but this wasn't any old dinner, was it? It was a dinner, a day, that came with a capital letter, and special items, and a parade…

"My mom just texted," Maya told Lucas as they walked along the grocery store aisles. He turned his head away from where he'd been looking for a spice. "A kid in the twins' class told them about what happened to turkeys before they end up as dinner, and now Gracie is mortified and won't eat it," she revealed, which left him with much the same expression as her, which went along the line of 'I get it, and I'm sorry, but I also kind of want to laugh a little.'

"So, we need to come up with an alternative?" Lucas guessed.

"I will channel Chiara and make her pasta," Maya declared with a nod, the solution having come to her about as soon as she'd read her mother's text. Gracie was a pasta fiend through and through, especially the ones made by her big sister, who was reasonably proud of her own growth in the kitchen in recent years. Shawn would tease her that it helped a lot that she'd started following recipes instead of previous instincts which had led to one or two truly troubling creations. "Maybe some of the other kids will want that, too. If she's the only one eating that, she'll give those eyes, you know?"

"Familiar with those, yeah," Lucas nodded. "Do we need to add anything for that?"

It would be the two of them, along with Shawn and Katy, the twins, MJ, and Haley, and then Tom and Melinda, and Pappy Joe and Patty, too. Sam had briefly meant to go back to Tucson to spend Thanksgiving with the family out there, especially with them headed to New Orleans in December to visit James' side while he had chosen to spend Christmas in Texas. But then Cecilia had asked if he would come over to her house, to help bolster this small dinner she was set to have with her father in a continued effort to strengthen things between the often absent professor and his daughter. He could not say no to that, so Sam chose to stay.

On the whole, everything appeared to be back on track in the land of Sam and Cecilia and Dora. After the shake-up of Dora and Adam's break, and then Adam's new relationship essentially removing him from their unit of friends, and the issue of overlapping feelings, it really felt as though Halloween had allowed the trio to reset their clocks. Then again, after two years of this, both Maya and Lucas were just a bit curious about whether they would run into more drama on the following year's party. For the trio's sake, they hoped this was a duology and not a trilogy.

More than three weeks having passed since the last day of October, they could definitely say that this year's party had been the field for a lot of developments. While it had seen a return to peace for Sam, it had also brought a pair of young zombie folk closer. From having been little more than classmates for as long as they could remember, suddenly Missy Sanderson and Kai Avelino were growing more and more inseparable by the day. There had been no talk of dates or whether Kai felt for Maya and Lucas' young neighbor in the same way she did, not yet. For now, they were becoming friends, which seemed to be good enough as far as Missy was concerned. She wasn't ready to tempt fate and risk losing what they already had, which was pretty solid and wonderful.

Every time Lucas went up to the farm in the morning, whenever they would meet on the road as they walked their respective dogs, whenever Missy would just pop in out of the blue, they would clock no more than a minute or two before some variation of 'I was talking to Kai…' or 'Kai texted me…' or 'Kai and I were at school and…' And from what they had been hearing from Kai's older brother and sister, they were getting a similar kind of chatter from him about the farm girl.

Coming out of the grocery store, Maya and Lucas ran into Ramona and a couple of former classmates of hers from when she'd been in university here in Austin, while the rest of them had been in Houston. Neither of them had followed on that same path as her, and they had sort of lost touch because of it, but after the divorce, after going back to the apartment which was now hers alone, she had ended up reaching out to Gabriela and Ariana, who had been like sisters to her for a good four years. They had been catching up, and spending a lot more time together, and while Gabriela lived happily with her on again/off again boyfriend, Ariana had recently been left to crash on their couch due to a failed engagement and had been on the verge of having to consider moving back to New York with her family. Now, instead, she and Ramona were looking to become roommates in the weeks to come, which would also mean Maya no longer had to be her virtual roomie.

She was doing so much better now than she had at the start of the semester, when everything had gone crumbling with her and Robbie, and by now the same could be said for Robbie, too. He had only really started to get back on track after his little half-brother had started on the mend. His surgery had been a success, and all signs pointed to his making a full recovery. Robbie had become so attached to the little guy, and in turn it had allowed all four of the boys to really get to know and care for one another. It was complicated, with the secret of this other family, but between the brothers it was really not so complicated, something Maya was perhaps best placed to understand.

Thinking of Robbie and his brother, of course, they would also be left to think about Josie. Even now, none of the others had any idea that she was the one who had been Scott's donor. Only Lucas knew, and Maya along with him, and once Josie herself had realized they did know, she had allowed for visits. Lucas had tried to play it cool, as he passed the notes he'd promised her, but clearly his attentiveness had been a giveaway.

It was the first time they had been in her apartment, and the Josie they found here felt a whole lot more like the person they vaguely recalled meeting at Willow and Lion's wedding. The fact that she was presenting herself to them in this manner was as good of a sign as any that she was trusting them as she did very few people in her life. Thinking back to the girl they had known in Houston, who had barely felt like a person at all, the one they'd found here felt so much smaller and yet so much more real. Even so, they were also left with the impression that it almost took more for her to show this side than to be this construct of herself she presented at school, even now that she'd pulled back some of the way.

"Hey, when you see Maeve, can you check what she's going to be doing for Thanksgiving?" Maya asked as they loaded their bags into the car. All they knew for now was what Lucas had heard from her a few days back, which was that she wasn't going to her parents' on the day. It would have been too much of a mine field for her to navigate with her secrets.

So far, they had kept their promise not to tell anyone about the baby, but the gathering would have felt like too much of an opportunity for something to be said where it wasn't supposed to be said. This went for _that_ secret, as much as for the one she still held over them, the part where she wasn't looking to raise the child. She didn't want to tell them while she was still figuring it all out and end up getting it wrong. She may not have been looking to remain this baby's mother, but for now it was still her responsibility to look out for that small life, and she would do right by it.

Being the only ones who knew about it, Lucas and Maya were also the only people she could turn to whenever something new was added to the mix. She had told them how she had met with the baby's father, the first time, and chickened out from telling him why she had sought him out. It wasn't until the second time, which he had mistaken for a date, that she'd told him how she was pregnant and the child was his. Maya and Lucas had been on the premises, just in case… mostly to keep her from flaking again, and after Maeve had said her part, the guy had looked ready to pass out.

There was no questioning of whether she was telling the truth, if she was trying to saddle him with a charge that was not really his to carry. She said it was his baby and he trusted it. That was one part though, and with the way Maeve had looked back at them, the second part was possibly the one that frightened her the most. Now he knew about the baby, great. But what would he say when she explained the conundrum she found herself in? She wasn't going to keep it. She would give birth to it, but that would be the extent. This was his kid too though, so she wanted him to have a say. If he was ready to take the child and raise it, that was what they would do. If he wasn't, then it would mean adoption.

He hadn't made up his mind on that day, and as of yet he was still weighing his options. But he was around. He would check in with Maeve regularly, and he wanted to go with her whenever she had appointments, which he had already done once. What would happen next, well… they'd just have to wait and see.

"Yeah, I'll do that, absolutely," Lucas nodded. Even if she couldn't be with her own family this year, he couldn't see why she couldn't be with another family.

They climbed into the car and drove off toward home. On the radio, Ree Forster sang Maya's words, and it reminded them the concert was drawing closer by the day. The way things were headed, Maya's third contract song would be hitting the airwaves right around that time, even as the TXNY produced Christmas album would be coming about. It would make for some very magical holidays, but for now they had this one holiday to get through first, _their_ holiday to host, with a whole lot of food to prepare, now including pasta for the turkey-weary Gracie Hunter, and an additional guest, once Lucas invited her.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	121. Their Rally Around Dinner

April 30th 2020

_Chapter 121  
Their Rally Around Dinner_

Bright and early on Thanksgiving morning, the house on the lane was wide awake and full of activity. Not all of their guests would be arriving early, some wouldn't come until well in the afternoon, but one small crowd – in number and in size – would be coming along, the better to watch the parade with their big sister, which meant no lying around, no matter how cozy any of them were. Katy had sent a text when they were about to leave, and by then they had just finished getting dressed for the day, which left no more than twenty minutes for any of them to get everything done that needed to be done by the time any of them arrived.

"What time are you going out to Cecilia's?" Lucas asked Sam, as the two of them moved the table from the kitchen and out into the living room. After some consideration, they had decided to move the couch and everything else as though they were in party mode, the better to set the table in full extension out here, giving everyone some room to breathe where they might not have managed it, being as many of them as they would be.

"She said to be there at four. I don't know if she actually wants me to come earlier, maybe I can help with things. She might not even need me to, but…" Sam shrugged. But he just wanted to help, to show support in his girlfriend's attempt at a first proper Thanksgiving dinner since before she'd lost her mother and her father had made retreating into his office something of a default mode.

"How about you text her around three, see where she's at, and then you'll know," Lucas suggested.

"That could work…" Sam looked encouraged.

"I can drive you once you know," Lucas promised.

"Okay, but first we have to call back home, for Mom and everyone," Sam reminded, to which Lucas gave a nod. He had not forgotten, nor would he have been able to, with how Sam had reminded them already several times in the past week. After nearly a year and a half out here with them, it still showed in him how determined he was not to let any holiday or birthday slip by unnoticed, not to have any of his siblings back in Tucson believe he had somehow forgotten them. It was very rare that they all didn't see each other, whether they'd visit or be visited, on or around those days, in fact he was sure this was the first time, which made it no wonder to Lucas that Sam's more neurotic side would be flaring up.

It reminded him so much of Maya, back in those early days, as she had been faced with the realization that she would not get to go to New York and be with her old friends over the holidays. She had counted on it so much, and when she hadn't been able to go… Of course, she'd had a few things to help her through that, and he counted himself lucky to have been one of those. Another had been Shawn Hunter, though Lucas doubted either he or Maya had any idea on that day how much his arrival would impact their lives in the long run.

"We made pies!" Nellie Hunter proclaimed as her big sister opened the door and found her there, holding up a covered plate.

"Oh, thank you!" Maya took the plate with a sneaking smile, making as though she was about to shut the door and go eat the whole thing by herself.

"No!" Nellie giggled. "That's for everyone! And just for dessert, it's morning now!"

"Alright, fine, I guess," Maya sighed dramatically, pulling her little sister in a one-armed hug and kissing the top of her head.

"Is it started?" Nellie turned to look at the television.

"No, you're good, still got a few mi…"

"Hurry up, it's going to start!" Nellie called back toward the car. Gracie stood there, waiting with another pie in her arms, while MJ, who had just been helped out on to the ground, came dashing at the call. Shawn was pulling a couple of bags from the back, while Katy had just gotten little Haley from her seat. Once they started to head toward the house, Gracie followed and finally went ahead toward her sisters, setting her pie down where she could before hugging Maya.

"Hey, Mouse Mouse," Maya smiled down at her as she looked up. "I made spaghetti," she whispered at her, and Gracie smiled before dashing over to where Nellie already sat in front of the television, on the ground, with Trix and Lou sniffing about. MJ approached Maya now, like a four and a half-year-old spy, sneaking looks over to the twins before pulling a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket and holding it up to his sister. "For me?" she asked.

"Secret," MJ whispered before going to join the girls. Maya unfolded it to find it was a drawing he had made, of a happy turkey and himself next to it. She had to keep from laughing, knowing how much he loved sharing his drawings with her, but also grasped the fact that Gracie was in a state where she would not appreciate it the same way.

"Ya!" two-year-old Haley come tottering toward her when she was set down on the porch. Maya scooped up the youngest Hunter and peppered her with the kisses she deserved. Her littlest sibling was only getting bigger by the day, it seemed, and it was making Maya emotional in ways she had not expected.

"The one and only," Maya confirmed as the girl giggled, and wriggled, and held on tight with strong, tiny hands… She was like a doll, polished and sweet, which only heightened her status as being the youngest of their bunch, especially where Shawn was concerned. Maya and her mother would joke around from time to time, at the notion of Shawn Hunter being granted four daughters out of five kids, and what that would look like once those three young ones grew up and started bringing boys around…

"Save me a seat, I'll be right there!" Shawn called out to the kids now crowded around the television, stopping at the door for a beat to greet his eldest before heading into the kitchen with his bags.

"He wanted me to let you know he'll be having whatever you have for Gracie, too," Katy came up to her daughter and hostess at last.

"Okay, sure," Maya nodded at once. "Solidarity?"

"Oh, every step of the way. Gracie's been asking a lot of questions since the whole turkey debacle started, and now she won't eat meat at all. I wasn't sure what we were going to do about it, but Shawn, he's been looking into other options for her, and he's been having whatever she's been having, every time," Katy revealed, with a smile on her face that showed just how much this small gesture of her husband's for their daughter would touch her heart.

It had not exactly been the intent for all of them to end up sitting on the ground as they watched the parade in the transformed living room, but then when Shawn had gone to join the kids he had been beckoned down to their level by Haley with an increasingly familiar 'Da come!' and so in time the rest of the group was made to follow suit, or suffer the stare of the little doll.

"Asher!" MJ pointed to the screen when a familiar face appeared, singing with his cast mates in a performance from his new stage role.

"No, bud, that's not him, that's Joey, remember?" Lucas asked, as the boy didn't so much sit with them as he stood behind Lucas, hands perched on his shoulders. He would move around like this, sometimes standing behind one of his parents, or his sister, or Sam, like he couldn't sit still in wait for the moment he knew would come, at the end, when Santa would show up.

"Oh… Sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure," Lucas chuckled.

"Oh… Okay," MJ shrugged and went on watching.

Maeve arrived around lunch, standing like a nervous wreck with a plastic container which held her offering to the meal. Lucas wondered at first if she was nervous about them possibly spilling the beans on her secret, but then he quickly shifted to realize maybe she was mostly uncertain of how she would be when surrounded by small children, like something in her brain would cause her to go and change her mind due to exposure and hormones. The greatest challenge to this resolve could easily have been Haley, when instead she soon became locked in conversation with seven-year-old Gracie regarding her recent dietary shift. Leave it to the bookstore clerk to come up with a number of possible books to recommend, all off the top of her head and, in time, through her phone, as the small brunette looked on, stuck at her side in full attention.

By the time Sam called to Maya and Lucas that it was time to call over to Tucson, so he could then head over to Cecilia's, the Friars of both Austin and Houston were on the verge of arriving. The trio excused themselves and headed up into the attic with the laptop. They had barely gotten themselves set up when the call came in ahead of them getting a chance to do it. Sam clicked to answer and smiled to find younger sister Cara smiling back at him. He loved all his siblings equally, but it was easy to understand why he would miss her the most. She had been in his life the longest of them all, an honor he couldn't even say would have gone to Maya in another world, as he would never have existed in it.

"Hi!" Cara waved to all of them now.

"Hey, weren't we the ones who were going to call you?" Maya inquired of her younger sister.

"You were, but I couldn't wait anymore," Cara explained.

"Why, what's going on?" Sam asked. Cara opened her mouth to reply and just as quickly closed it again, looking around.

"Nothing, just miss you," she finally shrugged, fooling absolutely no one.

"You are such a bad liar," Sam shook his head at her.

"Better than you," she shot back with a smirk. "Not that I'm lying now," she added after a beat, just as Eliza, Emma, and Wyatt came hurrying into frame, waving and talking over one another while Teddy casually appeared in the back, eldest of the bunch as long as Sam was in Texas.

"Alright, alright, make some room," James called as he appeared, hoisting up Wyatt so he might sit on the couch and deposit the boy on his knees, while Abigail was given the seat on the other side of Cara when Eliza and Emma scooted down on the ground in front of the others.

"Happy Thanksgiving you three," Abigail smiled. As often as they all spoke and visited one another ever since Sam had moved in with them, she still had that look in her eyes like a day away from her son was as bad as a month. As they all returned the greeting, they could just see how every one of them back in Tucson was eager about something, not just Cara, and it didn't take long for it all to be put out in the open. Rather than to hold on to pretense any longer than they had to, they came right out with the news. They had plenty to be thankful for this year, but right about now, the item at the top of the list was the discovery of six days prior that Abigail and James were expecting.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	122. Their Rally Around Truth

May 1st 2020

_Chapter 122  
Their Rally Around Truth_

By the end of the night, it really got to feel as though the news about the impending arrival of a Hart-Lane baby had cleared away any and all anxieties Maya or Lucas might have had about hosting the year's Thanksgiving dinner. The only one who was possibly affected in a different way was Maeve, who now found herself having more difficulty over keeping her own baby secret when the main topic of conversation seemed to revolve around babies. The parents around the table all had their specific points of view on experiences and what it would be like for those two, starting all over again at their age, and with all those grown and growing kids in their midst already. For once, Maya and Lucas were more than happy to field the looks they were getting, like a number of people at their table was growing eager toward the eventuality of grandchildren or great grandchildren.

Maeve made it through with her secret intact, though shortly after dinner she claimed she needed to get going and Lucas drove her home before returning to find the rest of their guests were getting ready to head out as well, with two of them looking to a long drive back to Houston, and others with a quartet of young children in need of bed time. Goodbyes were said, and soon enough it was just the two of them and the dogs. Most of the picking up had been done already, something Lucas knew would have been spearheaded by his mother.

"Was Maeve okay?" Maya finally got to ask.

"Hard to say," Lucas scratched at the back of his head. "She didn't really talk on the drive out to her place. I tried to get her talking at first, but it wasn't getting anywhere so I let her be."

"Yeah, that's probably for the best," Maya nodded. "I can only imagine what she must have been feeling like. It's kind of my fault, I should have known not to tell everyone about Abigail, not when she was there and…"

"It's not like that," Lucas promised her, moving over to put his arms around her waist, which made her smile as she looked to him. "So, another sibling, huh?" It didn't matter that they shared no blood whatsoever, so there was no need of questioning whether this would be a new brother or sister to her.

"I'm starting to lose count," Maya laughed. "Four, and four, and two, now one more... That's twelve of us now, which is just crazy to think about, isn't it? From solo to a dozen… and every one of them I love, every one of them… they just make me better," she couldn't stop smiling, maybe even cry a bit, and Lucas was right there to sweep those happy tears dry.

"Between her, and Maeve, and whenever Zay and Nadine trying… that's a lot of…" Lucas was cut off as they heard the key in the door and turned to find Sam had returned from Cecilia's.

"Hey!" Maya went toward him. "How was it out there?" Her brother looked like a kid who'd been busted coming in after curfew, which he wasn't in any way.

"Huh? Oh… it was good," he replied. "I should get to bed, I have a lot of work to do tomorrow," he went on, moving up the stairs. Archer barked and followed after him. Lucas and Maya looked to one another.

"Was it too good to be true to think trouble was behind us?" Maya frowned.

"I'm not sure that's what that is," Lucas told her.

"What is it then?"

"Well, earlier, when we were on the call and Abigail said about the baby, I could have sworn I saw this look go over Sam's face. I don't know what it was exactly, but it was almost like he was upset. He looked fine after that, and then Cecilia's dad came to pick him up and he was gone, but now… I don't know."

"You think he's unhappy about the new sibling?" That hardly sounded like Sam, who was a stellar big brother all around, whether it was to the siblings he had grown up with, or the ones he had gotten via his mother's second marriage, or even to the young Hunters, who were only siblings to him by virtue of their being his sister's siblings. They were as much family to him as any of the rest, and they loved him like a brother, too. So why would this one be any different?

"I don't know what he's feeling, we haven't talked about it," Lucas pointed out, and the look passing between them said it all: maybe they should talk about it with him. "Should we wait until tomorrow?" Maya considered this for a moment before taking a deep breath and letting it out.

"If we wait, we're leaving him to a bad night's sleep. If we go…"

"We might not fix it, but at least we'll have tried?" he guessed. Maya nodded.

So, they made their way up to Sam's room, only to find that he wasn't in it. He wasn't in the bathroom either, but then the attic door was open, and as Maya climbed up the steps, she spotted her brother sitting on the bean bag, looking into the telescope view, pointed toward the window in the roof.

"Last minute stargazing?" Maya asked. Sam didn't look away.

"I come up here sometimes, helps me sleep when I look out there for a little while," he replied. Maya climbed up the rest of the way, Lucas behind her, and the two of them went and sat on either side of Sam, waiting silently until he'd look back at them.

"What's on your mind?" Maya asked, lightly prodding her brother's arm.

"Nothing," Sam shook his head.

"You sure about that?" Maya wasn't convinced, and he knew better than to assume that she was. "Did something happen at Cecilia's?" she asked, to rule it out.

"No, everything was good, really. She made the whole turkey on her own, and it was really good. Her father said that she got that from her mother, that after she died he and Cecilia mostly ate take-out or went out to restaurants, because if feeding them was left to him, they would both have starved or been poisoned. Cecilia said that's why she started learning some more about cooking, because she actually got tired of pizza for a while." He smiled as he said all this, so they could believe him when he said that everything had gone well tonight. That was one possibility removed, even though it brought them back to the other hypothesis…

"Is this about your mom?" Lucas slowly asked. Sam looked at him, like he didn't understand what he meant.

"What, because of the baby?" he finally asked. "No, that's great, really. I told Cecilia about it, and we talked for a while trying to decide if I wanted it to be a boy or a girl. If it's a boy, then that'll even it out, four and four, but that's not all that matters. Personally, I could think of a lot of reasons, one way or the other, so really… brother or sister, I'm good," he nodded.

Again, they could tell he was being honest about it, that he was happy about his future sibling. And yet… the hiccup, whatever it was, it definitely had to do with this, they just weren't sure how exactly.

"Don't stay up here too late, okay?" Maya finally told him.

"I won't," he promised, and she scooted over, kissing him on the cheek and briefly hugging him. He hugged her back and then she got up, motioning for Lucas to follow. He clapped Sam's shoulder and left him to his stargazing. The couple left the attic and headed back down to the kitchen.

"What do you think?" Lucas quietly asked.

"You remember when we were figuring out where we would go for college?" Maya responded with a question of her own.

"I do," he nodded. "You had trouble deciding where you were going to go. The twins were like a year old, and you didn't want to… Oh…" Lucas paused as he started to see what she was getting at. Her thought was that the thing that made her brother upset was that he would be out here, in Austin, while his mother went through this pregnancy, and when this new brother or sister would be born, and go through all those early stages, and who knew how much, or whether he or she would be the only one. It would have hit him all at once, him and that fast-thinking brain of his.

"I had a bit of that, too, when MJ came along, and then Haley, but by then we were just two hours away, and we could get back whenever we wanted… mostly… Tucson is a lot closer than New York would have been, but it's still too far for casual visits, and he's sixteen, and in college…"

"So, what do we do?" Lucas wondered.

"I don't know… I don't know that there's anything we _can_ do, not really, short of him transferring off to a school back in Arizona, and I don't think he'd go that far. But…" she trailed off, shaking her head to herself.

"It's going to be on his mind," Lucas fill in the blanks, and Maya turned to him with a sigh. "Like there was any doubt he was related to you," he offered a light joke, which worked well enough in making her laugh just a bit as he held on to her.

"Not a boring day in sight around here, is there?"

"Nope," he smiled down at her. "Turned out pretty well, didn't it? Brother woes aside, secret babies aside…"

"Turkey drama aside?" Maya followed along in the same tone, and Lucas bit back a laugh.

As thankful as Gracie Hunter had been for her spaghetti, which had also been consumed by her father, brother, and little sister, she would keep the others' plates, and her eyes would look as though they were windows to the terrors her classmate had revealed to her. After a while, she'd asked if she could take her plate and go eat somewhere else. She had been asked to stay at the table with the rest of them, so she had spent the remainder of the meal staring into her plate, even after it was emptied, rather than to look anywhere else and see what she didn't want to see. Sitting next to her, Nellie had worked over time to eat her bits of turkey meat so as to make it disappear and allow her twin to at least look at her, but it had only worked so far as to have the two seven-year-olds muttering to one another.

"Yeah, besides _all_ of that, it was a pretty solid day," Maya smiled. "If you ask me, a little drama isn't a bad thing. Makes things memorable."

"I'll definitely remember this one," Lucas agreed.

"Good, I'll quiz you in five years," Maya smirked.

"Ah, and me without my notes," Lucas sighed, which made her chuckle.

"This will reflect poorly on your record," she 'scolded.'

"I have ways to make up for it though…"

"Oh, I know you do," Maya hummed.

When they went back up the stairs to get ready for bed, Maya couldn't help but stop in and check what her brother was up to. Sam had finally left the attic and gone to bed. As far as she could tell, he was asleep, and she hoped that was actually the case. He'd been doing well enough with being away from the rest of his family, but sometimes they couldn't help but remember he was still a kid, and while this place was very much his home, the vast majority of his heart continued to see home as being the place where he had his parents there with him, and the rest of his siblings, too.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	123. Their Rally Around Plans

May 2nd 2020

_Chapter 123  
Their Rally Around Plans_

"Yes, absolutely, you will receive the list on Friday at the latest. Yes… Alright, thank you."

As she hung up the phone, Maya had a moment of just hearing her own voice that made her smile. Every so often, her father would come to pick her mother up from the theater, and some of her siblings would be along for the ride, so they would naturally come and say hello to their big sister, too. On a few of those times, she'd received calls and had to answer them while the twins looked on. They would look so amused, and finally, Maya had asked what was so funny. Gracie, of course, wouldn't say a word, but then Nellie was much too amused to stay quiet, and she explained that she thought Maya sounded like a 'grown up' when she answered office calls.

"I'm a what now?" she would pretend to be shocked, which would make both girls laugh.

She didn't know if she would qualify it as a 'grown up' voice, she was just putting forth as much of a voice that would get people to trust she knew what she was talking about, not some kid or… Alright, maybe they had a point. Personally, she thought she sounded a lot like their mother when she was on a theater call. She wondered what her mother thought she sounded like when _she _was on the…

"Maya?"

She blinked, thinking for a moment that she was conjuring up that voice in her head, only to realize her mother stood just at her office door.

"Hey! Sorry, I was just… What's up?" she sat up. Something about working with her mother made her very conscientious as to whether she was slouching or not. Katy stepped into the office and shut the door. When she turned around, she had a great big smile on her face which gave Maya pause as she tried to interpret it. "Mom?" she stood from her chair, wondering more and more what this was about. If this was _another_ new sibling, she was going to lose her mind…

"I got the part!" Katy whispered excitedly, and Maya's breath released before she could go ahead and hurry into her mother's arms to congratulate her.

"I knew you would," she squeezed her tight.

"It's going to complicate things," her mother declared with a bit of a sigh, like she could only be so happy without also feeling guilty for doing this even though others would have to make some sacrifices in order for her to be able to go out to Dallas for the performances. Mostly, it would be likely to affect the Hunter kids, who might have to go without their mother for days at a time. It would have been one thing if they were all still very small, but the twins were in school now, and MJ in preschool, and Haley in daycare… They couldn't all go with her, and even if they had, someone would have had to go with them…

"Dad and I already told you we would make it work if you got it, and now you did, so we will," Maya stated, as though it was the simplest thing in the world. "Okay?" she jostled her mother's arms so she would get excited again. Katy laughed and she was hugged again for it.

A knock at the door halted the mini celebration, and when Maya looked to the window panel next to her door and spotted a familiar looking crutch, she went to open the door. The surprise of Cecilia's visit was one thing, but the discovery that she was accompanied by Dora Cassidy only heightened it.

"Hey," Maya smiled. "What are you doing here?" As Katy excused herself and went back to her office, the girls walked in.

"I texted Dora at lunch, and we got to talking," Cecilia explained, looking over to her friend. "I told her about Thanksgiving, and how, well… Sam's been kind of off the last few days, distracted," she went on, as Dora gave a nod to indicate she agreed with this assessment. Maya looked to the two of them and let out a breath.

Oh, she'd been aware of it, too, how could she not? She saw Sam every day back home, and it was as the girls said it. His mind was in many places and rarely was that place centered on what was happening around him. The news of his mother's pregnancy had more or less run through his mind like a chaos beast, unlocking all those little pockets where he would think about home and how he missed his family until they sprang from their hiding places and melded into a single, raging beast. Now, that beast sat in the middle of his mind, blocking the view he might have had of the rest of the world. And every day, the beast grew stronger.

"I know, I've seen it," Maya told the girls, motioning for them to sit in front of her desk, while she brought her own chair around to be with theirs.

"He misses his family, his other family," Dora stated, in a voice that said plainly 'we all know this, but someone has to actually say it.' "Maybe we could go and see them, just over the weekend," she suggested.

"From experience, that doesn't tend to go the way you think," Maya had to tell her, much as she appreciated the initiative. "Mostly it just confuses things even more, and then he'll come back here and it'll either be the same or it'll be worse."

"Oh…" Dora bowed her head a moment. Cecilia looked much the same, which told Maya this might have been her thought as well.

"Look, Sam chose to come here, and he's been doing great, especially with you two being there for him," she told the two girls as they looked back up to her. "It was still hard for him to go, with our father dying, and how much it affected the other kids… He's told you about that, hasn't he?" They nodded. "Right," Maya nodded along, rather than to say 'oh, good, I could have been putting my foot where it didn't belong.' "He didn't want to leave them behind, and now this new baby is coming, and it's like he's gone back to that place in his head, where he needs to be with them, to be the big brother."

"After my mom died, my father took me with him to the dance school where she worked. I'd been there so many times, for as long as I can remember, but it wasn't the same. I missed her so much…" Cecilia recalled openly. The room remained silent for a few beats. "So what do we do instead?"

"I…" Maya shook her head, trying to come up with an answer. There was no single right one, was there? It all stemmed from who needed the help and who was doing the helping, didn't it? Given the right combination, they could make something happen for the better, otherwise… "I think the two of you are in the best position to help him," she finally stated, going by way of truth if nothing else. "You can figure it out together, and I will do what I can to pitch in if you need me to."

The girls looked to one another. No one would ever imagine that they had recently gone through that whole debacle over Halloween. Cecilia had figured out for herself that Dora had these feelings for Sam, while Dora gave every impression that she had pieced together the fact that Cecilia was aware. And despite all that, the two of them showed not one drop of animosity or jealousy. If anything, this connection might have brought them closer together as friends, because for all they knew, there was also trust, unbreakable, between all parties involved.

"Are you busy Friday night?" Dora asked Cecilia, who shook her head. "Can we come over Friday night?" Dora turned to Maya now.

"Absolutely," Maya smiled. Just like that, Dora motioned for Cecilia to follow and the girls left the office.

Maya sat back in her chair for a moment before stretching her arm across her desk to grab her phone and text Lucas to let him know they'd be having company on Friday night, possibly into Saturday morning, depending on what the girls would decide to do.

_Lucas: Sam?_

_Maya: Better that than finding them at a train station in the middle of the night._

The callback was a joke, mostly, but maybe something honest in the middle, too. She could look to all of her siblings and pinpoint some quality in them that they shared. Nellie was so like her in how scattered she could be, right up until someone she cared about needed comfort and support. Gracie was patiently observant about her surroundings, picking up on details others might now. MJ would find joy in the silliest things. Haley… she was only two, but she could recognize in her something that felt a lot like the way she responded to new people. On the flipside, Cara was just as deeply grounded in musicality as she was. And Eliza… her sweet Lizard simply thrived on passion, on inspiration. Wyatt, who she'd known from the youngest age of her paternal half-siblings, had grown from a babe in arms to a boy of seven years, and still in all that time had remained someone with a world in his head larger than what his brain could ever hope to carry.

For all that, and even though their characters may have appeared vastly different on the surface, Sam was the most like her. He had her heart, weighed in insecurities, in a sense of duty to the people in his life, who could bring him to his highest highs and lowest lows, simply for being present or absent. She knew exactly what he was feeling right now, how it would weigh on him, and for all that she also knew that she couldn't be the one to restore his balance. For her, it had been Lucas. It had been him, and Riley, and all the friends she had made here, and for Sam it was going to be those two girls who had come to her today, seeking guidance on how to help him. He was as lucky to have them as she was to have her own circle of friends.

As much as she knew Cecilia and Dora would have to be the ones to remind Sam that he was okay here, that the others would also be okay out in Arizona, and that the distance would not mean so much as he felt it did now… She still couldn't help but sit here and try to figure out what to do for him. It was as she'd told Dora, they couldn't just take Sam out to Tucson for a quick visit right now. It would only get him worse off once he had to leave again. The reverse would also be true, if his family came over to Austin. He needed to be balanced again before that could happen.

"Hey, I'm not calling at a bad time, am I?" Maya asked, when Abigail picked up.

"Not at all," her stepmother replied. "To be honest, I was expecting this sooner or later."

"Makes sense," Maya had to smile. Back in the day, she couldn't explain how she and this woman who had essentially gotten the life her own mother had never gotten had bonded so swiftly, but today it was all so clear, wasn't it? She and Sam were so similar at heart, and Abigail had recognized it in her husband's firstborn from the moment she'd met her. "So… What can we do about Sam?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	124. Their Rally Around Distance

May 3rd 2020

_Chapter 124  
Their Rally Around Distance_

"Can Cecilia and Dora sleep over on Friday?" Sam asked his sister on Wednesday morning, to which she said yes. "Great," he nodded, to her and then himself as he left the doorway to hers and Lucas' room. He was already on his way out to school, getting picked up by the Schmidt twins for a review before a test. Lucas was on his way to work at the bookstore today, and as ever, his body didn't seem on board with sleeping in just a bit, so he'd be awake, getting ready to go and do his bit at the Sanderson farm before shifting gears to selling books.

"Want to come with?" he asked Maya with a smile this morning. After getting dressed and having themselves a quick breakfast, they left the house, with the dogs on their trail – except for Archer, on his leash as he was still too small to be left to his own devices. "Did I hear a squeak when I was coming out of the shower earlier?"

"You heard a squeak? I am pretty sure I shouted just a bit," Maya grinned, fishing out her phone to show him the e-mail she'd woken up to. He read it as they walked past the mailbox and stalled for a moment.

"For real?" he blinked back at her. When she laughed and confirmed, he hugged her in a way that almost felt like a twirling step in a dance, as they never stopped walking in the process. "This is just… I mean last summer was crazy, with how big Ree's song got, but this… Your song, in a movie…" They had known who would be the voice behind the words on this one, not so long ago, but they had imagined it would be for an album of hers, never could have guessed it was going to be for anything like this.

"What if it's a flop?" Maya expressed the small worry which had been nagging at the back of her mind since not too long after checking out the message. In the time Lucas had spent in the shower, her emotions had taken such a journey, from immediate shock, to giddiness, and then straight into this 'what if' portion. She knew she couldn't help it, and she had gotten to a point where she almost just chose to let the worries come, so she could work through them and put them aside as sorted out.

"The song or the movie?" Lucas asked.

"Either? Both?"

"There's no way to know now, is there?"

"Not really, no, I know," Maya breathed.

"Do you get to go to the premiere or something?" Lucas pondered with a smile, which made her laugh.

"I'm not sure… I might push for it just to get you in a tux though," she gave him a once over and he assumed a bit of Bond-like posture that only served to make his bride to be giggle and bury her face in his arm as they went.

"You didn't tell Sam you already knew about the girls coming over," Lucas pointed out as they went on toward the farm.

"I know, I figured it would be easier just to let it be this way. If he's excited, I say let him be. He did look kind of excited, didn't he?"

"There was definitely a bit of a step up from what we've been getting lately," Lucas agreed.

"Good… good…" Maya breathed, mostly to herself.

"I've been thinking a lot about Houston lately," Lucas drew her attention back. "It's hard to believe we haven't lived there in nearly a year and a half already. Do you ever catch yourself thinking about going to the Nook? As though it's a five minute drive away instead of two hours?"

"I kind of do, actually," Maya chuckled. "Sometimes I get cravings, like big time for real, salivating cravings," she revealed. "I'm having one right now because of you…"

"Sorry," he apologized, undercut with a laugh as it was.

"You owe me a breakfast date now."

"I'm good for it," he assured her.

"I do miss it out there…" Maya reflected, breathing in the morning air. This was always her favorite part of the day, bar none. "Not in a sense that I'd rather be there than here," she amended, to which Lucas gave a nod. "It was just… Those were some great years, some of the best. I'd say The Best, but think of the pressure that would put on those ones yet to come," she smirked over at him, flexing her hand where the engagement ring managed to catch the sunlight.

"I know what you mean," Lucas squeezed the hand he held, brought it to his lips. "I'm sure, if anyone asked, I'd say the best thing to come out of that time was the fact that you and I started living together, and that's been really good."

"No complaints there," Maya smiled.

"For real though, I mean it's not like I was scared at the idea of living away from home, from my parents, but I never had to be, because I had you, and Dylan, and Riley, and Sophie…"

"Yeah…" It got her thinking of her brother again, as was to be expected. The only reason he was even in Austin, away from the rest of his family, was that _she_ lived here.

He had been a fifteen-year-old kid, about to start college where he would be the runt of the litter no matter where he went. So, he had pitched this plan to go and live with his big sister, to get to do the whole 'away from home' college thing, and they had supported it, every step of the way. For Maya, it also meant getting to spend more time with her little brother, after having lived apart for most of their lives, so it was an even easier sell.

Beyond that though, she'd just been intent on encouraging him to do this for himself. After Kermit had died, he had become so focused on looking after his mother and younger siblings, that he could easily have gone to college in Tucson, the better to keep on being big brother/father figure to Cara, Eliza, and Wyatt. He could have put everything he had of himself toward their well-being and let that be his place in life. Instead, he had chosen this, had allowed himself his college experience. The last thing she wanted now was for him to come to regret it and slide back into brother mode.

Arriving at the farm, they were greeted by Mr. Sanderson, the grandfather, who had been a staple of these early hours for as long as Lucas could remember. Standing at the window in what had then been his grandparents' bedroom, what was now his and Maya's bedroom, they could just see the Sanderson farm in the distance, and without fail, every morning, if they looked and squinted their eyes they would catch that small figure walking along in his old tan hat.

"Morning!" Missy came bolting out to greet Maya and Lucas almost as soon as they arrived. She would always be there to assist, too, with her own dog at her heels. Now this morning, with Coraline finding the trio of Trix, Lou, and Archer also on the scene, it was a frenzy of happy dogs yapping at one another around their humans' feet. "I'm repainting one of the fences for Dad," Missy informed them. "I was thinking of doing something on them, not just the one color all over."

"Oh, that's my cue, show me," Maya smiled, trailing off with their young neighbor as she turned a wave to Lucas with a look like 'I guess you're on your own, Huckleberry.' He waved back with a smirk.

As Missy brought her over to the fence in question, Maya got the impression it was no accident she had decided to do this task today of any day. More often than not, Maya would end up accompanying Lucas on his farm stops on weekends and also on Wednesdays, when his being at work instead of school made for a later departure. When she had come bolting out the door as she would do every morning, there had been this flicker of gladness when she'd spotted Maya was there along with Lucas. She wanted to chat, and these days she had one preferred subject. It would have been so easy for her to stare down the girl and say 'just ask him out already,' but she had a strong feeling she didn't need to, that it would happen sooner or later. Then again, Sam had believed the same where Dora was concerned, and it had ended up far from that…

Here she was, back to thinking about her brother, sure, but then so what if she did? She cared about him so much, and right now he was in a weird space… It wasn't in her to just think 'oh, he'll get over it.' In her heart, it went a lot more like 'so long as he's in it, I'm in it.'

"Maya?"

She blinked, finding Missy was looking back at her, paintbrush in hand. She'd been stuck in her head for a moment or two, thinking about her brother… Maybe she was trying to keep him from sliding back into brother mode, but she had definitely fallen headlong into sister mode ever since Thanksgiving.

"Sorry, got lost for a second," she told Missy, getting back to work in tracing the flowers her young neighbor wanted to have along the fence posts.

As they went on painting, she would think about when she had been in much the same situation as Sam was, give or take a few variants. It wasn't exactly the same, was it? Here he was, awaiting the birth of what would be one more sibling, miles and miles away. All those years ago, when _she'd_ had to consider leaving Austin for her own college education, she'd had to do so with the idea of leaving – at the time – her baby sisters, the first she'd ever had. Nellie and Gracie were by no means the eldest of her siblings, but by virtue of when they had all come into her life… Yeah, they were at the top of the list.

She had been seventeen years old when the twins were born, so even though at some point she had been made aware that her father had other kids somewhere, she had not known them personally, and she had been an only child for all seventeen of those years. And then her mother had married Shawn, and they'd had the girls, and they… they had changed her life, in ways very few people had done it. The idea that she should be away from them as they grew from infants and onward… She didn't want to miss all those early days, didn't want to allow herself to become a stranger in their midst. In the end she had decided on Houston, and it had all really been as good as it could get, short of being in Austin with them, but the result couldn't really factor in the choice, could it?

So, even though she'd had more than a year with them before the move, whereas Sam would be so much further away from his new brother or sister right from the start and for what would be the first two years of his or her life at the least… she got it. Hopefully, Friday's sleepover would do the good he needed to get. If it didn't, then there really was no telling what would happen next, what choices Sam would end up making. Maya may have found her loophole with Houston, but that didn't mean he would get one of his own without having to make a sacrifice or two. As selfish as it might have been, she really did not want his living with her and Lucas to be one of those sacrifices.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	125. Their Rally Around Choice

May 4th 2020

_Chapter 125  
Their Rally Around Choice_

"Man, you blink for a second and this place turns into Christmas Town," Maya remarked, looking to Sam as they pulled into the grocery store's lot on Thursday afternoon. "I'm not complaining, but there is such a thing as excess, huh?"

"It's not even December yet," Sam shrugged.

"It'll be _everywhere_," Maya whispered dramatically, leaning in at her brother's ear. He gave her a look. "What, nothing? Sammy, come on…" she turned a pleading smile to her brother. "You know, it doesn't take much for me to figure out what's wrong with you most times. Your face has a way of doing a thing where it's a lot like mine, and that just means I can read you like a book… that I wrote."

"What does the book say this time?" he asked, almost a challenge to these supposed skills.

"Christmas is coming," she started, which got her a look from him to point out she could have figured that one out on her own. "It's coming," Maya restated with intent like 'let me finish,' "And that means you're going to have to make up your mind, about what you'll do, and where you'll go," she finished, in a more than sympathetic tone. Sam's expression shifted enough to tell her she'd been right on the money.

The year before, Sam's first year in Austin, his family had flown out from Tucson and spent the holidays here, which had simplified things a great deal, where Maya's younger brother was concerned. All his people ended up in the same place. But this year would be different. This year, his mother and stepfather and all his siblings were bound for Louisiana, to spend Christmas with James' side of the family.

He was more than welcome to join them, of course. All he had to do was say the word and a plane ticket would be purchased and sent to him. That was all good and fine except now he sort of had more and more reasons to stay in Texas, which put him in the awkward position of having to choose between one side and the other. And that was the impossible part. It would be his first Christmas with Cecilia as his girlfriend, as she had not earned that title until the start of this year. The solution might then have been for her to go to Louisiana with him, but then this year would be following along the line of her and her father rekindling traditions they had sort of fallen behind on since the death of her mother, so there would have been no point in even asking.

"I hate this…" Sam sighed, walking alongside his sister, who gave him a side hug.

"I know how bad it can feel, to have to choose between the people you love, but you do know that they are aware of your being only one person, who can only be in one place at a time? They love you, too, and wherever you need to be, you know they will understand that, too."

"Mom would say that the harder it is to choose, it means that I know what I want to do but I can't admit it because I don't want to disappoint the one I'm not picking."

"I can see that," Maya agreed. "So… you want to stay, don't you? You want to spend the holidays with us, and with Cecilia…" There would have been no point in Sam attempting to deny this, or play it off in any way. The answer was right there on his face, betraying him.

It would have been easy for this whole thing to be portrayed as a selfish choice, for him to say that he struggled with this choice for his own interests alone, whether he'd get to see his family or not. But this was Sam, so naturally there was more to it than that. He was thinking about them, too, maybe more than himself. He was thinking about his mother, his sisters, and his brother in particular, in a way his new stepfather, brother, and sister, would never fault him either, as they would be well placed to understand it, too. It had been a position he'd struggled with the entire time, the same one which had left him uncertain over whether to even come to Texas for school. Kermit, and the loss of him…

Adding on to this the memory of that Christmas, three years prior, when they had gone into those days with the knowledge that it would be their father's last one… It didn't seem possible that so much time could have gone by since that day, and yet here they were. They still remembered it, Maya absolutely remembered it, remembered walking up to the house and Cara bolting out the door and into her arms because she knew, and she was heartbroken… They had all worked to make that Christmas a great one, despite the rest, and then the year after that, the first one without… They'd worked even harder… The holidays had always been about togetherness, but for the last couple of years, it really had gotten to feel that much more important.

With that knowledge so engrained in him, how was he ever supposed to choose to be anywhere but with his mother, with his brother and sisters out wherever they would be? For that matter, how could Maya, too? That had to be going through his mind, too, right? There had never been any question where _she_ would spend her holidays, she would spend them right here in Austin, with this side of her family. Had she just gotten to that point in her life where she was old enough not to feel in any way… guilty about it? Maybe she had… and she was glad for it… but Sam wasn't there yet.

"I think you can find a way out of this, a solution where you'll be okay. You just haven't found it. But you will, I know you will. I don't want to use the whole 'smartypants college kid' defense, but you can kind of see where I'm going, don't you? You're putting so much pressure on yourself to think of something, your mind is like… a cluttered desk. You keep telling me, 'Maya, you can't work like this, you need order…'"

"I don't sound like that," Sam protested just a bit over her impression of him.

"I don't sound like that," she repeated, in the same voice she'd used, spot on. He couldn't counter this if he tried. "Clear the desk, Sammy," she lightly poked at the side of his head.

"Fine, okay, okay, stop… stop!" he dodged away, making her chuckle.

Walking through the aisles of the grocery store, Maya questioned her brother as to what he and the girls were planning to do on their sleepover. The trio would be taking to the attic the following night, setting the sleeping bags around the telescope, as good as having themselves a camp out, minus the November chill in the air. It was hard not to think back to her own sleepovers, back when she was his age and younger.

Back then, she and Nadine and eventually Riley would be sleeping in her room, while the boys would be in the basement, and here they were, preparing for this sleepover where her teenage brother would be spending the night in the attic with two teenage girls, one of them his girlfriend, the other his complicated-feelings friend. It was the kind of set up any number of parents would look to with uncertainty, and Maya would be lying if she said neither she nor Lucas had considered whether this could lead to certain issues, but… At this point, it felt as though they needed to trust that they knew those three kids enough to give them their trust.

And yet…

Here they were, with the subject of Abigail and the others very much front and center in their minds lately, and it left Maya to remember that Sam living with Lucas and her wasn't just some extended brother-sister sleepover they were having. She was responsible for him, she was the adult in this scenario, his mother's appointed voice, a role she took very seriously. She knew this was something that had to be put on the table, just as it had been when _she_ had been his age and she was seeing someone for some time already. If nothing else, the fact that she was still, underneath it all, his big sister… might make the discussion just a bit easier to handle.

Maybe she should have gotten Lucas to talk to him about it, but… No, no… This was on her.

"Hey, Sam?" she spoke up as they were getting back in the car sometime later.

"Yeah?" he asked, leafing through the magazine he'd picked up for himself. He still looked so much like a kid to her, like no matter how old he got, she would still look at him and see that ten-year-old boy she had first met in New York. He wasn't though, was he?

"We… we need to talk about some… things…" she let out a breath. Sam turned his head to look at her, frowning with some confusion.

"What things?" _Just say it already, you won't get anywhere with him if you can't even talk like a grown person…_

"You and Cecilia," she told him, and she could see the process in his mind as he went from 'what about us' to 'oh…' and then 'make me disappear right now.' "No matter how awkward you think it is for you, it's no picnic for me either, alright?" Maya stated, going on the side of open honesty. "But we need to talk about this sooner or later, so let's just… okay?" He didn't reply, couldn't even look at her head on, though he was listening, so that was as good of an agreement as she would get. "Have you two…"

"No," Sam shook his head. "No, not… not yet…"

"But you're thinking about it?" Maya asked gently.

"Hard for me not to, I mean it's… it's everywhere, and I'm just…" he gestured to himself, which she took to mean 'a teenage boy with hormones.' "I would never… never put any pressure on her, I swear," he insisted.

"I know," Maya smiled. _So far, so good_, she thought to herself, taking another breath. "But then what happens the day she decides she's ready?" she went on, trying to ignore how her brother was blushing. He was searching for his words, which meant he had to ask himself that question.

"We, I…" He was looking for a way to say 'I know I'm ready, so if she's ready then we're going to' while also saving face with his sister, which told Maya more or less what she needed to know. Another deep breath, and the solution seemed to be 'if you have to say it, I should say it.'

"Junior year, Lucas and I were in that accident we told you about, remember? My parents thought it was his fault, didn't want him hanging around me. One day, it was April, I snuck him into the house when no one was around. We were down in the basement, in my room, we were making out for a while and… there was a moment, a turn, where we both sort of knew we were thinking it. Lucas wanted to make sure that I was really there, and… I was. So we did… It was right for the both of us, not just because we were craving something, but because we were craving it with each other, wanted it to be him for me and me for him. If the day comes when you look at Cecilia, and she looks at you, and everything is right, then I'm not going to stand in your way. I just want to make sure you'll be responsible about it, and I think you will."

"Yeah… I promise," Sam slowly replied, looking at her now, not so awkward anymore.

"Good," Maya nodded. "One more thing…"

"Protection, I know," Sam cut in, one more flare of discomfort.

"Yes," Maya told him, not entirely removed from that flare herself. "You ask Lucas if you have to, alright?" The way he nodded, she had no doubt he was way ahead of her on that suggestion.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	126. Their Rally Around Sam

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

May 5th 2020

_Chapter 126  
Their Rally Around Sam_

When she woke up on Friday morning, Maya opened her eyes to look upon the morning sun with the lingering remnants of the dream she'd had. In this dream, as impossible as it was for such a thing to have ever happened, she was visited by a small boy she knew at once to be Sam. He was all of five years old, and so she was only thirteen herself. It was the middle of the night, and she was asleep in her bed, until the sound of the door opening and the spilling of light into her darkened room brought her back around to open her eyes and find the boy standing there, large glasses over his face, and a Superman figure clutched under his arm.

"Come on," her younger self whispered, holding up the covers like she was used to these visits. In a moment, the small boy would come scurrying up, climbing up to join his big sister. She would take the glasses from his face and set them down on the night stand, and he would curl up with her as she settled back down. "What's the matter, Sammy? Did you have a bad dream again?" she would ask, and the boy would nod at once. "It's okay, I've got you now. No monsters here."

"Not monsters," little Sam insisted.

"What is it then?" she asked, but then… if he said anything, she didn't remember it. After that, she was awake, left frustrated by the unknown.

"Morning there, Restless Leg," Lucas muttered, revealing himself to be awake as well. Maya turned over until she was facing him and the might of the beard. He was getting a good handle on keeping the thing nice and trimmed, she had to say, enough to make her wonder if he might keep it after the holidays after all.

"Did I kick you?" Maya inquired.

"Just a bit," he confirmed, making her bite back a chuckle.

"Any wounded?"

"Mostly shins," Lucas assured her, even as she leaned in to kiss him good morning. "What was going on in that head? Strange dream or the foundation of a new masterpiece?"

"Mm, door number one," she revealed, propping her head up. Lucas was giving her those 'tell me stuff' eyes. "I was like thirteen again, and Sam was there, he was little, five or so, and he came to my room in the middle of the night because he had a bad dream."

"Except you didn't know each other back then," Lucas filled in the blanks.

"The very slightest of the logic issues in this scenario," Maya nodded. "I mean, I know where it comes from, that desire. Growing up with the others, I can't count how many times one or two of them showed up like that and crawled in with me… or both of us." Lucas smiled, thinking fondly of those moments, which he himself would not have experienced either, having no younger siblings of his own. "Sam was just… a bit too old for that by the time he came into the picture, but I know, if we had known each other back then, I could have been there for him, and he would have come to me when he needed it…"

If she thought about it, the little face she'd been staring at was really Wyatt's, with Sam's glasses thrown over it as some way to signify that this was who he was meant to be. Her Hart brothers resembled one another enough that anyone would know that they were brothers to one another, but if she looked at a picture of Sam at five, he distinctly looked like himself and not Wyatt. Her mind had likely made the substitution because Wyatt was the only one of the two she could recall in motion at that age.

"I just don't remember what it was he was coming to me for, and it feels like I'm supposed to… And I know, I know it has to do with how he misses home, and he's torn, and how… I'm just trying to… to be there for him, to look out for him, but if that's what it is, then I would really appreciate if my brain would have been kind enough to finish and tell me just… what next?"

"I'm not a dream… interpreter…" Lucas told her, but what I'm getting is maybe it's telling you that you're doing exactly what he needs you to do already, which is to be there for him. You're here, you're a safe place… and that's what he needs." Maya took this in with a smirk.

"I think the beard is giving you powers," she teased, which made him laugh.

"I promise to only use them for good."

The day went on, all in all a regular one. School here, work there… Maya got home first, after a stopover at the post office. She hadn't been sure, when it hadn't arrived the day before, whether the package would arrive for today. But then the tracking had alerted her that it was ready for pickup, so she'd finished up what she had left to do at the theater and she'd gone on to retrieve her item. When she came home, she went up and put the box in her closet. This would be her sort of 'break in case of emergency' contingency. If the time came that they needed a little extra push to assist Sam… it would be there, with markings on the box very reminiscent of a birthday present she had received a few years back.

By the end of the night, Maya would come to realize she'd never needed it, not this time.

"Hey, Maya!" Cecilia greeted her as she came through the door just as her boyfriend's sister was coming down the stairs again.

"Hey… aren't you still supposed to be in school?" Maya checked the time. It wasn't a huge gap, but by all accounts she shouldn't have been here for a half hour at the least.

"Technically, yes, but I realized I forgot something at home when I left this morning, and I didn't want to have to wait until last period was over, go back to get it, and then come here," the girl confessed.

"So you just left?" Maya tried not to sound so much like a hall monitor.

"I may have told them that my leg was hurting," Cecilia expanded on her explanation with a sheepish smile. "It has to be good for _something_, right?" she shrugged after a beat.

"What was so important that you had to play the leg card?" Maya asked, curiosity getting the best of her.

"Special edition box sets, you know how he is with all the special features and the commentaries," Cecilia revealed. The smile on her face here was just too pure and full of love for anyone to ever argue on the merit of her bailing out of one period.

"I'm familiar, yes," Maya chuckled.

Dora arrived next, no more than fifteen minutes after Cecilia had done do, which left Maya to ask the same question of Lucas' cousin as she'd done with the first of their guests.

"I had to go home for some batteries," the girl declared, pointing to her ears. "I left the pack on my bed when I was packing." Maya looked at her, looked at Cecilia.

"You're lucky I don't work at either of your schools, you would have been _so_ busted," she shook her head at the pair of them. "You know the way, if you want to go drop off your bags," she pointed up the stairs, and the girls moved as one, Dora trailing after Cecilia and carrying her bags for her as she went. The closer they got to the top, Maya could just make out whispers being exchanged. "When did I become the grown up," she muttered to herself as she went to check on the dogs.

When Sam arrived, Maya could tell he had been looking forward to tonight as the day had gone by. He found the girls waiting for him in the living room, where they had been looking at the various movies they had both brought, and the ones they had found set aside by him, and in no time he was sitting with them and his sister, talking about this one or that one. They weren't the only ones who would be around for the movie portion of the night. The Schmidt twins arrived almost back to back with Lucas, and then Missy came along, with Kai Avelino in tow.

When Maya had invited them both, on the morning of fence painting, she had left her neighbor with the challenge of bringing some prime zombie flick, which she hoped would make way for a healthy dose of discussion between the budding friends/maybe more than friends.

Pizzas were ordered and soon delivered, at which point the group settled before the television and the first movie was selected and started. The various discs with their special features would be for the trio of friends to dig into later on, once the guests had gone. Even so, all through the movies, Maya and Lucas could see Sam lean in to whisper something to Cecilia and Dora, one sitting at his side, the other on the ground at their feet. There had been that small moment where they had all gone to sit where Maya had wondered if there might be a bit of a situation, if Sam ended up between the two girls, but it never became an issue. Maybe this night was as much for Sam as it was for her to go ahead and breathe a little, not worry so much.

What she was able to see, as the night went on, was how her brother seemed happier now than he'd been in a while, since even before Halloween and all that bit of chaos. She would think it had come along halfway between the night itself and the anticipation of it throughout the week, where Sam had managed to reclaim some peace of mind. Later on, after the Schmidts and Missy and Kai had gone on home, she also learned that he'd come up with a solution to one problem which had been hanging over his head recently, regarding the coming holidays.

"Are we going to have all the decorations up before I start finals this year?" Sam asked, as Maya came back into the house after seeing Missy off. She'd waited along as Kai went off to catch his ride home with the twins.

"Uh, yeah, why? You study better if it's festive?" she joked.

"No… Well, maybe… It's just I love doing that with you and Lucas," Sam explained, which made his sister smile. "And I was thinking I'd like to get going like the day after finals."

"Get going to where?" Maya asked, unsure.

"Tucson," Sam told her. "I'm going to stay out there with everyone until they leave for Louisiana, and then I'll come back so I'm here for Christmas."

Maya looked at him there for a moment, her kid brother all self-assured once again, before moving up to pull him into a good, strong hug. In living together for the first time in their lives, over the past year and a half, just about, Maya and Sam had sort of gone and developed this language of hugs, something between making up for lost time and really just holding to the concept of expressing oneself with or without words. When Maya held her brother here, she was showing her happiness for him, and when Sam held his sister, too, he showed his gratitude for her.

"You know, you might check and see when the girls finish school before the break, they might be able to go and visit you out there for a few days," Maya suggested. Sam looked at her for a moment, considering this, before heading into the living room to find the girls. As she watched him go, Maya caught the sound of a low whistle from above and turned to find Lucas looking at her from the top of the stairs. He waved for her to join him and she went, taking one more look back to find the trio talking excitedly, which she took to mean that the girls were both on board for a trip to Arizona.

"Welcome to the other sleepover," Lucas offered his hand to lead her along the hall.

"Why, thank you, sir," Maya pulled on her drawl.

"I would have called it the adult sleepover, but it might have put a bit too much pressure on whatever happens next while those three are watching their movie stuff," Lucas went on, which had her giggling.

"You never know, the night is young, and we're not _that_ old."

They ended up sat on the bed, with Maya's laptop, as they worked to cross off a couple of things off of Wedding Planner Zvolensky's to-do list. She would send them things here and there, wanting them to choose a color for this, or a song for that… They tended to take a lot of time to decide, as any presentation of choices had a way of pulling them into heavy amounts of debate and recollection. On this night, for instance, when they had paused to listen as Sam and the girls went up to the attic, nearly four hours had gone by, and they were barely cracking into the third 'to do.'

"You know what, I don't care if Sophie says it takes us forever to get back to her, I love this," Lucas gestured between the two of them sitting there.

"Yeah, me, too," Maya beamed, feeling all giddy on the inside. Conversation had always been so easy between the two of them, had been since all the way back in 7th grade, when it had been him and her sitting on the steps outside of school, those mornings when he had sessions with the guidance counselor. Nowadays, with over eleven years' worth of material to pull from, they could easily have talked their way through the night if not for the fact that he was working in the morning, and they were 'on the clock' with a trio of minors upstairs.

"Tonight was pretty good, wasn't it?" Lucas asked as they readied themselves to go to sleep.

"It was everything I… Oh…" Maya laughed.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"I completely forgot about the box from Abigail," she whispered, turning back to him. "Should I just give it to him anyway? Or do I hold on to it for the next time he needs a bit of home?"

"What if there's food in there?" Lucas pointed out.

"Good point," Maya went and retrieved the box, bringing it halfway up the attic steps before climbing back down and calling up. "Special delivery!"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	127. Their Cheers of December

**_A/N:_**_ Hey hey! So yeah, I said I'd try and get more deleted scenes done a while ago and it didn't happen, anxiety has been getting in the way so just getting this and We Three Hearts kept where I want them has been all I've managed to do. I will do my best to do some deleted scenes soon, that's all I can do for now :)_

* * *

May 6th 2020

_Chapter 127  
Their Cheers of December_

"So… when you said you almost had it narrowed down…" Lucas blinked as he and Maya stood just inside their room. Looking around, from the closet doors and on to the bed, and on the back of his desk chair, anywhere that might be adorned with one dress or another at its full length so to have it displayed, there were dresses… everywhere. Leaning to peer inside the closet, where those dresses usually hung, it was a giant void and nothing more.

"I narrowed it down… to a dress, instead of pants or a skirt," Maya casually pointed out, smiling proudly.

"Right," Lucas chuckled. Maya motioned toward the array and he moved forward to start and help her narrow it down. All teasing aside, he could see why she was as nervous as she was, and why she wanted to pick absolutely the right outfit. This would be the dress she wore when she'd go on stage with Ree Forster in a few days' time. She had been looking forward to this for weeks and weeks, and now it was almost the big day.

It was their first day on their own, after having accompanied Sam to the airport for his trip to Tucson to see the Hart-Lanes. He had finished his finals two days ago, while Lucas had had the last of his the previous afternoon. He had been reviewing on the ride to the airport, because as much as Sam would have understood his not coming along, Lucas felt it was important enough to go for multitasking instead. As thanks, Sam had helped his big brother's preparation by quizzing him while Maya drove in the front. It would have been five of them out there at the gate, if not that Cecilia and Dora were both still in school and just could not reasonably get out of it for this reason. So, they had said their goodbyes the night before Sam left, on the promise that they would see each other soon, when the two of them would be flying to join him the following week.

Neither Maya nor Lucas could hide the fact that they were relieved to see how much Sam's spirits had been lifted since the night of the sleepover. It made them realize just how much they loved having him there with them at the house, and how much they had missed his cheerier side. Of course now they would have to do without him for a little while, but that was more than fine, too. There was plenty for them to appreciate about their having the house all to themselves.

"What about this one?" Maya snatched up a flowery dress from the bed and held it up before herself. They had by now eliminated somewhere about ten percent of the displayed dresses, under a process of 'will this itch, will this be too warm, will this look horrible with the lighting…' Lucas stood back now, observing the new contender.

"I don't know, I think I need to see it on you to get a better idea," he finally declared. Maya gave him a look. "Oh, so it's okay when you make me try things on just so you can watch, but I don't get to do the same?" Maya made a show of considering this, and the smirk that followed told him she had not only come up with an answer, she had also found a way to make things even more interesting.

"I will make you a deal. Since it's just you and me, and there's no chance for my little brother or anyone else to come along, how about every time you decide you need to see me try on any of these dresses, _you_… lose a piece of clothing of your choosing," she stated with an innocent shrug. Lucas responded with a chuckle as he bowed his head and finally looked back at her.

"Alright, done," he told her.

"Great," she smirked.

"Let me just go and grab a vest… and shoes… Maybe a hat and scarf, it's getting kind of chilly around here," he moved to track down said items, while Maya laughed.

"If that's how you want to play it, I have tricks, too!" she called after him.

He soon discovered those tricks, which involved her making some excellent sales pitches for the various dresses she still needed to work through and eliminate or keep. He'd be all ready to pass a verdict, but then there she'd go, and before they knew it, she was swapping dresses, and he was losing another thing. When she finally got to evict his shirt, she had the most victorious little smile.

"I see now, by my count, you are running out of cards to play there, Santa," she gestured at him standing there. "Ho, ho, ho," she whispered, adjusting the latest dress.

"Okay, now, this is not me giving up before I end up standing here butt naked…" Lucas declared, which made her giggle. "But I do think that might be the one," he pointed to the dress she'd just put on. She turned to look at herself in the mirror. Somewhere along the way, she had almost forgotten why they were doing this in the first place, but now that she was thinking about it again… Yeah, that might have been a winner.

"I think so… yes," she finally nodded. "Good," she started to gather up the others and return them to the closet along with the ones they had previously eliminated and the maybe pile.

"Can I put my shirt back on now?" She turned to look back at him.

"Yeah, no," she shook her head. Lucas nodded to himself like he'd expected exactly that answer. "By the way, I know that you guys work in a bookstore already and all that, but my mom wanted me to pass some stuff on to Maeve, she figures it might be helpful, from her perspective," Maya revealed, pointing to a bag sitting on the dresser. Lucas went to have a look.

Much as she had been intent on keeping her impending motherhood a secret at the start, when it was all new and she had no clue this way or that regarding the next several months and then some, by now the shock had worn off for Maeve. It had all started to take a turn one she'd had a second meeting with her baby's father. After the first time, when she had told him, and then after that, when he had accompanied her on a first doctor's appointment, he had shown up at the bookstore looking for her one day. Maeve had looked just a bit unnerved at having him there for anyone to see and wonder what was going on, but finally they had set up to meet over lunch. When she returned, she told Lucas what they had discussed. He remained someone with whom she felt at ease discussing her situation, and he took the role with care.

After having thought it through, and going along to the doctor's, after really considering the whole picture, the baby's father, Carter, had told Maeve that he would raise their child. If she felt at ease with this, and if she was absolutely certain of her choice, he would take full custody of their son or daughter. He also wanted to leave the option open so that Maeve would be able to have some part or another in the baby's life, whether or not her identity as mother was acknowledged or not.

"Do you know… what are you going to do?" Lucas had asked her.

"I don't know," Maeve had told him, and her whole stance said as much. "It's my turn to think it over now." There was plenty for her to consider. Top of the list, Lucas knew, was the fact that her parents still had no idea of the choice she was in the process of making. "I'm not going to change my mind," Maeve told Lucas, her voice shaping the 'but' she did not speak. "If I'm just… a close friend of Carter's, or… if we just say that he really wanted a baby, and I helped… I don't know… If I'm involved, then maybe my parents still get to be involved, too, even if it's not all out there…"

She'd sighed, and hearing her mutter to herself how she wished she'd never had to tell them in the first place, he'd put his arm around her and she'd welcomed the gesture. Before long, their co-workers were finally let in on the secret, though undercut with the lie that she was being a surrogate for a friend. Lucas had gone along with it, never blinking.

In the weeks since that day, the plans had started taking better shape. Maeve was now entirely on board with giving Carter their baby to raise, and Carter was stepping up in every way as he prepared for single fatherhood. After a lot of discussion, they had made a choice, in that they would perpetuate the surrogate story, to his friends as much as hers, and also to both their families. This had been trickier where Maeve's family was involved, seeing as they'd gone weeks believing one thing, only to be told another. It had been with both Lucas and Maya that Maeve had figured out a way to say that, when she'd told her parents about the baby, she had meant to explain the whole truth, but that after seeing how happy they both were, she hadn't had the heart to go on. It had been rough, but there had been no way around that, so this was really the best option they had.

"She still doesn't know if she wants to be involved, when the kid grows up," Lucas declared as he inspected the books, spilling with notes in Katy's hand.

"She'll figure it out," Maya replied with confidence. Lucas turned back to find she had changed out of the last dress and into her holiday PJs, complete with jingling elf shoe slippers. These had been a gift from her little sisters and when she promised she would wear them all through December, she wasn't joking. It was like a Maya warning system all through the house. It unnerved the dogs just a bit, to the point where Maya would never leave the slippers unattended, for fear that they might fall prey to a dog's bite or another, or that the bells would end up lodged in an unsuspecting pup's throat.

"Okay, _now_ can I put on a shirt?" Lucas 'pleaded,' and Maya walked over to him, jingling along. Locking her arms around his waist, she looked up at him, putting on another thinking face.

"No… no…" she finally declared in her ever so casual voice.

"This is my fault, isn't it?" he sighed.

"You had to go and stand there like you were dressed for a blizzard, and I worked really hard for this, just let me have my moment with Sexy Santa over here," Maya shrugged. He was so close to losing control of his smile, descending into laughter. "Come on, ask me if I've been a good girl this year," she tapped his chest with a nod.

"I am never going to be able to keep a straight face after I put on the suit and get out there with the kids," Lucas scratched at his beard with a small laugh.

"All the better to make you jolly," Maya ran with this.

"Alright, fine, whatever you want. But we have that show you wanted to watch, and I'm going to be cold."

"Good thing you've got me there to warm you up," she led him out toward the stairs. Her jingling feet beckoned the dogs, who crowded around them on their way to the living room.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	128. Their Cheers of Music

May 7th 2020

_Chapter 128  
Their Cheers of Music_

Waking up on the morning of December 11th, Lucas was in no way surprised to find the other half of the bed empty. He had pulled out more or less every trick in the book in order to get Maya to relax enough to go to sleep the night before, though his successes were not particularly… successful, not for a while, and now on the other side of it… It was the day of Ree Forster's concert in Austin, the day Maya would meet the woman and go up on stage with her, so to expect her to be asleep as the sun went up would have been a rookie mistake.

Lucas went out from the room, listening… The house was mostly quiet, though he could just vaguely hear the sound of music somewhere. It wasn't in the attic, and heading down the stairs brought him nearer but still… The basement?

There sat Maya, with her guitar, quietly going through her song, Ree's song, the one she'd be performing on stage that night. She was just on this side of fidgety, like she was second guessing every strum, every note.

"Do I need to break out the pep talk?"

"Might not be a bad idea," Maya estimated, looking up at him. "But waffles could do the trick, too."

Waffles were made, and consumed, and with that they were able to get on with their day, which would not be uneventful by any means. The very first thing was an interview at the local radio station. After having been a semi regular guest through the near decade of the band's existence, this would be the first time Maya appeared on her own, as far as TXNY was concerned. She wouldn't be on her own, no. She was there to be along for the ride on Ree's interview, as her special guest for the night's performance. This was the moment where she would meet the singer who had catapulted her burgeoning songwriter career from zero to… infinity…

She was going to make a fool of herself, wasn't she?

"You've got this, alright?" Lucas vowed as he drove her to the station.

"I'm getting flashbacks to the first time we got interviewed… We were sure someone was going to be sick, and right now I think I'm it."

"For real?" Lucas looked at her, already plotting how he might get off the road.

"I'll get back to you on that."

Maya's stomach managed to hold on, settled with the cool morning breeze and a lot of internal reassurances. She had seen and listened to a lot of interviews with Ree Forster over the years, enough to build the woman up as a genuinely kind person, and the conversation she'd had with her on the phone had painted her in that same light. Maya may not have had the worldwide fame she did, not to that degree, but she had gotten to a point where people would approach her with much the same kind of nervousness to them. Did this make her anything more than a human being? Not at all. She was just Maya, and Ree was Ree. She couldn't go up to her and be a nervous wreck, she wasn't going to.

If she needed any more convincing, the moment Ree Forster walked into the room where Maya and Lucas waited, she had such a smile on her, holding out her hand toward the young songwriter.

"Hello, oh, good morning!" Ree greeted her as Maya clasped hands with her and shook. _Stay calm, stay calm, wow, she's real…_ "Will I be terribly imposing if I ask for a hug?"

"I-I… Not at all, hugs are good," Maya managed to speak without tripping. As the singer embraced her, it was like all her nerves were getting leeched out of her, replaced with sunshine and joy. There was no faking a hug, and this one felt like a direct journey into Ree's heart as a person. The immediate impression was that no one on Earth could possibly ever respond to her in any other way than open respect.

Ree was introduced to Lucas, who she greeted with 'ah, yes, the fiancé!' as she'd somehow picked up on this bit of information. They barely had a chance to speak here, as they were soon led to where they would go and have the interview, only the first pit stop in their whirlwind day. Later, Lucas would assure Maya that she had done great, which was good, because she barely remembered any of it herself. From the radio station, they had followed Ree and her people on the tour bus, on their way to three more interviews. In between the second and third, they had stopped for lunch.

"Do you know what, you remind me a lot of me when I was your age," Ree told Maya as the two of them and Lucas sat around the table.

"I… I do?" Maya asked, inwardly kicking herself for the falter, after she'd been doing so well.

"Oh, absolutely, look at you," Ree smiled. "Twenty-four years old, and you've had your band now for what, nearly a decade already?"

"Ten years this summer," Maya confirmed with a smile of her own.

"And you have managed to create a presence for yourself, with no help but your own, well around the world, and enough to catch Audra's attention. When I met her, she told me all about how she wanted to sign you girls, twice, but you stayed true to who you are, and I have so much respect for that. When I was starting out, I had no idea where I would end up, but I knew what I was after and I went for it." And she had gotten it, hadn't she? She had made her own climb, reached the top, and she was still there, not a single indication of slowing down or losing relevance. "I can't wait to find out what the future has in store for you, Maya."

The more the day progressed, with the interviews, and the lunch, Lucas could just see how Maya confidence returned, replacing the nerves. If there was one thing that might come and challenge this, he knew, it would be their arrival at the venue, and the moment she'd step on that stage, even just for rehearsals. With or without an audience, the place would look enormous, but really the emptiness made the whole thing feel as though they were standing in a cavern, echoes and all.

"Before you and I have our go, I want you to sing one on your own up there," Ree told Maya, who turned back to look at her with surprise. "I'm serious," Ree nodded. "If I've got you pegged right, whatever nervous feeling is wreaking havoc in your stomach right now, you'll forget all about it in no time, once you start to let it out in a song. You've done plenty of gigs, haven't you? This is the same thing, except the stage is bigger, and there are going to be more people. The same thing," Ree repeated with a nod before moving to join Lucas where he stood, off the stage, in his capacity as chronicler of this day. Maya caught his eye for a moment. As big and new as this place was, she had him there, the realest thing in her whole world. She took a breath, adjusted her guitar. After a moment, she reached up to take the chain from around her neck, wrapping it around her hand until she could grasp the pick between her fingers. Another breath, easier now, and she started to play, to sing… It was just as she said. Everything was better now.

Before they knew it, the concert began. Maya and Lucas spent most of it with their group, in the section they had gotten thanks to Ree. The best part of it all, they'd have to say, was absolutely Katy and Melinda right next to them, both of them looking like they'd reverted back to the girls they had been twenty-five years prior. As much as they had known that Katy was a huge fan of Ree's back in the day, Lucas' mother had jumped at the chance to be here today, and now they could see why. It was the most un-Melinda they had ever seen her be, and it was amazing.

When the time came for Maya to head up and join in for her performance, Lucas quietly took her hand and kissed it, a simple spell of luck, whether she needed it or not. She found her way to where she'd be led over to wait for her cue, waiting for Ree to introduce her and call her on to the stage.

All the while as she stood in wait, absently feeling at the grooves of the engraved fingerprints on the pick, Maya had her eyes closed. She breathed slowly, listened to the non-stop burst of sound from the audience, and Ree's magnified voice started going on about this song, and how it had come to her from someone right here in Austin. There were rises in the audience's cheers, whether for the city or from those who knew Maya and TXNY, she couldn't say. Finally, her name echoed out into the packed cavern that was the venue, and she walked out there, pulling together that old familiar thrill of being on stage and the memory of rehearsals earlier, the first time she'd gotten to sing with Ree and how happy she'd felt. This was more people, a bigger place, but like she'd said… it was the same. And Maya loved being on stage.

Out in the audience, you could not have found a prouder, louder bunch, than Lucas, Katy, Melinda, and all those who had come along with them today. There was no telling how well the video would capture this moment, with all the noise going around, but where Lucas was concerned, he didn't know how he could ever forget those few minutes, from the introduction, through the song, and then the couple more Maya and Ree did together before Maya finally left the stage.

Seeing her up there, there was no space to think anything else except that, if she'd chosen to do it, Maya Hart could have filled spaces like this anywhere she went. She came alive under those lights in ways she never could anywhere else. Despite all that, she'd chosen a different life for herself, and anyone who would tell her she was a fool for turning away fame like that… they couldn't have known her the way he did, the way everyone around him did. She had started out as someone doing whatever she could to get by, before growing more and more into the person she was now, where she had discovered new paths, discovered she could make her own choices, build the life she wanted. Lucas got to be a part of that chosen life, and he embraced that privilege every day.

When Maya returned to them, for the rest of the show, Lucas could tell she'd had herself a good 'did that really happen' cry backstage first. Lucas locked her in his arms, kissing the top of her head several times, whispering at her ear how amazing she'd been up there and how much he loved her. As loud as it was, with the audience cheering for Ree Forster on stage all around them, in that small moment neither of them could hear any of it, focused on one another instead, as they took in this whole mad day and how it could not have been any better. At the end of the night, they left and headed home, quietly contemplating all that they had experienced. Lucas would see Maya as they drove home, swiping through the pictures he had taken on his phone. She fell asleep before they even made it, and he carried her into the house, ensuring that he didn't wake her from whatever colorful and musical dream she was having.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	129. Their Cheers of Surprise

May 8th 2020

_Chapter 129  
Their Cheers of Surprise_

"Power's out," Maya mumbled, turning around and burrowing herself closer to Lucas in order to gather some extra warmth against the chill in the air. "Snowing…" He opened one eye and the other, lifting his head just enough to see out the window. The absolute stillness in the room convinced him enough that there was no electricity. As to the snow, it was nothing of blizzard proportion, likely wouldn't stick on the ground very much if at all… There had been the whistle of strong winds when he'd gotten up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night though, which could account for the outage.

"Good thing it's my day off then, huh?" Lucas stated, wrapping her up in his arms and pulling the covers up some more, enabling her cocoon of warmth. She laughed and nodded. It was settled then, they weren't going anywhere. Except… "Do you hear that?" Lucas asked, a few moments later.

"Hear what?" Maya asked, in a tone that plainly stated she was merely humoring him and really just wanted to stay where she was, as they were, and she would not support any endeavor that sought to bring them anywhere else than right where they were. Even Lucas found his focus pulled back to her for a moment, his short bride curled up to him in such a sweetly personal way. How could he ever want to disturb this state either? He wouldn't, except he thought he'd heard a knock from below, and now he heard it again.

"Someone's at the door," he told her.

"Don't want any," Maya declared, having decided perhaps that this was a door-to-door salesperson. At the third knock, she sighed and looked up at him. "Fine…"

Lucas was the first out of bed and headed down the stairs, never minding the chill and his bare feet. He reached the door and opened it to find the knocker with his fist raised to knock again, only to signal for him to not say a word.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Maya was holding her ground with staying with the warmth, determined that Lucas would soon return and they could keep on doing absolutely nothing except keep cozy until the power returned. Hearing the door shut downstairs, and steps coming up the stairs soon after, she smirked to herself, opening up the covers in wait to swallow him back up.

The one who leapt at the invitation however was not her soon-to-be husband, but rather a much shorter, blonder and entirely more female person, lovingly referred to as…

"Lizard?" Maya gasped, unexpectedly finding herself met with her little sister, who burst out with giggles and reached to hug her big sister and was happily received. "What are you doing here? Hi…" Maya laughed along, caring not one bit that the eleven-year-old carried a bit of the outdoor chill on her.

"It's a Christmas surprise!" Eliza informed her. "I know we already had our sister sleepover this year, but we weren't sure if we'd get to have one next year, so…" At this, as though her presence alone wouldn't have heralded the obvious, Maya tossed back the covers, yelping a bit at the change in temperature before sticking her feet in the jingling slippers, tossing on a robe, and beating a mad tinkling symphony as she hurried out of the room, her little sister on her heels, all the way down the stairs so she might come to find the purposefully quiet bunch standing in the middle of the living room, waiting for their appointed messenger to bring Maya back and discover them. As soon as she found them there though, of course, the vow of silence was no longer necessary, not that it would have lasted anyway.

"You were supposed to be back in two days," Maya yanked Sam into her arms before he could go and pull any jokes like 'alright, I'll go back and wait then.' Maybe it was all the drama they'd been going through before he went off to Tucson, but now that he was back she was feeling especially emotional at getting him back. The way he hugged her back, she imagined he felt the same way.

"I was, but you know how they get when they want something," Sam told her, tipping his head to the little sisters.

"You can't say no?" Maya laughed to herself, giving one last good squeeze before she let him go. There were plenty more for her to greet.

Later, Lucas would get to tell her about how he'd opened the door to find Sam there, about to knock again. He'd been so surprised to see him, too, though when Sam had motioned to stay quiet he had done as told. He could just see the rest of the group coming out of the rented vehicle, the rest of the Hart-Lanes as well as Cecilia and Dora, who had been in Arizona with them over the last few days.

"Why didn't you use your key?" Lucas had asked his brother, even as he pulled him into a hug.

"Why didn't you answer the door?" Sam asked in return, just as happy to see him.

"The power's out," Lucas answered him.

"I wanted to surprise you," Sam did as well. Eliza had come up to the porch now, with that eager smile so like her sister's. This had given Lucas an idea, and a moment later he was helping the girl out of her coat and boots and sending her on a mission to retrieve her sister. She didn't have to be convinced into mischief.

As Eliza had gone upstairs, the rest of the group had come into the house, all of them instructed to remain quiet but also to hurry before Maya came along. It was a miracle that the dogs hadn't given up the game, with all these people showing up at once. Here was Wyatt, here was Cara, here were Teddy and Emma. Dora came sprinting into her cousin's arms with an electric smile, and Cecilia took a beat to look up at the snow falling from the sky before joining them. James came along, carrying a number of bags that seemed unmanageable alone, though he insisted on shouldering the load when Abigail offered to help. She simply chuckled and moved along toward the house to greet Lucas, who was already slipping on his boots to go and help.

"Did we wake you?" Abigail asked.

"Five minutes less and you might have," Lucas revealed.

They all barely had the time to get inside the house, boots and coats and bags handled, before a jingling of bells sounded Maya's speedy approach. Lucas had barely had the time to process all this, but now, to see the look of overwhelming and happy surprise on her face… Christmas was just a few days away, but this felt like the holiday was kicking off early, and more power to it. After she'd hugged Sam, Wyatt was a boy-shaped rocket, excited to see his big sister and received with equal amounts from her. Every time they saw him again, it was like he'd changed and grown again, from the one-year-old in arms when they'd first met him, to the seven-year-old with his very own spaceship back in Tucson.

After the cacophony of the arrival had calmed down a bit, Maya and Lucas were able to stop and assess where to go from here. They had just woken up, they were still in their PJs, they had not eaten, there was no power, and they suddenly had eight people in the house with them, four more on the way, from what they heard, as Luna was reportedly on her way along with her daughters and her mother, once she got through an errand she'd gone on to after leaving the airport.

It had originally been intended that Sam and the girls would return to Texas in two days, at the same time that the Hart-Lanes took off for Louisiana. Maya and Lucas would still have gotten to see them all, though not until after Christmas, as they would be making this stopover in Austin before returning home to Tucson, the better to ring in the New Year together. That had all been good and fine, until the girls had started to talk about the idea of not seeing Maya until _after_ Christmas just did not sit well with them.

What if they had another sister sleepover, a Sleepster as they called it? They had a contract, and it didn't say anything about their only being able to use it once a year, did it? And Cara and Eliza had a photo album they had put together the previous fall, with the pictures they had gotten printed, and the year at the top and everything. They wanted to give it Maya for her to keep, and add to it whenever they had a new Sleepster, and wouldn't it make the best Christmas present? Well, this part they only told Lucas, in confidence, for now anyway…

There was no telling whether this endless diatribe had been presented with the intention of cranking up the guilt and making their parents alter their plans, or simply as the overly dramatic distress of a couple of girls who missed their sister. Either way, it had worked, and the surprise was crafted more or less overnight. A flight was booked, hotel as well, and as bags were packed, a call was put in to Katy, the better to ensure that things would be planned out for all co-signatories of the sleepover contract.

"How are you doing?" Maya asked Abigail, when she finally got to hug her stepmother. It was the first time they had gotten to see one another in person since the news had come about this new baby, of course, which made this hold feel like it was a long time coming. Already, a month later, there was a change to her, and she was starting to show. She'd already been three months along by the time she and James finally felt at ease to tell the kids. The first few weeks after they'd found out had not been easy, and there had been some concern that the pregnancy would not reach the end they yearned for. But all was looking better now, and the newest member of the Hart-Lane family would be making his or her debut in mid to late May.

"Better now that I'm on solid ground," Abigail told her stepdaughter with a laugh. "And that I'm here with you," she went on, which made Maya reach over and hug her a second time. "I need to hear all about that concert, I still can't believe you got to sing with Ree Forster, in front of all those people."

She had gotten to see the video, of course, just like everyone else in the family, and Abigail had revealed herself for being an old time Ree fan just like Katy and Melinda, which now put an image in Maya's head of the three of them sitting together and talking about the singer like they were in their late teens and early twenties all over again. And then Luna, oh she would be there, too…

Maya recalled one old video, one of the ones her father had sent her on that thumb drive. She had been three years old, and her then fifteen-year-old aunt and twenty-one-year-old mother were standing there with her, in the old apartment's living room, singing along to one of Ree's songs that was playing on the radio. They were sort of shimmying along, looking at her, as she did her best to move and sing like them. Thinking about it now, she knew Ree would get a kick out of it… It would have to wait. First, she had to see about Sleepster 2026 number two.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	130. Their Cheers of Sisterhood

May 9th 2020

_Chapter 130  
Their Cheers of Sisterhood_

For having prided herself in being able to read her mother like her favorite book, Maya was mostly impressed with how Katy had gone and kept this whole thing a secret all this time. Well, 'all' this time… A couple days back, her mother had called and asked if she was busy over the days to come. When Maya had said that she had nothing coming up, which was more or less true, her mother had asked if she might look after the kids on one specific day, so that she and Shawn could go to the mall and play s-a-n-t-a. Maya had laughed, proclaiming herself up to the challenge, and just like that she was booked for this one day, which happened to be this day. She would soon call her mother, discovering that while her parents _were_ actually going to shop, she would be put in charge of three out of four siblings, and this until the following morning. In the meantime, her last Hunter sibling would be joining the fraternal side once again, with Lucas, Sam, Teddy, and Wyatt.

"Are we going to see Mrs. Carlton again?" MJ asked, as Lucas was leading him back to the car, carrying the boy's small bag of clothes for the night.

"Actually, I'm not sure where we're going yet," Lucas admitted to the five-year-old. It wasn't like last time, when they had planned the whole thing out, and made arrangements with Sophie's mother for the house. There were no plans, at least none that Lucas was aware of, though it seemed now that there _were_ plans, which Sam and Teddy had concocted together. They wouldn't tell Lucas until after they'd picked up the last of their small crew of brothers.

"Can Hunter come?" MJ asked as Lucas put his bag in the trunk with his own.

"Hunter Matthews?" Lucas asked, and the boy nodded. He might have said 'well, he's not one of your brothers, is he?' but then did that even matter? Technically, the title was passed between some of them in more of an honorific capacity than anything else. And over on the girls' side, where they had this whole contracted Sleepster situation going, they had invited both Cecilia and Dora to join in, so what did it matter if Hunter was what could generally amount to a cousin, with how close the Hunter and Matthews families were. They had gone so far as to name their sons after one another, hadn't they? "He's two."

"Haley is two and she's with the others," MJ pointed out. "And he's my friend," he nodded firmly.

"Hey," Lucas went to look in on the others in the car. "This place you won't tell me about yet, if we brought one more, would that be alright?" he asked, looking to MJ, who smiled. "A little one?"

Shortly thereafter, they were picking up the curly haired Matthews tot, who probably had little to no idea what he'd been recruited to, except that there was Lucas, and there was MJ, and he liked them very much, so he was on board. They'd tried to get August to join them, too, while they were at it, but the sixteen-year-old was working that day. According to Riley, he was saving up to buy himself a car.

"Alright, do I get to know where we're going now?" Lucas turned to Sam and Teddy, tapping the steering wheel to point out how he was the one driving. The boys shared a look. A minute later, Lucas had swapped seats with Sam, who drove them off from the Matthews house.

Sitting in the back with the three small boys, Lucas watched the pair in the front, brothers through and through, and he really did not mind following their lead.

Where they ended up was a hotel, the very one where the group out of Tucson had checked in. They had booked three rooms, one for Abigail and James, one for Luna and her mother, Elizabeth, and one for the boys, as they knew the girls would of course be spending the night with their big sister. The boys' room had three beds, to be shared now by the six of them, two by two. There would be plenty of time for them to decide who went where. For now, they were in a hotel, days before Christmas, and there was plenty for them to see as they left their room and wandered around.

As they went walking, Lucas kept Hunter in one arm and kept hold of MJ's hand with the other. Wyatt was in full exploration mode, a spaceship captain on an away mission. They may not have had a contract of their own, but going by how the girls' sleepover had so far resulted in the boys getting together to have one of their own, it left Lucas to wonder what this would mean in the years to come. For now, it almost went without saying, as Maya's siblings – and any others along for the ride – were young enough that they were still homebound for the most part, with very little in the way of individual lives, away from the others. What would happen once they weren't living at home anymore, once they were all off at school somewhere, or living on their own, maybe somewhere else than Austin or Tucson…

He liked to think that, in ten years' time, twenty, thirty… they would still have this, some form of this anyway. It was a great tradition to share among them, and as far as he was concerned he would do everything in his power, just as he knew Maya would, too, to keep it going, year after year, after year.

X

"Where are we going?" Emma asked, as the group of girls walked along the lane, following Maya's lead. She had Haley in her arms, the smallest Hunter looking around with clear, curious eyes.

"Far, far away… to another world…" Maya intoned dramatically, looking into her baby sister's face, which soon split into a smile and then a laugh.

"What does that mean?" Eliza asked, frowned, not catching on.

"Hey, I get to have my surprises, too," Maya turned to her, in her normal voice once again, getting another of her sisters to laugh.

This other world was soon revealed to be inside a massive looking structure, once upon a time part of another farm, further along from where the Sandersons lived. When the old family had moved away, the new owners had converted the building near the house into something of an attraction for the locals, every winter. Whether or not the weather gave them a snowy, chilled winter, there was one place they could count on for a bit of wintry fun.

"I know! I know where we're going!" Nellie declared at once, turning back to Maya, who gave her a look. Nellie pressed her lips together and played innocent at once.

"Woah…" Ginny Chen breathed as they walked in, a sentiment shared by all of those who weren't familiar with the 'In and Out Rink,' called as much for the wide doors pushed open on the days where the weather allowed, turning the place in a long tunnel where the skating rink had been built.

"I don't have skates… None of us have skates," Eliza pointed out.

"They have skates, we can borrow them, come on, I'll show you," Nellie led the way, soon followed by Gracie, Ginny, Sadie, Eliza, Emma, and Cara. Maya watched them go before looking to the other two at her side. Dora knew the place fairly well, having grown up in the area. And then…

"I'm sorry, it was short notice, first thing I could think of," she told Cecilia, knowing there would be no sound reason for her to get on skates and go out there with the rest of them.

"It's fine, I don't mind," Cecilia assured her. "Sam and I come here sometimes, we'll just sit and watch the others skate… I like it here," she smiled. "You can leave Haley with me if you want to go out there with them."

Maya stayed on the sidelines to watch for a while, amused at the sight of her sisters, trailing after one another around the ice. Some were more agile than others. The twins in particular, having gone with their father for about as long as they could stand up on skates, had earned the alliterative nicknames of Natural Nellie and Graceful Gracie. They could do circles around the slightly clumsier Eliza and Sadie, but instead they would go and try to help them, a couple of small instructors. Their methods… varied.

Eventually, Maya had been convinced to join them, once Haley had dozed off in Cecilia's arms. Gracie came gliding toward her as soon as she saw her step on the ice, taking hold of her hand and leading her along to join their group. By the time they all left and started back toward home, the sun was looking to start making its dip before long. The flushed and tired out girls were happy for a simple dinner of pizza, which Maya had called to order as they were leaving the rink, the better to cut on the wait by the time they made it home.

"The power's back," Dora remarked as they arrived. That had been part of the reason why Maya had taken them to skate. They could not have predicted that the outage would happen on the very day where her sisters came to surprise her, but that was what had happened, and rather than going out of their way to find some alternatives, Maya had set her mind to some easy solutions, knowing the power was set to be back in mid-afternoon, and so it was.

The pizza arrived and, for the speed with which it was consumed, was a thing of the past in no time. Between this and the afternoon's activities – and for some of them an early rise followed by a flight – it wasn't long that the little ones were nodding off, and falling asleep like stacked dominos toppling on to one another. They were carried up to the attic, some of them coaxed into sleepily going up of their own power. In the end, all that remained were Maya, Cara, Cecilia, and Dora, sat on the couch and the living room floor, under the lights of the Christmas tree, as they worked to wrap some last minute presents for what would be their 'pre-Christmas' morning. When the boys would be brought back, and as the girls would get up, they would get to have themselves a small gift exchange before the Tucson contingent flew off, some for home, others for Louisiana.

"So, if in like three years or whenever I have to look at colleges, do I get to come here like Sam did?" Cara inquired. Maya looked at her, surprised and unsurprised by this question. It wasn't the first time Cara would ask if she might move in with her sister, of course the first time around had been under much different circumstances.

"If that's what you want, absolutely," Maya told her without hesitation. It might have been something she should consult Lucas on before agreeing, seeing as there was no telling what their lives would be like by then. This was all still just speculation though, so she felt comfortable with answering the way she felt was the right way.

"Really?" Cara blinked, like she'd been certain her sister would say no.

"When the time comes, we will discuss it, alright? You've got my word," she reached out her hand to her sister, who smiled and clasped it with hers. Deal. Thinking about that moment, when Sam would be through with college, and Cara would be starting it… It brought up so many questions, so many curiosities, and none of them could really be answered, could they? Not yet…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	131. Their Cheers of Peace

May 10th 2020

_Chapter 131  
Their Cheers of Peace_

"Wait, do we have the marshmallows?" Maya stalled, turning to Lucas and then the house.

"I have them," Lucas held up the bag of things he'd packed for this small excursion of theirs.

"Good, okay, that's… What's with the smile?" she asked, to which he gave a small nod to the hat on her head. "You'll get it back tomorrow," Maya promised, smirking and adjusting the Santa hat sitting over her braided hair. "Now, come on, I want to be out there before midnight."

"Yes, Santa," Lucas tipped his head and followed. This made her laugh, even as she lead the way, humming and singing a Christmas carol, as the last hour of December 24th ticked on.

They arrived at the campfire site, where Maya saw to setting up a blanket before sorting through the drinks and the makings of smores they had brought from the house while Lucas got the fire going.

"Mint chocolate?" she held up the bars.

"Felt more festive," he shrugged.

"And orange marshmallows, really?"

"It was Maeve's suggestion," Lucas stood back as the fire came to life.

"Was this before or after she got pregnant? It might be one of those weird taste things…"

"Before," he laughed.

"What's next, egg nog crackers?"

"No, they're just the normal kind."

He sat down at her side, taking the bottle she offered him with a tip of the head for thanks and spearing the marshmallow with her. As they held them over the flames, they paused, just taking in their surroundings now, and present company… It was Christmas Eve, for a little while longer, and after the whirlwind of the surprise Sleepster, and their trip up to Houston today to celebrate with their friends, they had decided the best way to end the day would be with a lowercase date, by the fire, with smores and drinks and each other.

"Okay, here we go," Maya declared, as their blackening marshmallows were met with the other components of their festive treats. When they were able to take a bite, they did so, both of them sort of pausing and exploring the combination before they could pronounce themselves on the result.

"Not what I was expecting," Lucas declared, his face suggesting he wasn't completely sold yet, but he could be, given time to let the thing grow on him. He looked to Maya, curious to see what she thought of it, only to find she'd already consumed half of it, a content little smile on her face. "How about you?" he teased. She looked up at him, a deer in headlights.

"You've got stuff stuck in your beard," she informed him in return, chuckling as he worked to clean it away.

"Did I get it?"

"Sort of moved it elsewhere," she informed him, reaching over to assist. "Best I can do, you'll get more anyway, that thing is a menace with sticky foods."

"Is it? Hadn't noticed," he took another bite. Maya looked at him and bit back a laugh. "After tomorrow, I'm going to see about taking it down a notch, less Santa, more…"

"Rugged cowboy man?" Maya filled in for him. "I have to say, that was kind of my favorite stage of this whole adventure in your face there."

"Oh, I noticed that," he nodded, getting a playful kick in the leg for his troubles. "What are you doing?" Lucas asked, as he now watched her spear two of the big soft orange puffs to hold over the flame.

"Experimenting," she informed him, with a gleam of mad scientist in her eyes.

"I'm going to have to cut you off, aren't I?"

"You can try…"

"Sugar rush and alcohol, next to an open flame, I'm just saying. I'm not feeling Christmas in the ER," he made his point. Maya looked as though she was picturing it all in her head now, and had since moved right into 'how do I spin this in my favor?' Lucas sat now with a look of pointed curiosity, waiting for this answer as well. Seeing this, Maya quickly tipped the way of amused agreement.

"Well, gosh, how lucky am I to have such a caring husband in the making…" she declared, a moment before gasping and pulling her marshmallows away from the fire. They were looking very much on the coal end of the spectrum. "They're still good, it's fine, help?" Lucas took up the graham crackers and chocolate, moving to collect the burnt sugary bits. "Careful with your fingers…"

"I got it, I got it," Lucas promised. "This is going to go everywhere…" he frowned, right before Maya could put her plate under his hands and he let go. "Good?"

"Going to give it a few before I eat it, but it looks promising… Fingers?"

"All present and accounted for, no burns," he assured her.

They quietly took in their surroundings for a while. The sounds of the night, of the crackling fire, were just barely mixed in with what could either have been the whistle of the wind or someone somewhere playing Christmas songs late into the night and loud enough for them to hear.

"I think that's the rink," Lucas turned to Maya, knowing she would have heard it, too, likely more than he did. "They're open all night on Christmas Eve."

"Has to be," Maya agreed. "Next year, we should go," she suggested, effectively stating her intentions to stay here and keep enjoying this quiet moment, just the two of them, at the same time.

"Next year," Lucas nodded.

There were so many pillars throughout each year, those anniversaries, and birthday, and holidays they celebrated time and again, and they just felt like… timelines, each one. Whenever one of those days came along, they would find themselves in the moment, but at the same time they'd also be thinking about those same days they had already lived, and the memories attached to those, and ever since the two of them had been a couple, with an outlook on the future, they had taken to think about what those days might be, in years to come. Every year it seemed that their vision of the future changed, which made sense. Every year they knew more of what they were, and what they would come to be…

This year, for instance, with his decision to work at Sullivan Stables, he could foresee holidays spent out there, in the place his grandmother had put together. And one thing they knew for sure of the next Christmas, besides the fact that they would be headed to the rink for some late night skating, as they'd now decided… it would be their first of the holiday as a married couple.

"So, how is it?" Lucas asked, as he watched Maya break apart the new smore and take a bite.

"Very burnt… I kind of like it…" she squinted, speaking like a judge in a cooking competition. "And the last one for tonight, if I'm ever going to sleep," she added in her normal voice after a pause.

"I wasn't going to say anything," Lucas smiled.

"We're going to have to be careful tomorrow," Maya told him as he fixed himself a second smore. "MJ is starting to get suspicious about… you know," she prodded her hat with the one of her fingers that wasn't sticky with melted marshmallow.

"Right," Lucas agreed.

"And it might be the first Christmas Haley remembers at least a little… Do you think she'll figure it out when she looks at you?"

"Depends. Remember that year we dressed as Jack and Sally for Halloween. Gracie recognized me then and it was way more makeup. Also she was just a year old." The memory lit up in Maya's mind at once, that look on her baby sister's face as she'd stared at Skeleton Lucas with something unmistakably like recognition. It made her laugh out loud, breaking the near stillness with giggles like chiming bells.

"That's Gracie though," she finally came around to say. "And Haley… Not to say she's not bright, but I think you should be okay."

"I can leave and go get changed, come back an hour later as Santa. I'll just say I have to go to work."

"On Christmas?" Maya frowned.

"He's five…" Lucas countered, making her smirk.

"A very important book emergency?"

"Always, very important. Also, passing a message on the importance of literature," he nodded.

"Alright, if you're going to keep that up, you're the one who needs to be wearing this thing," Maya carefully lifted the red and white hat and deposited it on top of Lucas' head. He reached up to adjust it. "And look at that, it's midnight," Maya sat back and looked to her watch. "Go on, Claus, let the kids hear you!" she stood, bottle raised with a grin.

Lucas straightened up in his seat, more than happy to humor her and channel his inner Pappy Joe, the true Santa as far as he was concerned. Letting out a jolly 'ho ho ho' into the night, in this place of all places, made him feel more than ever like he was carrying on this legacy he had been handed.

"Fabulous performance, well done, now really dig deep, from that belly of… well… from that pillow you'll be sticking under your shirt tomorrow in place of… yeah…" Maya gestured toward his total lack of a belly. "Quiet on the set and…. Action, Santa!" she pointed at him. He laughed, focusing once again and taking her direction to 'dig deep' before giving her another 'ho ho ho.' "Yes, better!" Maya hopped about on her feet for a moment before moving to sit with him again, leaning in to kiss him as he held his hat in place.

"You know what this is making me think of?" Lucas asked, smiling, as they pulled back. She shook her head. He started to sing, quietly, to a familiar tune, though changing one M word for another, to create 'I saw Maya kissing Santa Claus,' which made her burst out laughing again, tipping her head to his shoulder.

"I'm putting that on next year's album," she told him as he put his arm around her and she turned her head up to look at him.

"I smell a hit," he declared, kissing her forehead and earning complaints that he was going to leave marshmallow and chocolate on her face.

"We should probably get going back to the house," Maya sighed a little while later. "Before our chaperone up there comes looking for us," she nodded back in the direction of the house, where Sam had gone to bed before they came out here. She could just imagine him sitting up in the living room in wait, ready to give them a 'what time do you call this?' if he didn't outright march down to the campfire to get them. They had to get up early! Christmas! Party! Family!

"Oh, we wouldn't want that," Lucas intoned. Maya laughed, getting up and holding her hand to him so he'd follow suit.

They gathered everything up again, putting out the fire which plunged them back at the mercy of the moon and stars to cut the darkness. They walked on back toward the house, Lucas' arm around Maya's shoulders. There was a merry giddiness in the air, a mix of sugar, and drinks, and holiday spirit… They looked forward to morning, where they would get to expand this feeling beyond just the two of them. That was what made it all something to look forward to, wasn't it? Near and far, they had people they loved and who loved them in return, and they were going to have themselves the merriest of Christmases, completed with the very first appearance of a bearded Santa who, they had a feeling, would be making many more of these visits in years to follow.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	132. Their Cheers of Christmas

May 11th 2020

_Chapter 132  
Their Cheers of Christmas_

"Hey, Santa man!" Maya called up the stairs as she walked into the house, hurrying out of her coat and boots so she might go up the stairs and find Lucas. "The kids are all off to bed back there, you want to go back? The party's still going… Hello?" she poked her head through the bedroom door, only to be startled a moment later when Lucas set his hands at her hips. She yelped, spinning around.

"Sorry," he laughed, taking the towel from around his neck to give his face and hair a bit more drying off. "And yeah, just give me a few to get dressed up again," he indicated the other towel, around his waist before stepping around her on bare feet. "Took a while to get all that stuff to wash off," he explained. "I got it all, right?" he looked at her.

"Sit, let me see," she pointed to his desk chair.

Long before Lucas had undergone his transformation into Santa, which involved a washable coloring of his hair – on his head and on his face – from his natural tones to a more Old Man Santa white, he had awakened early that morning for a brief home session of Christmas morning with Maya and Sam. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the day would start off with power going into the hands of whoever woke up first. It suggested a scenario in which all of them would be awake at the crack of dawn, lying in bed and just… waiting.

When Maya opened her eyes, she was already aware she'd lost. For one thing, she was not being held spoon like but was in fact on her back. This was not proof exact that she'd lost, no, the proof was rather that she felt a weight, as though someone was just sort of resting halfway over her, and she knew without seeing him that this would be her fiancé, just sort of posed there, waiting for her to wake because then… he would be the first thing she saw when she woke up. And he was… Just that big old casual grin staring back at her, and a gift bow planted on his head, waiting for her to laugh, which was just what she did.

"Just what I asked for, thanks, Santa," she hummed.

"Merry Christmas," he tipped his hat.

"Merry Christmas," she laughed once more, and he leaned in for a kiss. "Are we weird?" Maya pondered.

"All day, every day," Lucas promised.

To no surprise, Sam was already up and about, working to whip up his best breakfast yet, which he soon got to sit to with Maya and Lucas, once his big sister released him from the giant hug she'd caught him in. They had then moved into the living room for a brief gift exchange, stockings only, as the rest would be happening over at the Hunter-Hart house. The best part, without a doubt, was when Sam unloaded his stocking and found an open pass, which would allow him to go and visit back in Tucson as often as schedule and desire combined, to go and see his parents, and siblings, especially the littlest one yet to be born, all on his sister's dime. Now he was the one hugging the air right out of her, much to her approval.

It was an unavoidable reality that Maya's means had shifted in the past year, thanks in no small part to her job with the theater, but even more so to her contract and the songs she'd been writing for other artists. It wasn't like she was rich all of a sudden, but compared to what her reality had once been, she might as well have been. It would have been easy to splurge on some things, but she had resisted that urge. It was a good thing she had access to someone who could help her become more aware of what she had, what she was getting, and what she might do with it in order to get things on track for the future, between Topanga Matthews and Thomas Friar. Lucas' father had been especially happy at the idea of being able to counsel his future daughter-in-law, and it had been a great afternoon shared between the two of them.

When it had come to Christmas then, she'd felt it was only right that she allowed herself one flex of this new sort of wealth. Sure, it wasn't expected or necessary for her to buy more presents for everyone, but it didn't mean she couldn't treat the people she loved and make them smile. Giving Sam the ability to go home more often… that definitely got a huge smile out of him, and maybe a few tears, too.

With the morning advancing, the trio had gotten ready to head out to Katy and Shawn's, where a quartet of eager little ones would be waiting to see what Santa brought them. As soon as they had arrived, they'd found all of them waiting at the window. MJ could just barely see over the ledge, while Nellie had Haley hoisted up as much as he could, with Gracie lending a hand.

After presents, the house become a whirlwind of preparation, between getting all the food ready, where Sam jumped in to help, getting the rest of the house set up to receive their guests, where Lucas volunteered, and lastly in getting the kids ready. Maya had taken up her Hunter siblings and seen to each one. Every year had seen this preparation routine change, as everyone would get older and more capable of getting dressed on their own, or as more of them would exist at all.

This year, Maya only really had to get Haley changed, although when MJ showed up in the smallest Hunter's room, believing himself to be Ready For Christmas, his big sister had chuckled and made him come to her so she could fix him up a bit. Meanwhile, the twins showed up in their brand new holiday dresses, which they lost no opportunity to specify had been needed on account that they'd outgrown the old ones.

With clothes all set, Maya had gotten around to fix everyone's hair. The twins were very excited because, unlike last year, Haley's hair was now long enough that all four of them girls could have the same style. They felt bad… well, mostly Gracie did, as expected… over MJ being left out of this plan, but he hardly seemed to mind. He had his bracelet, engraved with his initials, his special thing so provided by his older sisters, and he got to wear it today, and that was good enough for him. All five of them had their own special things. The girls had their lockets, even Haley, with a loopy H on the front, he had his bracelet, and that was good enough.

If anyone was just as happy to see Maya, Nellie, Gracie, and Haley holding a solid sisterly front, it was their parents. Shawn had seen them coming down the stairs, trailing after the almost two and a half-year-old who would pitch a fit if she was not allowed to go up and down on her own most of the time, and he'd gotten that misty eyed 'I'm not going to cry' face, which generally preceded a covert wiping of tears. And then when Katy had seen them, oh… all her girls… that was all the Christmas she needed, and her one precious boy coming along with his hair all neatly combed, and his star-dusted bow tie… He was the bow on top of that present…

The guests had started to arrive around eleven, the better to dig into the food that was laid out for them to take and fill their plates with, along with a few other items back in the kitchen to be kept warm. The next few hours were a mash of eating, and talking, and exchanging gifts, and playing with the kids, and music and dance… And all the while, the 'undercover Santa' was waiting on his moment to be called away on his book emergency. Maya had been fully ready to jump in and help Lucas get ready, but he had pointed out that it would make it that much more obvious if she disappeared just as he did. Plus, he kind of liked the idea of surprising her.

So, when he left, she remained as she was, joined by Riley and Rosa as _they_ joined Nellie and Gracie and played a new board game the twins had received from Pappy Joe and Patty.

When the surprise guest had made his entrance, it was just as well that all the kids were too busy looking at him and running over to him, or they might have wondered why several of the others were barely able to contain their reactions. Between his lifelong friends, who were hanging on by a thread in not bursting out laughing, and his parents, who were seeing him take on the role for the first time when they still had so vivid memories of when he had been one of those running kids himself, and his fiancée…

Oh, Maya chronicled the whole thing, caught between finding the whole thing ridiculously adorable and trying not to laugh as she remembered the song from last night, around the campfire. It would be a bit too obvious if she went and kissed him right about then, wouldn't it?

"All gone," Maya declared, as she finished inspecting his hair. Not a speck of white was left, leaving him once again her very handsome young fiancé. "You were a big hit today," she informed him, not in so much of a hurry to leave this quiet moment with him.

"Looked that way," Lucas nodded, looking up to her from where he sat and smiling.

"I especially liked the part where MJ kept poking you in the belly. I was so sure he was on to you then," Maya laughed.

"I thought so, too," he recalled.

There was no doubt that, of all the kids who were around, MJ Hunter was most likely to recognize him despite his transformation. But by the end of it, the five-year-old was just happy to see him, and thank him for his presents. Lucas… Santa… told him he was very welcome, and he looked forward to the next year, where he hoped MJ would be just as good as he'd been this past year. MJ had promised he would be, triple cross his heart, and then he'd gone off to find Haley and Hunter.

"What about you? What was your favorite part?" Maya asked.

"Well, if I'm being honest, this one right here is climbing the ranks," he informed her, which made her snort. "Too predictable?" Lucas wondered.

"Might be, if I thought it was a bad thing," she shrugged, allowing herself – and him – one quick not-so-quick kiss before inciting him to get dressed up again so they could get back to the party. "To think, I almost made it through the whole day before thinking to say it…" Maya breathed, half distracted as she watched him dress and thought of the amount of padding she'd had to sew into that costume of his…

"Before saying…" Lucas was about to ask, looking back at her and just catching her as she looked away and pretended like she hadn't been staring. "Oh, right," he chuckled. "Well come on, say it," he nodded at her as she tried to play off the fact she knew she'd been busted.

"Last unmarried Christmas…" she finally stated, smiling broadly as he came up to her. "And me without my mistletoe…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	133. Their Cheers of Midnight

**_A/N:_**_ The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

May 12th 2020

_Chapter 133  
Their Cheers of Midnight_

"You know, I've been thinking about getting a new tattoo," Maya declared, waiting for a moment to see if…

"Mm?" Lucas mumbled at her back and she smiled.

"Good, you're awake," she turned herself around to look at him. "Morning." He leaned his face into her hand as she cupped his cheek, a light prickle of his shortened beard.

"What was that about a tattoo? Were you just seeing if I was up?" he yawned.

"Maybe a little, but it wasn't a lie either," Maya shrugged, looking to her arm, where her birds and her clock were staring back at her. "I mean, I have one that was for both of us, and one from the Houston house…"

"Same," Lucas nodded, holding up his own arm.

"Sometimes I just think about what I might get that was just mine. Then again, knowing myself, it'd end up having to do with people, too. I've got my friends, I've got you… After that there's…"

"Your _other_ family," Lucas guessed, which made her smile.

"Like I said, still thinking for now, and I _was_ checking if you were awake, too."

"Confirmed," he chuckled. "Come here," he leaned in closer, even as she did, until they were as close as they were bound to get, She didn't have to be convinced for a good morning kiss, and when they'd pulled back to look into one another's face again, he could whisper the thing that would be on her mind, because she really couldn't help herself tracking these steps. Today was the last day of their last unmarried year… It got her laughing.

"You know what I'm realizing?" she asked him.

"What are you realizing?" he asked back.

"We didn't do this last year."

"Do what?" Lucas wondered.

"The last unmarried something-something… Up until Sophie, we _were_ supposed to be married this year, and that didn't change until last March, so all those days the year before, they were supposed to be the ones, but… they weren't, not in the end. It's not like I could have known, but…"

"I see what you mean, yeah," Lucas let the thought settle in. She was right, they really hadn't done any of that the year before. "So, what do you think it means? _Do_ you think it means something?"

"What, that some part of our subconscious knew we weren't going to be getting married this year?" she laughed. "No, I don't know, it's just… It's funny, I guess."

"Well, now it's… you don't believe in jinxes, do you?" he paused. She shook her head. "Well, now it's definitely happening for real," he finished his sentence and was rewarded with a grin.

Whatever may or may not have happened in the moments to follow was left never to be known, as there was a knock at their bedroom door.

"You guys up?" Sam asked. Lucas looked to Maya with a tip of the head she interpreted as 'I don't know, are we?' She smiled, kissing him once more before sitting up.

"We're coming, we're coming, keep your pants on," Maya called to him, catching Lucas as he bit back a laugh. "Don't even," Maya pointed at him as they got up.

"Archer got out, I can't find him," Sam's voice informed them, from out in the hall, and they looked to one another before Lucas went and opened the door. Sam stood there, in his PJs still but with his boots on, suggesting he'd just come back from outside.

"Are you sure? You know he likes to go to sleep in random places, and he's as hard to wake up as you are," Maya pointed out.

"If he's in the house, he's really well hidden, because I looked everywhere," Sam shook his head, walking in now to crouch and look under the bed.

"Hey, hey, I'll look in here, you two go check the rest," Maya pulled him back up.

"Okay…" Sam didn't resist in any way. He really loved that pup…

"How would he have even gotten out?" Lucas asked, following his brother.

"I don't know, maybe he slipped by when we came back last night."

"No, he was here, I checked on the three of them before I went up to bed. The doors, the windows, nothing was open. I'm telling you, he's still in here."

Sam didn't look convinced, so Lucas humored him and they went out, walking around the house, and further up the lane… Lucas told Sam a story he'd heard from Missy Sanderson, about how about four years prior, her own dog Coraline had gotten lost on New Year's Eve, too. She had been spooked by the burst of fireworks. The morning of January 1st, Missy had been a total wreck, and though she'd been told to wait, that her father and grandfather would go searching for the dog, she'd eventually gone to find her dog on her own.

"She found her near the water, like one more minute and she could have been washed away, and then when Missy went to get her, she was the one who fell in. They were both fine, but she was soaked through, by the time she walked back home it was even worse. Got grounded so bad," Lucas chuckled, the way one only could when they knew there was no danger anymore.

"What if Archer went to the water?" Sam was not so comforted by this story. He started to run in that direction, and Lucas had to follow. He stopped again when he caught the sound of Maya's call on the wind. He turned to look toward the house and breathed.

"Sam, Sam!" he called after the boy, catching up to him and stopping him. "Look," he pointed to where Maya stood on the porch, a fluffy pup in her arms. They jogged back home, and as they approached Maya set Archer on the ground. True to his name, he shot off like an arrow, striking true as he found his favorite boy and was picked up again, the better for giving kisses.

"Hey, boy!" Sam was very nearly crying, hugging the growing dog. "Where were you? I… Do I smell bacon?" he blinked.

"Yeah, you do, and so did he," Maya grinned. "I figured there was one sure way to get him to show himself if he was in the house, which he was. Not sure where exactly, just that I made it, and all of a sudden there _he_ was, sitting like the good boy he is, waiting for his treat. His big sisters were also very intrigued," she informed them.

With the small crisis averted, the trio was finally able to sit and have a proper breakfast. Archer didn't leave Sam's side, to the point where Maya and Lucas both expected him to finally go and sit on the floor with him. He was headed to the Cassidy house for the countdown to the new year, him and Cecilia both, and now he wanted to bring Archer with him, which he ended up doing.

"Can't blame him for being afraid to lose anyone else," Lucas turned to Maya as they went on upstairs to get ready after they'd seen Sam and the dog off. They were staying at Dora's until morning.

"Is it weird I want to bring Trix and Lou with us now?" was Maya's response.

This year, they were headed to Diana Zvolensky's house for their New Year's Eve festivities. Sophie's mother always gave these great big parties on December 31st, though they didn't always attend, what with any number of other places and people to see. But this year she had all but insisted, and for how complicated of a year it had been, with what had happened to Sophie and the long and ongoing road of her recovery, they couldn't think of anywhere else they'd be.

It would also be Sophie and Chiara's second wedding anniversary, which made the day extra special every time it came around.

"It doesn't feel like it's just been two years, does it?" Maya commented as she and Lucas walked up to the house from the car.

"No, much longer, definitely," he agreed, thinking about the day they'd driven back to Austin, days before the New Year, their last one before graduation. All of a sudden, as they had arrived, they had been informed that their friends and roommate had not only gotten engaged but also decided to have the wedding in a few days' time. And they had done it, and it had been very beautiful. He told Maya as much. "I can't wait to have memories of ours," he added, which made her smile.

"Lucas Friar, the day you and I get married, I might not stop drawing for days… songs will be composed, to make people cry and swoon…" she informed him with confidence.

"I will keep you furnished with all the material you need," he countered, with equal confidence and adoration.

With this being Mrs. Zvolensky's party first and foremost, they walked into the house to find it crowded with any number of strangers. Luckily, they didn't have to search very long to find their people. The rule of the game generally went that they would find each other in Sophie's old room, which was in fact still her room. It wasn't as though her mother lacked for space that she needed the room back so badly once her only child and the only other occupant vacated the premises. The place as a whole could feel as though it was on the excessive side, a feeling championed by Sophie herself. It was and always would be too big.

"I tried to talk her into moving, getting a smaller house, even just one that feels too big for one person, not one that feels too big for like five or six. She won't do it," Sophie had told them, the last time the subject had come up.

"Here I thought it was about to be 2027, feels a lot more like vintage 2020 if you ask me," Maya walked into the room that day to find they were the last to arrive. The room was packed with Sophie, Chiara, Asher, Ray, Riley, Dylan, Rosa, Nadine, Zay, and Rebecca either sitting on the bed, on the ground, or just sort of standing around. The arriving pair worked its way through every one of them, a hug here, a fist bump there, before landing with the lady of the room herself.

"Wasn't a half-bad year, was it? I became a basketball hero, started senior year, and I met her… sort of," Sophie counted off, turning a smile to her wife, who nodded in full agreement. "It's like a time capsule, but with secret hiding places for the things I didn't want my mother to find, back when I thought she didn't know I liked girls." It had been and remained one of their favorite stories within the group, Sophie's going with her courage in both hands to come out to her mother, only to have this revelation met with a casual counter revelation that her mother had guessed as much a long time ago and had since been waiting for her to let her in on it. For all the troubles the two of them had had, with Sophie's choice to become a cop, this had never been an issue between them.

"Hey, I don't mind the blast from the past," Lucas told her with a smile.

"Wait until you see how much my dance moves have improved lately," Sophie smiled back.

The group now completed, they had ventured out into the party proper, before they reverted any further into adolescent mode.

"By the way, we told them," Nadine told Maya as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

"Told…" Maya turned to her.

"Me and Zay, the trying…" Nadine quietly explained.

"Oh! Okay…"

"Didn't have much of a choice, Zay got a bit… Zay-like… when we got here and Sophie offered me a drink and then…"

"Wait," Maya caught hold of her arm so she'd stop and look at her.

"Oh, we don't know for sure yet," Nadine volunteered a small smile. "We tried to stop somewhere and get a test on the way here, but everything was either closed or didn't have anything, so we just came anyway, and tomorrow we'll just have to find a way… Either that or I bribe one of the nurses at the hospital to run it for me," she joked, though the small glint of hope in the back of her eyes just made Maya smile. For their sake, she would cross her fingers that this similar bit of holiday maybe baby would turn out a whole other way for Nadine and Zay than it had done for Lucas and her.

"You call me as soon as you know," Maya gave her friend's hand a good squeeze, sharing in her giddiness.

When she found her way over to Lucas again, she could tell he had been given the rundown by Zay as well, about how his push back on the offered drink had forced him and Nadine not only the fact that they had been trying for a baby for some time now, but also that they just might have finally succeeded. According to Lucas, his best friend was trying very hard not to jump to conclusions and declare it a fact, but it was almost stronger than him.

"I don't know about you, but I am already liking this new year and it hasn't even started yet," Maya breathed, as she and Lucas walked out into the yard along with several others of the guests as midnight approached, the better to see the fireworks. "Nadine and Zay getting a baby…"

"Maybe…" Lucas had to insist.

"Hope," Maya pointed at him. "And Asher and Ray get to move into their house, my mom has her new play, Sophie is getting better and better, and then… what's the other thing again?" she pondered, turning to him to coax out the smirk he was trying to hold in. "What is it, Dockleberry?"

"Well, I mean, I heard this thing about a wedding…" he finally played along.

"You know what, I heard that, too," she 'gasped,' as he locked his arms around her from behind and she leaned to him.

"Going to make it the very best, as soon as it starts," he vowed, kissing her shoulder.

"Yeah?" she turned her head to him.

"Any second now," he kissed her, pressing his lips to her forehead, and her nose, and then held to her lips, even as everyone around them started to count down the final seconds. To them, it felt like leaving one world behind, and leaping boldly into the next. "Happy New Year…"

"Happy Best Year…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	134. Their Invitation to Grow

May 13th 2020

_Chapter 134  
Their Invitation to Grow_

"Alright, give it to me…" Maya breathed after waking up to the distinct impression that she was about to be caught in a deluge of confetti.

"It's just really hard to believe that now, every day, you're getting closer to thirty than twenty…" Lucas intoned, perhaps not reaching her actual pitch but giving an overall spot on impression, borrowing the exact words she'd given him, all of eight months ago, the day _he_ had turned twenty-five.

"I'm starting to see what you were saying now," she cringed, her 'distress' over reaching her own milestone soon nudged aside in favor of celebratory kisses, which felt as though they had been intended to number up to twenty-five before the two of them reached something of a 'but how about we do this instead…' level, right up until…

"Happy birthday!" Sam's voice was heard – loudly – right before the previously expected confetti came out in a burst that blanketed them both. The deployment was followed by the sound of the boy's laughter as he disappeared back into the hall.

"You'll have to run pretty far for me not to catch you, Samuel!" Maya shouted.

"I love you, too, sis!" Sam shouted back. Lucas could only laugh, brushing confetti from the top of his fiancée's head.

Much as they would have loved to just forget about school, and work, and the whole world outside their house in general, they had to go. Lucas and Sam were school bound, while Maya was off to the theater. She had recently gotten to work with Lindsay Alcott up at the school once again, which had been just as wonderful as the Fall Festival had been. She would get to have another go of it, when spring came along, and she couldn't wait.

Before heading to the theater, she made her stop over for the usual coffee and treats, where she found someone had already paid off her order before she got there. There were a number of potential candidates for this act of birthday generosity, from those who would be receiving the items that weren't hers, but she had a sneaking suspicion this had been the work of her good man Huckleberry. Whoever it was, they sent the birthday girl off to work in an even greater mood.

Inside the theater, as she made her way to the office area, Maya crossed any number of her co-workers who either wished her a happy birthday in passing or stopped and embraced her, asked her how she felt now that she was 'a year older.' She tried not to look like all she wanted was to get to her office after a while, thanking each one with a some variation on 'same as yesterday.' When she finally reached her office, she now suspected that this had all been a ploy to stall her, the better to let her 'invaders' complete their work.

"Surprise!" Gracie gasped out, the first to see her, as she raised up both arms as high as they would to, each grasping a trio of colorful balloons. Almost at the same time, Haley turned from where she'd been shadowing Shawn's attempt to straighten up his side of the banner he and Katy were hanging over the wall behind the desk. The youngest Hunter went dashing over to her big sister, who barely had time to set down her things on Lily's desk before she was roped in by the two-year-old, soon followed by MJ and Nellie both, who had been hiding in wait. There was no point in continuing to hide, was there?

"Hi! Hey! Okay!" Maya laughed, grasping on to the open door to steady herself from the onslaught of small arms. Finding herself prisoner of so many arms was a happy trade off, when she could look down and see those four faces staring up at her like that. Sometimes, she did have to wonder if the age difference between them might not confuse things to some degree, like they didn't look at her – the younger two especially – as something like a third parent. If that was the case, then she counted herself more than up to the task. "What are you all doing here, don't you have school?" she asked, looking to the twins especially. As reasonable as the question was, it was asked also in a bid to give herself a moment to not feel so overwhelmed by the fact that they were all here, doing this for her.

"We are, but Daddy said it was okay," Nellie informed her, pointing back to Shawn, who gave his daughter a look like 'oh, you're ratting me out now?' which made Nellie laugh.

"I'm taking them there after we leave here," he specified now, as he and Katy came up to have their turn in greeting their eldest.

"I couldn't just let today pass by like any other birthday," Katy told her with that sort of smile that felt so much like a thread back to the past, to the days of just the two of them, on the road from New York to Texas.

For so long it had been for the most part something that was theirs alone, that time in their lives. When Shawn had come along, and Lucas, too, they had been taken into it all, though it couldn't be said that they understood it in the same way. Now… Now, the twins were getting to be old enough that they would get curious, that they would start and ask questions. It couldn't be helped, could it? They understood that Maya's father was not Shawn, not in the same way that he was _their_ father. They knew that Maya's father had been Kermit, who was also Sam's father, and Cara's, Eliza's, Wyatt's… the same way that there was Abigail, who wasn't Maya's mother that way.

For all that knowledge, it was clear to see that they didn't understand the rest, through no fault of their own. But they wanted to know, so how were they going to tell them? _What_ were they going to tell them?

After this quick surprise visit had been over, Shawn had taken off with the kids, Katy had gone on to her own office, and Maya had gotten to work in her cheerfully decorated space. Her siblings had wanted to make her office feel happy, to make the day go by while never forgetting that this was her special day, and later she would be able to tell them it had done exactly that.

"Your ride is here…" a sing-song voice caught her ear as she was cleaning up her desk and readying to leave. Looking up, Maya smiled to find Nadine leaning to the open door.

"Hey!" she picked up her bag and went around to greet her.

"Decorations are nice," Nadine pointed around the room.

"So were the decorators," Maya nodded with a grin.

"Happy birthday, Superstar," Nadine snatched her up into a hug that nearly tipped her off her feet, much to her enjoyment.

"Ugh, another one!" Maya dramatically complained as they trailed off down the hall toward the parking lot. "The last one _just_ happened, I swear they're coming faster now…"

"If you want, we don't have to do anything tonight, I will just take the cake back home and eat the whole thing," Nadine shrugged.

"No no no, you're talking nonsense now," Maya waved her hand at her and Nadine laughed.

She was doing well enough now, even though those first few days after the turn of the year, after she and Zay had learned they weren't in fact having a baby yet, had been a bit hard to get through. There was a reason why they had intended to keep their trying a secret, and it was this right here, with the false hope, and having to burst all those balloons when they found out they hadn't achieved anything after all. Maya had just seen it in her friends' eyes, as much as they hated to have to tell the others, it was their own disappointment that felt expanded, every time they were denied. It had only been three months or so since they'd started, they had to be patient.

"Do I need to close my eyes? Are there blindfolds involved?" Maya asked as Nadine's car turned on to the lane.

"There was some debate, it got weirdly heated, and then they just decided that you should get to do whatever you want, so it's up to you. I'm not even sure if there's anything outside the house for you to… Oh, never mind…"

In what they would refer to as the Great Balloon Shortage of 2027, the house could be seen from far up the lane, so populated with the colorful globes as to give the impression it would take off at the slightest breeze and turn into the house from Up. Maya could not have closed her eyes if she tried, feeling herself tearing up at the sight of it all. Soon, she had her phone out to take pictures. She didn't have to wonder whose idea this way. She'd sort of forgotten all of it, how she and Riley, when they were little, had decided what they wanted on their twenty-fifth.

When her own mother had turned twenty-five, Maya was seven. It would be Katy's first birthday since Kermit had gone away, which only added to what she'd been hearing, where everyone seemed to be under the impression that this number was a Big Deal. Maya and Riley were still new friends at the time, but close enough that the question had turned to what they would want when they were that old. Clearly, it had to be an eternity away.

"Balloons. Lots of balloons. All the balloons." That had been her wish. She sort of recalled thinking how if she had all those colors around her, making her world so bright and alive… she could only have an equally colorful, bright, and lively day. And now here they were, and her prediction had been correct. The fact that Riley was here with her to celebrate this day, eighteen years later… oh, that meant so much, too.

"You remembered," she laughed and cried at the same time when she got her arms around her oldest friend.

"Of course I did," Riley replied, sounding much as she did. Within months, it would be her turn, her twenty-fifth, and Maya would remember that, too.

All those years ago, she doubted that her little self would have any idea just how many people would be there in the world, wanting to celebrate her birthday with her. Many of them were at the house that night, others could not be there in person, due to distance or availability, but even absent they made their presence known in one way or another, whether it was through a call, or a card, or a present. Not until all the guests had gone did she receive the last of these.

"Maya?" Sam went to find her, taking more pictures with her proper camera now.

"Yeah?" she asked, taking another shot before looking at him. There was an envelope in his hand, and without seeing anything more she knew exactly what it was. "Oh…" she breathed, leaving the camera to dangle around her neck before reaching over to take the envelope from him.

_To Maya, on your 25th birthday_

"Near the end, when he was starting to have more difficulty with… everything, he gave that to me, asked me to pass it on," Sam explained solemnly. Whether this was the only one he'd been entrusted with, she didn't think so, but she wasn't going to inquire any further. She preferred to wait and find out, for herself, for him, for the others.

"Thank you, Sam," Maya nodded. "Thank you." He nodded back, quiet as though he'd gone off into that old place in his head at the memory of their father. She knew it well, and she hugged her brother close, thankful every day that she got to know him, that he existed as a person in the world at all.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	135. Their Invitation to Return

May 14th 2020

_Chapter 135  
Their Invitation to Return_

"Hey, your mom's looking kind of weird back there?" Lily told Maya as she walked into the office a few days later.

"Weird how?" Maya looked up from her scribbling over some new lyrics she was trying to get polished. With any luck, she'd be able to start getting a demo track down over the weekend.

"Kind of pacing around," Lily replied.

"She's probably going over lines for Dallas. Trust me, I've seen weirder. One time when I was eight, I walked into her room and she was wearing a…"

Down the hall, there was the sound of a glass shattering.

"Okay, fine…" Maya scrambled out from her office, Lily on her heels. A few others had been startled by the sound, breaking through the early morning quiet. "I got this," Maya told her assistant, waving the others off before slipping into her mother's office without knocking. Katy stood half crouched, trying to pick up the pieces of what had been a vase until not a minute ago.

"I wasn't looking, I knocked it over, I… I need to find another one, they'll wonder where it went…" she mumbled, shaking her head. Maya realized this would have been the vase the twins and MJ had 'bought' for her, last Mothers' Day, because that way they would be able to bring her flowers all the time, to make her office look nice, and smell nice… They would replenish the flowers at least every other week. Now the vase was gone, shards and dust…

"Hey, it's okay, we'll replace it, they'll never know," Maya promised, pulling her mother up to look at her. "Are you hurt? Did you cut yourself?"

"No, no, I'm fine, I…"

"No, you're not, you're being kind of… fidgety. You look like you've seen a ghost," Maya told her, looking over to where the vase would have been. There was a small envelope sitting there, sort of tipped against the wall crookedly, like it had been tossed, and the poor vase had been in the way. "What's that?" she pointed to it. Katy looked to the enveloped, breathed out.

"Ghosts…"

Moving to retrieve the envelope, she flipped it over to look at the front. It was addressed to her mother alright, but it wasn't to Katy Hart or Katy Hunter, rather Katy Clutterbucket, with her home address. The return address said that this had come from Arkansas. Two labels affixed, to the center, to the top left corner, like one of so many. It had already been torn open, so whatever was inside, she'd already seen it, stuffed it back inside, right before sending it flying across her office, to be the death of that poor crystal vase. Maya looked to her mother, who just stood there, staring at the pieces on the floor. Finding no refusal for her to look inside, she pulled out the card.

On the front had been printed a picture of a couple, the man in a suit, the woman in a wedding dress… It was old, and she'd never seen these people, but there was familiarity to them. Inside, the text was printed in gold.

"Join us in celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary of Angela and Tanner Clutterbucket, Saturday, January 30th 2027, from 7pm until 11pm, at their home…" Maya read, blinking. "Oh."

"Throw it out," Katy looked up.

"Mom…"

"I'm not going, so what does it matter? Give it back," she reached out, but Maya put everything, envelope and card, behind her back, out of reach.

"How did they even know where you live, you haven't spoken to them in like…"

"Going on twenty-eight years. Give it," Katy insisted.

"Mom…"

"Maya Penelope Hart, you give me that thing right now."

"I am twenty-five, Mom, that doesn't work anymore," she resisted.

"Does it?" Katy asked, a bit too wide-eyed for her own liking, but Maya kept steady. After a few beats, Katy sighed. "Betsy…"

"Your cousin? The one who took you in?"

"She always told me it was ridiculous, running off to New York to be a star, kept telling me I should go back, even though _she_ ran off, too, when Aunt Mary and Uncle Peter found out about her and that cheerleader. I was too stubborn, of course, so she let me stay, made sure I went to school. If it wasn't for her, I might never have met your dad, and then you wouldn't be here, think about that…" She was rambling, her pacing reduced to what space of her floor wasn't dusted in glass, but she was still pacing nonetheless.

Maya's track record, where grandparents were involved… well, it wasn't ideal. None of them had been in her life though, so what did it matter? Then, the last few years, her father's side had been made to resurface, and it had been… some good and some bad mixed together. The past was the past, and now she had her grandmother, up in Tucson, along with her aunt, and her cousins, and Abigail and James and the kids. She wouldn't give them up for the world. And if she lacked in blood kin, the whole of the Friar and Sullivan clans had taken her in as one of their own, thanks to Lucas. Alright, maybe not all of them, but the good ones…

Her mother's family though, the unfortunately named Clutterbucket… Well, they had been a blank for a long time, a list of names, some stories, provided by her mother but on the whole… outdated. That was to be expected, when her mother had not seen or spoken to the vast majority of them since before Maya herself was born. She doubted that most if any of them knew she even existed, much less her younger siblings.

She didn't know what they were like, not exactly. All she had to go on were the memories of a young girl who had felt stifled by her small town and sought bright lights. What had felt like unreasonable demands and unreliable people to her could have been perfectly good people, doing their best to provide what they just couldn't. When Maya had been younger, she'd been happy to contend with what she was told, but now, as an adult… She knew better than most how impressions could change, how some of them could really be worth re-examination, as difficult as that initial step could appear.

"I didn't know you and Betsy were still talking. I never even met her… Did I?"

"No, you didn't," Katy shook her head.

"Because when you found out you were pregnant, you told her you were moving in with dad," Maya slowly recalled, the same story she'd once told Lucas.

"I didn't want it to get back to them, didn't want the I-told-you-so's," her mother sighed. "I wasn't planning to cut her out, I just… wanted to have my life together first, but then the Harts kicked your dad out, and time just happened, and… it took a bit longer for me to 'get it together' than I thought it would, so by then I just… I couldn't pick up the phone. I put it all behind me, figured they'd done the same."

"So how did this happen?" Maya held up the envelope. Katy let out another sigh, which shifted into a chuckle.

"You want to take a guess who turned me on to Ree Forster in the first place?"

"Cousin Betsy…" Maya bowed her head.

"Might as well be the president of her fan club. To this day, she is very much on top of everything about her, even hops around from city to city to go and see her when she's on tour. Last month, she came to see her, in Austin, and who did she see on that stage with her idol, if not this young woman who looked a whole lot like she could be related to her. Didn't take her long to put two and two together, and a week later, she called the house."

"Why didn't you say anything?" Maya quietly asked. Katy shrugged, didn't reply. "What did she say? What did _you_ say?"

"No one was home, she left a message." As silence stretched on, Maya looked to her mother.

"You never called her back, did you?"

"Can we not…"

"Mom…"

"Things are good now, they're great. Why are you trying to make me dredge up the past like that?" Katy looked at her, not angry, just still so… like a frightened child, like the kid she'd been when she'd run away.

"Because… it's not just you anymore. Maybe I would like to know where I came from, _who_ I came from. And maybe one day Nellie, Gracie, MJ, Haley… they'll want to know, too." Her mother looked at her like she hated that she couldn't just brush this off; Maya had a point. "I'm not telling you that you have to go to this thing, just… Talk with Dad, think about it in some way where you can be calm and… nothing gets hurt in the process," she gestured to the glass on the floor. Katy considered this, finally relenting.

"Fine. Fine…"

"Good. I'm holding on to this," Maya put the card back in the envelope and stuffed it in her back pocket before moving to hug her mother.

"I don't know if I should be proud or terrified of this maturity of yours," Katy breathed, hugging her back.

"I'll take both, if that's alright with you," Maya gave her another good squeeze. "I'm getting a broom. At lunch, we can go and find a replacement for the vase." When she pulled back, her mother reached up to cup her face in her hands.

"I don't regret a bit of it, you know that? Not anything, not if it would mean I didn't have you, or Shawn, or the girls and MJ."

"I know," Maya smiled, and her mother nodded. "I love you, too." Katy laughed. "Broom," Maya pointed to the door.

"Right, yes…" Katy looked to the mess on the ground now, almost like she was seeing it for the first time all over again.

Stepping back out into the hall, shutting the door behind her, it felt like she'd stepped back out into the real world. Things were quiet, but she had a feeling people were listening to any sound they might catch, out in their own offices, wondering what was up with Katy. Maya ignored this and went to find a broom. Returning to her mother, she helped gather everything up, finally returning to her own office, with the promise of lunch with her mother – Katy's treat – and some vase shopping. All they really needed to do was call Shawn and ask where he'd gotten the first one.

Finally sitting back at her desk, with Lily doing her best impression of someone not quietly trying not to pry, Maya pulled the envelope from her back pocket, pulled the card back out and stared at the photo for a while. She could joke that, at least, if they went through with this, there really couldn't be any more surprises, any more family coming out of the woodwork, but it was about so much more than that. Her father had missed his chance. He'd died before he could ever find a way to make peace, if not with his father then at least with his mother, who would have wanted nothing more than to do the same. Her mother said she had no regrets, but Maya knew that might not be the whole truth, whether Katy could admit it to herself or not. If she could spare them all that missed opportunity… She had to try. Maybe it would never go any further than this, but she would have tried, and that would have to be good enough.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	136. Their Invitation to Recall

May 15th 2020

_Chapter 136  
Their Invitation to Recall_

By the time she arrived back home at the end of the day, Maya felt weighed down, as though the day had started a bit sideways and had decided to follow that curve the rest of the way. Driving back from the theater, all she wanted anymore was to be home, with her fiancé, her brother, and the dogs. Walking in, she had expected to find Sam there, Cecilia with him, as Lucas saw to dinner as he would on Wednesdays this semester. Instead, the house was mostly quiet.

"Hello?" Maya called out, plopping herself down on the couch as she did. A moment later, she could hear barking and skittering, the promise of Trix and Lou dashing her way from upstairs, even as a little creature appeared from under the couch. "You're so sneaky now, when did that happen, huh?" Maya leaned forward and snatched up Archer, held him snug in her arms where he appeared content to remain.

"You have the look of someone who's had a long day," Lucas appeared from out of the kitchen.

"Day was long before it even started," she sighed as he came and sat with her.

"What's up?" In response, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the envelope. Passing it over, she could watch his curiosity turn to slow discovery. He saw the labels on the front, the names, the locations. He knew enough of her mother's story to start piecing things together. He took out the card, stared at the photo for a few beats before opening it to see what was inside. "Wow…"

"Yeah," Maya sighed, scratching at Archer's ears, his buoyant sort of puppy joy feeling like an essential component to her ease. She went on to tell Lucas about the incident with the vase, and the conversation she'd had with her mother. "She said she'd think it over, I don't know… if she's going to talk to Dad about it, tonight, or another day, I just… I don't know…"

"It's in less than two weeks," Lucas remarked.

"I noticed," Maya nodded. It was sort of last minute, sure, but that didn't have to be a bad thing, did it? There could be reasons, she just… didn't know what they would be, because she had zero context to work from. She didn't know these people.

"Do you think she's going to go?"

"I have no idea…" she sighed, trying not to air her frustrations out on him, even if she knew he would absolutely get that this was not directed at him so much as it was happening in his vicinity. "You know, it's like… she's put it all behind her, but all it takes is one thing to come along, and she's right back there. It's like when my grandmother and Luna showed up in Austin and she wouldn't see them."

"I remember," he nodded. Maya groaned, focusing on the dog a bit more.

"I get so worked up about it, too, so I get where she's coming from, like no matter what we do, it always goes back to that, all the messy parts of us, our families…" Lucas shuffled closer to her on the couch, a move she happily met by leaning her head to the offered shoulder, Archer still in her arms. Lucas kissed the side of her head and she just breathed, calmed by his presence.

"You want to go, don't you?" he stated what she'd clearly been failing to say with her words but succeeding in every other way.

"I can't help it. There's an opening, a little one, and I can't just walk away, I have to look inside, see what's there. Am I just asking for it?"

"I don't see how I would be able to leave it alone either," Lucas shook his head. "Are you worried about what she'll think if you decide to go and she won't?"

"I'm not going to go," Maya turned her eyes up to him. "Not if she won't. I couldn't… It'd be too… I don't know…"

As certain as she was of this choice, it was impossible for her not to let her mind wander down that road where she'd know… mostly she was just scared of how it would go, if she just went and they… didn't want her. In all these years, knowing what little she could know, there had been no other way than for her to create these people like characters in a story. In this story, her mother was the main character and everything was from her perspective, including these other characters, their personalities, everything that made them who they were. If fifteen-year-old Katy had seen them in one way, that was all she had to go on.

She didn't paint them as villains, maybe antagonists, obstacles on the road, but not _bad_ people. A lot of them were just set in their ways, some of them had very clear ideas of what her life was and what it should become, and that vision had not meshed, and so the adversaries were cultivated. In one corner, Katy the dreamer, and in the other, Mom and Dad, with work and family as the revolving doors of means and end… She wanted something, they saw it as frivolous, unnecessary. She found ways to earn money, to pay her own way, to get better clothes, and makeup, and movie tickets, and maybe even acting classes… But every time she would be made to surrender it all, because they would not have their daughter 'chasing after trouble,' and Katy knew exactly what they were talking about.

Finally, she'd had enough of it, after she'd managed to scrounge up enough to buy a tiny, crappy little television set, because she was tired of being the girl without a television, not because they couldn't afford it but because her parents 'didn't believe in it.' She'd bought it, and she'd brought it home, and for one glorious afternoon, she lay huddled on her bedroom floor, looking at that screen no bigger than her own face. Then her father came home, and distracted as she was, Katy hadn't been able to hear him and hide it. He had taken the set, very nearly ripped the outlet from the wall, and he'd tossed it in the trash bin. The crack of the screen, that was what had decided it. She'd had enough of this, she needed to be with people who would understand her, and they sure as hell weren't here.

So the next bit of cash she'd managed to hide – all the while sacrificing other small amounts, the better to throw her parents off the scent – was put toward bus fare, to get her from Arkansas to New York. She had a plan, she was going to crash with her cousin. Betsy was eighteen at the time, and she'd made her own mad dash a year ago, for reasons Katy hadn't discovered until her cousin had managed to send her a letter, explaining it all. Her parents had found her in bed with a girl from school, and it had been… a very bad day all around.

Surely, if anyone was going to understand, it would be Betsy. So she got her money together, she made a plan. She played by the rules, just enough that they wouldn't get so suspicious, but also wouldn't be so on her case. The closer she got to her goal, the more she would count the days until she was gone. It was as though the moment she'd made the choice, the world around her missed no chance to show her she'd made the right one. This was not her place, this was not going to be her life. Finally… she had enough, enough for the fare, and food along the way, and some extra for new clothes, new everything, once she got to New York. There was no looking back. She left a note on the kitchen table, grabbed her bag, and she was gone. She traveled across the country, into the city she'd dreamed of, and she was going to stay. She was going to show them they had been wrong about her.

"If it wasn't for me, she might have gone back…" Maya frowned. "She could have made it back then, or… I'm not saying she shouldn't have had me, or the little ones now, it's just like… She didn't get to make things better with them. Maybe that's how it had to be, maybe they're exactly the people she made them out to be, I… I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore," she sighed, resettling in Lucas' arms. At her feet, she could see Trix and Lou sitting there, looking at her, like they very much wanted to get up there with the two of them and Archer.

"What did she want to achieve when she left home?" Lucas asked. "She wanted her life to matter, to be hers to create, yeah? That's what she did, isn't it?"

"The long way around," Maya smiled to herself.

She used to think so little of her mother, didn't she? She'd be sort of embarrassed by her, the way she'd behave, not realizing she was doing the best she could and then some, for her. Now, to look back on both of their lives, together and apart… Her mother was her heroine, her model for resilience. And even though she'd put some dreams aside, in favor of hard work and sacrifice, for Maya, for her siblings, she'd never lost it. She was making it happen, truly and finally. Her long delayed start was only a beginning.

"They need to see her, they need to see," Maya looked to Lucas. "Not to prove anything, but… to show them the person she's become, everything she's made of herself, including the little Hunters, and me, and her acting… They need to see it all." She paused, as he slowly nodded. "But I can't make that choice for her. And if she won't go, then I can't go either. That's just how it has to be."

"Okay," Lucas tipped his head. Maya looked back to the card.

"I have no idea who even sent it, if it was them, or Betsy, anyone. There's no note, no explanation, and…" her finger dragged along the name on the front. _Katy Clutterbucket_…

What was it supposed to mean? Surely, if they'd tracked down her address, they had to know this wasn't her name anymore. The whole thing was so impersonal, and maybe there was a reason for it, a good one, or maybe… maybe this was cursory more than anything, a call for her to present herself for this occasion, like it wouldn't throw everything in shambles for the long disappeared daughter of the happy couple to present herself after all this years. It could all just be adding insult to injury, but for Katy or her parents, who knew?

"Where's Sam?" Maya finally asked, noticed the absence.

"Dinner at Cecilia's," Lucas nodded.

"Don't tell him about this, okay?" Maya showed the envelope and the card. "For now, until my mom makes up her mind, it'll just be easier that way."

"Sure," Lucas agreed. "She's going to have to decide sooner or later…"

"Yeah…" Maya frowned, putting the card back in the envelope. "I should still check my schedule for that weekend, in case I need to go, and…" she turned to Lucas, who gave her a nod. He would do the same on his end.

"I can see if my parents might take Sam in for that weekend," he told her, guessing this would not be something she'd want to bring him into.

"Somehow, I don't see your mother turning down this chance to play hostess…" She didn't need to suggest how Melinda was really getting to feel that empty nest, enough to be cranking closer and closer to wishful grandma mode.

"Oh, she's definitely going to say yes, but that doesn't mean she won't reprimand me for not 'doing the courtesy' of asking her."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	137. Their Invitation to Try

May 16th 2020

_Chapter 137  
Their Invitation to Try_

By chance, it came to be that, as they were getting ready to go and pick up Sam from Cecilia's house, Maya got a call from her mother, who wanted to talk again. Soon enough, the decision came for Lucas to drop her off at her parents' house while he went on to pick up Sam and then swung back around to get her.

"What do you want me to do if I'm back and you're not done in there?" Lucas asked when they pulled up to the curb.

"Have Sam text me when you're nearly here?" Maya suggested, and he agreed. She took a deep breath, whether she meant to make this a 'big deal' or not, she couldn't help but feel her gut was in knots.

Walking up to the house, her nerves were momentarily released when she spotted a small face peering as high into the window as it could go. Maya squinted, her eyes saying 'now what are you doing there?' The response was a grin and a hand wave before the door was pulled open and she could see her little brother properly.

"You're supposed to be in bed, not playing doorman… doorboy…" she informed MJ as she pulled him up into her arms. "What are you doing up?" she whispered while MJ pressed his face against hers, blue eyes to blue eyes and crossing for being so close. He loved doing that, pulling back after a moment and laughing as his sight would settle again.

"Mommy said you would be here, I heard her, on the phone," he finally answered his big sister's question.

"Right, right, so you wanted to get some good hugs in?" Maya guessed. MJ nodded. "Sneaky," Maya laughed, kissing her little brother's squishy cheek as they walked into the house proper, closing the door on the way. "Where's everyone?"

"Up there," MJ pointed.

"Up there," Maya repeated, setting him back on his feet so he would lead the way, decked out in his favorite star strewn PJs. It had long been and continued to be his favorite shape, his favorite pattern, in any color combination. This one was yellow and dark blue stars on a light blue background.

Passing by the twins' room, Maya peered in to find they were both asleep in their beds. Then, in the nursery, she found Shawn, sitting on the small bed with Haley, as the smallest Hunter appeared to be almost but not quite asleep. Maya caught her father's eyes and he pointed down the hall while minding not to disturb the toddler. He also pointed to MJ, and Maya signalled she would handle it.

"You go to your bed, and I'll come and see you in a bit if you're still awake, okay? _If_ doesn't mean you keep awake on purpose, yeah?" she whispered, leading him to his room. MJ nodded dutifully, though he still looked at her with those innocent eyes. She was at least going to tuck him in, right? Maya just pointed to the bed, and the boy hopped in, crawled and flipped on to his back, head to the pillow and ready. "Weirdo," Maya chuckled, pulling his blankets up until he was satisfied. "Good night, star boy," she kissed his forehead and turned the light off on the way out to find her mother. She met her father in the hall, as he was coming from the nursery and carefully shutting the door. The two of them shared a look. "She told you about…" Maya pulled out the infamous envelope and gave it over as Shawn nodded. He looked at the labels on the front, pulled out the card.

"MJ's got a bit of her father in him, doesn't he?" he remarked, looking at the picture.

"He does, yeah," Maya nodded. She'd noticed it, too.

"Soon," Shawn remarked now as he read the text inside, including the date.

"I already checked my schedule, if she decides to go…" she advanced the topic, asking without asking…

"That's still unclear," Shawn answered the unspoken question. "All she's really told me is what happened earlier, with this and the…"

"V-A-S-E?" Maya filled in.

"That trick's not going to work much longer," her father shook his head and pointed loosely in the direction of the twins' room.

"How are you with languages?" Maya inquired, shopping for a backup. Shawn chuckled.

"Anyway… We haven't gotten that far into it, not with the kids running around, and I can't be the one to…" he sighed. Maya knew he was right where she was, feeling like he wanted to help while also trying not to sway Katy in any way where she might chose to do something she didn't want to do, but at the same time… Sometimes people needed that extra little push, didn't they, not to choose but really to be shown that they would not be alone if they made the choice that needed some extra support.

"What's she up to now?" Maya asked as they headed to Shawn and Katy's room.

Katy sat on the bed, a plastic box at her side, which Maya recognized being part of their household since she was little. It had always been in her mother's room, somewhere, usually on a closet shelf out of her reach, until she was tall enough that her mother outright told her this was hers, and it was personal. Maya had always been very good about respecting this, no matter what, enough so that that sight of the box there, open, felt sort of startling. Some of the contents were already spilled before her mother, trinkets and memories from a whole other life… Katy was looking through a photo album, not yet aware of her visitors.

"Hey…" Shawn cleared his throat, making her look up.

"Hey!" she smiled, finding the two of them there. "Check this out," she turned the album around for them to see and they approached. "This is when I arrived in New York. I grabbed a couple of disposable cameras on our first stop out of Arkansas, so I could chronicle my 'escape,' my journey to shiny NYC," she narrated, her voice adopting a decidedly teenage turn. The image they were presented certainly fit the bill. Fifteen-year-old Katy, blond curls spilling from a ponytail in the wind, using her free hand to point at the closest landmark she had found upon leaving the bus station, her face perfectly stating 'look, I made it, I'm here!'

"I've never seen you this young," Maya stated, amazed. "How did no one stop you, you look like a kid…" she had to ask, thinking back to her own attempt at running away, when she was thirteen and longing for New York, too, if only to return there.

"Looking back on it now, I still don't even know. I thought I was so clever, and this would be… my first test, as an _actress_, to convince people that I was expected on the other end of this journey by an adult," Katy shook her head to herself. "But… here," she reached into the box again, finding another album. "I grabbed these before I left, felt I had a right to them… more than they did." Even as she said this, they could hear in her voice the regrets she had now, if only in her perspective as a mother instead of a child, and one who had very nearly experienced her baby girl making a run for it.

This new album showed Maya the first evidence of her mother's childhood that came out of something more than stories. Little Katy Clutterbucket, in her home, outside somewhere, on her own, with her mother, her father, some grandparents, and cousins, and aunts and uncles… It was always easy for Maya to look at herself, or her brother and sisters, and say that they looked like their mother for this trait or that trait, but now, actually seeing Katy as a child, she could see it even more.

"This is Betsy, isn't it?" Maya pointed to one photo of what had to be a roughly eight-year-old Katy with a girl of about eleven years. They were sitting side by side in some wooden steps outside somewhere, arm in arm like sisters. Katy had always been closest to her of all her cousins, and the feeling was mutual, which would explain why the girl had then gone out of her way to explain her departure from home, six years later. It would have been such a loss for Katy, her kindred spirit taken away.

"I'll go," Katy declared in response to the question they had yet to ask, like maybe the thought of her cousin had finally convinced her. Maya and Shawn both looked at her, a united front in wanting to ensure that she was absolutely certain. Katy had taken a plunge back in those memories, she'd had to, and now she'd kicked back up to the surface and there was no doubt. There was fear, oh, so much fear, but the doubt was gone.

"We will," Shawn nodded.

"We will," Maya repeated, taking her mother's hand in hers. Katy squeezed it, looking to her husband with a smile. "What are you going to tell them?" Maya asked, nodding back to refer to her younger siblings. At this, Katy showed a flicker of debate.

"I'm not bringing them," she told her husband and daughter. "Just because I'm ready to face whatever that's going to be like, it doesn't mean I'm ready to put them in the middle of it."

"Sounds good to me," Shawn backed his wife on this, and Maya did, too. Her mother had a point. This first return was going to be… complicated, no matter what they did. It was better that they all got that out of their systems and, if it turned out that the Hunter-Harts and the Clutterbuckets could co-exist in some manner of peace, well, then… then they would introduce Nellie, Gracie, MJ, and Haley into that mix. "So, just the four of us then?" Shawn turned to Maya, guessing that Lucas would be coming along.

"Yeah," Maya nodded, looking up from the album again. It was hard not to be drawn to look at it.

"Trade you?" Katy asked her daughter, holding out her other album again. The pages had been turned to a new page, where Maya was treated to the image of her mother again, possibly sixteen by then, huddled cheek to cheek with a boy the same age as her, the same age as his future eldest son was in Maya's present time, and oh was there ever a resemblance between them.

Sixteen-year-old Kermit had such a brightness about him that it was striking deep at his future daughter's heart. This was the boy before the complication of impending fatherhood and parental rejection, and he was just… She could see what might have drawn young Katy to him, make her fall so hopelessly in love.

"Can I… Would it be alright if I borrowed these?" Maya looked to her mother, sniffling and feeling like she might have been on the verge of tears.

"Yeah, of course you can," Katy's face echoed this feeling, leaning forward to hug her.

Sam texted not two minutes later, and Maya was waiting for him and Lucas when they pulled up. As she climbed into the car, into the back, Maya asked Lucas if he had called his mother yet. He had.

"Mind calling her back to see if there's more vacancy at Hotel Melinda for a few little Hunters?" Next to her, Sam looked confused, not yet aware of the fact he'd be bunking at the Friars' for a couple of nights.

"This is really not going to be helping our case with the whole…" Lucas pointed out.

"I know, I know, Granny Mel needs to hold her horses," Maya shook her head before turning to her brother. "Hey, Sammy, wait until you see what I've got."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	138. Their Invitation to Meet

May 17th 2020

_Chapter 138  
Their Invitation to Meet_

The closer they had gotten to the date of their departure for Arkansas, Maya could not shake the feeling that this trip had the potential of being a total disaster. Her mother, determined as she was to go through with this, would only get more and more anxious at the thought of returning to this place she had run from and never returned to, not in nearly thirty years. All this time and she had been a ghost to most of her family. Even Betsy, precious Betsy, had been lost along the way, out of some self-preservation effort Katy had enacted three years onward.

"I keep getting this image like we'll show up out there and she'll have changed her mind," Lucas declared as they drove toward the airport after dropping Sam off at school.

"Well, your mom texted to let me know my parents just dropped the kids off at her house. She's driving the twins and MJ off to school, and then she's taking Haley on a 'girls' day' at the mall," Maya chuckled. "She's never going to give her back, is she?"

As uncertain as they had been over whether or not Katy would be good to go, she was there, at the airport, with Shawn, and in no time they were boarding their flight. A short debate had landed Maya in the seat next to her mother, while Shawn went and sat behind them, with Lucas. After seeing her through takeoff, Maya had put all her efforts into keeping her mother relaxed, finding a movie to keep her focused on something other than her impending return home. They had come upon a horror movie, which could have felt like the wrong thing, but really turned out to be the best.

Upon landing, with luggage in tow, they stopped to eat before getting their rental car and continuing on toward Katy's hometown. Shawn drove, with his wife in the passenger seat, while Maya and Lucas took to the back. The radio was on, which was just as well, as no one really spoke. They all wanted to give Katy the space to prepare herself, to take in her surroundings, to remember. In the back, Maya could only look out the window, too. This was where her mother had grown up, the first fifteen years of her life. This was the place she had been so desperate to leave. Maya had to guess that the place had changed over near on three decades, but for what she saw now, she had to wonder if it was a case of 'if this is the way it looks now, what did they even have then?' or 'so it's small, and very different from everywhere else I've been, but is that a bad thing?'

"So, what's the plan?" Shawn asked, as they pulled into the lot of the small hotel where they would be spending the next two nights. It was Friday, the anniversary wasn't until the next day, but what were they supposed to do? Were they only going to head to the house in time for the party, or were they going to go out there now, to say hello ahead of time rather than popping up out of the blue?

"I don't think you get how small this place is," Katy shook her head. "By the time we've checked in and gone out to the house, they'll know we're here. People talk."

They got proof enough of this as they got out of the car and pulled their bags from the trunk. Heading toward the hotel, Maya and Lucas both could see people walking by, watching them, talking to one another… Not many strangers around here, were there? Then, at the check in desk, the man behind the counter took one look at Katy and recognized her, announced himself as Clinton Frye. Katy had recognized him, too, and explained to the three with her that Clint had been a classmate of hers and also a neighbor.

"I had a feeling this was you, when I saw the reservation, but I didn't want to believe it. It has been so long, oh, people thought maybe you'd died. Rumor around school was that your daddy had done you in, buried you at the bottom of the well." After a beat – and after seeing the baffled looks of his guests – Clinton cleared his throat and looked to the computer. "Alright, two rooms, you're all set, here are your keys," he pulled these from a board on the wall behind him and slid them across the desk. Even as he did so, his eyes fell to Maya, back to Katy, and to Maya again. Another pull of his courteous smile, and he disappeared back into the office.

"Well, he hasn't changed," Katy went ahead and broke the silence, leading the way up the stairs to find their rooms.

_Shawn: I think we'll wait an hour before going to the house. If you two want to go around for a while, we'll be here._

_Maya: Okay, we won't go far._

"She's not ready, is she?" Lucas guessed, as hung up his suit in the closet.

"We've been here not ten minutes and things have already been extra weird, can you blame her?" Maya sighed, slipping her phone back in her pocket before getting back to her own unpacking.

"Not one bit. What do you want to do?"

"Conflicted as I am after the way things started, I guess I just need to push on, right?" Maya looked to him, and Lucas nodded. "Want to go for a walk?"

They hadn't exactly snuck out of the hotel, but they had definitely done their very best not to run into Clinton Frye again. The guy had definitely put two and two together and figured out where she fit into this picture, and all he needed was a chance and she'd find herself interrogated about every aspect of her life and her mother's life…

It was hard for Maya to put into words what it felt like to be in this place. Walking along, hand in hand with Lucas, she would be thinking about her mother being out here as a kid, as a teenager seeking to be anywhere else… It wasn't as though the town was bad, it was just… plain, so plain. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, not if you liked a quiet life, not unless you needed so much more…

"I could see you living here…" Maya declared, and Lucas chuckled, looking at her.

"Just me? Where are you?"

"Oh, I don't know if I could say the same for myself, not yet, but that doesn't mean there isn't a very sort of… Huckleberry quality to it, which does give it some extra appeal," she smirked at him.

"Huh…" he nodded, making her laugh. Seeing a store sign up ahead, she stalled and tapped Lucas' arm. "What?" he asked, looking to where she was looking. "Do you just have a homing beacon in you with these things?" Lucas wondered, while Maya tugged at his hand so he'd follow her closer to the music store.

"That's one change at least," she smiled. "Mom said the nearest music store was in the next town over. She and Betsy used to hitch rides out there with her cousin Randall. I wonder how long it's been open." Lucas didn't need to be told this meant she wanted to go inside; it was as good as guaranteed as soon as she'd seen the sign.

It wasn't the biggest as far as floor space, but it reminded them of Willow's grandparents and their own music store, back in Houston. The setup and the care given to the selection suggested that whoever owned it cared very much to share something that was a passion project.

"Hi there, welcome to Olsen's," they were greeted by a man who couldn't have been much older than either of them. Lucas could see Maya's ease increase. The younger they were, the least likely they were to fall into the gossip trap, right? He wouldn't have ever known anything of Runaway Katy. "Passing through?" the man guessed.

"For the weekend, yeah," Maya told him, and maybe she'd thought too soon, or there was just very little anyone in town didn't know about the social calendar.

"Here for the party up at Clutterbucket farm?" he asked. He didn't give her the interrogation feel that Clinton Frye had done, more like he just sought to confirm what was his best guess.

"Uh, yeah," she shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

"Yeah, I should have known, I mean look at you," he smiled, which left both Maya and Lucas puzzled as he turned and called up the back of the store. "Hey, Charlie! Think this one's one of yours!"

"One of my what?" a woman's voice was heard calling back, even as a small girl came poking her head out before dashing over to the man, who hoisted her up into his arms. She couldn't have been more than three, holding a small toy guitar like a teddy bear.

"I don't know, cousin, I guess," he replied before turning to his confused customers. "Hey, David," he held out his hand in introduction. Blinking, Maya clasped his hand and shook it.

"Maya," she introduced herself. "My fiancé, Lucas," she pointed to him.

"Nice to meet you both, and this one here is Caitlin, say hi, bub," he poked the small girl's cheek, making her smile.

"Hiiii," Caitlin trailed off, looking down to her guitar.

"Don't be shy, it's alright," the woman finally came from the back, at the steady pace guided by the belly leading the way, suggesting little Caitlin couldn't have been more than weeks away from becoming a big sister.

Maya saw her, and she had to agree with David here. There was no way the two of them were not related. Charlie saw this as well, and she met this realization with growing curiosity.

"Charlene Olsen, hi," she offered her hand as well, and Maya shook it, Lucas following suit. "But please, call me Charlie."

"Sure," Maya nodded. "I love your store."

"Oh, thank you," Charlie nodded. "Well, it was David's father's store first, opened back when he and I were kids, then we bought it, right after we got married," she explained.

"So that explains that then," Lucas turned to Maya, who nodded along.

"Explains what?" David inquired.

"Oh, just that my mom grew up here, and there was no music store back then," Maya explained. _Would she have stuck around if there was?_

"Who's your mother?" Charlie asked, clearly still trying to locate her on the family tree.

"Katy," Maya told her, unsure what surname to provide at this point, but maybe she didn't have to. The moment she'd said the name, recognition had flashed over both Charlie and David's faces. He looked surprised; she looked properly shocked, enough that her husband set their girl back on the ground and stepped up to her like he wanted to know that she was alright.

"So, not a cousin then," David smiled back at them. Neither Maya nor Lucas understood what that was supposed to mean, but then Charlie stepped up and took hold of both of Maya's hands, a tremulous smile on her freckled face.

"I didn't think she'd come, I just… I took a chance. Betsy called and said how she'd tracked her down, had her address. So I just grabbed one of the invitations and fixed it up myself. I know it was reckless, but I figured this was as good of a chance as any to finally meet her, if she came… She's here, isn't she? She's with you?"

"Uh… yeah… yeah, back at the hotel," Maya responded, more on reflex than anything, as she stared at this woman, who had to be near to her own age, too. "_You_ sent the invitation?"

"I did, yeah," Charlie nodded, with a smile as good as identical to Katy's. "I just wanted to meet my sister…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	139. Their Invitation to Know

May 18th 2020

_Chapter 139  
Their Invitation to Know_

"Hey, so, I think she's just about ready to… What's up?" Shawn paused and asked, seeing the odd sort of look on Maya's face. She'd texted him a moment ago, asking that he meet her in the hall between their hotel rooms, and now that he'd shown up, he found his daughter with complication eyes.

"Uh… well…" she hesitated.

"Maya," Shawn incited quietly.

"I found out who sent the invitation. The problem now is that… her parents have no idea… that she was invited or might be here at all… Then again, with all the gossip going around, they might know now, which is going to make things so much more…" She stopped herself, waving off what she expected to be another call of her name meant to make her get back on topic. "Right," Maya turned to her door and pushed it open.

Shawn looked inside and was met with a startlingly confusing sight. A young woman sat on the small couch by the window, bearing a resemblance to his wife that was not identical exactly, and yet… Lucas was standing nearby, looking like he'd been pacing the floor, equally perplexed as his fiancée.

"Dad, this is Charlie… your sister-in-law," Maya nodded. Charlie smiled.

"Wow…" Shawn blinked.

"Yeah. You two chat, I'll just… yeah…" Maya tapped his shoulder before leaving the room, shutting one door before knocking at another. "Mom?"

"Come in," Katy's voice was heard. Maya walked into the room, shutting the door behind herself. In what felt like the strangest but very most appropriate mirror, her mother sat on the small couch by the window as well, two walls standing between the two women facing one another. "You guys went walking around?" Katy asked. Maya came to sit with her.

"Uh, yeah. We actually found a music store, not too far from here," she revealed, and her mother chuckled.

"There's a music store now?"

"Yeah, it was pretty great, actually," Maya grinned. "You know me, I couldn't just walk by…"

"Go figure," Katy shook her head. She looked as Shawn had said, she was just about ready to do this… which only made this next bit sort of awkward. Her mother had to have seen this on her face, much as Shawn had done. She had to be more delicate this time around.

"So, here's the thing," she sighed. There was no easy way to go about this, but she wasn't about to blindside her either. "You were invited by someone, but it wasn't your parents, they… they don't know." She paused here, allowing her mother to process this part.

"They never…" Katy slowly started, fell quiet just as soon, but the rest of that sentence was as clear as any. _They didn't want me here._

"I don't know the whole story yet, I think she wants to be the one to explain it to you, and…"

"She… So it _was_ Betsy," her mother cut in. Maya sighed, shaking her head.

"Not exactly, she… she gave the address, but she didn't send it, I… Okay… Two years after you left, your mother and father… had another kid," Maya revealed. "She's the one who invited you."

She really had no way to gauge how her mother would react at the revelation that she had a sister out in the world, a sister she'd never known existed, much less met. Maya could have joked, pointing out how Katy had now joined the club, along with her eldest daughter and her husband, in having a sibling come into her life years onward. She could practically have been their president. Charlie had been born when Katy was seventeen – the same age Maya had been when the twins were born, she'd done that math, too – but she hadn't known about her for another twenty-six years.

"You… you met… The music store," Katy slowly started to ask, only to answer her own question.

"She owns it, her and her husband," Maya nodded, then, "She's back in my room, I don't know if you…" Without a word, Katy stood and walked to open the door. "Mom…" Maya followed, out of one room, and into the other, where she came upon Shawn, Lucas, and…

"It's you…" Charlie breathed, moving to rise. Lucas offered a hand to help her and she took it, tipping a quick nod of thanks. "I'm so sorry, I should have put a note, something… I wasn't sure you'd come, and I didn't want to… to make you show up if you didn't want to, I…"

Katy had been approaching her, one slow step after another, taking in this stranger with a face like hers. Maya could only watch, Lucas could only watch, Shawn only had eyes for his wife… Katy came to a stop, standing before her little sister. Whatever was going through her mind, hearing these words from the young woman with the earnest eyes, the conclusion seemed to resolve itself in something like hope, as Katy wordlessly hugged the young pregnant woman. Charlie was surprised, but only for a moment and then she was hugging her back, tears in her eyes at the realization of what was clearly a lifelong wish.

"It's nice to meet you…" Katy declared, when the two of them pulled apart and looked to each other once again. She was crying, too. Her statement trailed in the recognizable invitation for a name.

"Charlie… Well, Charlene," she replied, wiping at her eyes. Katy looked down, like she had seen the belly before but only now was able to acknowledge it.

"How far along are you?"

"Thirty-two weeks," Charlie set a hand to her belly. "He's so much bigger than my daughter was," she stated with a reminiscing smile.

"You have a daughter," Katy stated, with a baffled little smile that echoed the thought she must have been having. She had a niece… and soon a nephew.

"Caitlin," Charlie nodded, reaching and pulling out her phone to show a picture, where the small girl sat on the counter in the music store, with her eternal toy guitar in her arms and a smile turned up to her father smiling back at her. "She's three now."

Finally, now, they had all taken a seat, so Charlie might give this explanation as to how they had come to find themselves in this town, in this hotel, all of them together. The first part was much as she'd told it to Maya and Lucas, back at the store. She'd gotten the address through Betsy after the cousin had seen Maya on stage and put it all together, and so presented with this chance, and some extra invitation cards at her disposal, she had put one together for Katy. She was the one in charge of sending them out anyway, as her parents were very much falling under the category of luddites.

"That hasn't changed much then, has it?" Katy asked, not reproachful, more expecting.

"I don't know about that," Charlie told her. "They're… Look, I can't speak for who they were before you went away, but… I think they're better now, or…" She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts. Clearly, she had been preparing for this moment, aware of how crucial it would be that she get it right. "I was five years old when I really understood that I had a sister somewhere, that I wasn't an only child. I'd seen photos, I'd heard your name, but I didn't put it all together before that. I was too young, and they probably didn't know what to say. But sometimes I would look at them and… I could see something in their eyes, a lot of the times when they were looking at me, other times not, I would look at them and… there was something in them like sadness, and I couldn't know why. I thought I'd done something wrong.

"So, one day, I went to Mom and I asked her… What did I do, why are you upset? And she said 'It's your sister's birthday today, twenty-two years old.' That night, I heard her and Dad talking. He was upset that she'd told me, said that I was too young, that it would only confuse me. For a while after that, whenever I asked about you, they would find a way to change the subject. It took four years before I managed to get the whole story. I'd been hearing people around town, they would talk… They like to talk. There was one time, I'd gone with Dad to pick up some pieces for the sink when it broke down, and one of the guys said something… I never really heard exactly what he said, he was laughing, but then Dad… He got this look on his face, I'd never seen him like that. He clocked that guy, laid him right out in the store aisle, left the pieces, took my hand and walked out.

"When we got into his truck, he was still too worked up to drive, I guess, so we sat there for a while. I was kind of spooked about what had happened back in the store, I started to cry. 'Hey now, Charlene, I didn't mean to scare you like that,' he said. He's never been the best at showing emotions, but I think he got better at acknowledging them. Anyway, we stayed there in his truck for a while, and he told me how you ran away, a couple years before I was born, how he and Mom hadn't heard from you since then. I'll never forget what he said. 'We did our best with her, but it wasn't enough. That wasn't our fault, wasn't hers either. She needed what we couldn't give. I didn't figure that out until it was too late. I tried to make her like us, like it'd be enough to keep her, but I just gave her all the reasons to leave. Wherever she is now, she's better off. She's stronger than anyone I've ever known.'"

Maya looked to her mother as Charlie spoke, watched her take all this in, all the while doing her best to remain composed, to listen on. Shawn had reached over and taken his wife's hand, and by the way she'd grasped it back they could see how just barely she was holding it together. When Charlie had said her piece, the room had been left to hang in silence, waiting for Katy to be the one to speak next. She looked to her sister, to her daughter and her future son-in-law. She looked to her husband, and a wordless conversation passed between them. Shawn gave her a nod and then he got up, headed into the hall. A few seconds later, both Maya and Lucas clearly heard his voice. He was on the phone with Melinda Friar.

"People… know I'm here now," Katy stated, her voice halfway distracted. "They'll talk, they'll tell them before I get to…"

"I can take care of that," Charlie assured her. "Here," she reached into her bag and pulled out a business card for Olsen's, found a pen and scribbled a phone number and an address. "This is me, I'll keep you posted, alright?"

After she was gone, like a woman on a mission, Katy watched her go before turning to Maya and Lucas. She looked to the card in her hand, held it as something precious. This day had not turned out at all as she had expected. Maya moved to sit in the spot where her father had been, slipping her arm around her mother, who looked at her with so much love and appreciation.

"The kids will be here in the morning," Shawn told them when he returned. Katy nodded.

"Good… good…" Finally, the sobs came, the break. All these years, and for all she'd believed she would find upon returning to this place she'd been so eager to leave… Maya held her mother, felt the rush of emotions in her as though she wasn't holding Katy Hunter, wife and mother to five, successful theater worker and now actress. She was holding Katy Clutterbucket, fifteen and homesick.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	140. Their Invitation to Participate

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

May 19th 2020

_Chapter 140  
Their Invitation to Participate_

They'd spent the rest of the day up in their rooms, like spies in hiding. They really just wanted to do their best to minimize their contact with anyone who might make things more complicated than they already were. Already Clinton Frye existed like an obstacle always buzzing near the main desk. From what Katy had told the rest of them, the Frye family lived just up the road from the Clutterbuckets. When she'd been growing up, the boy had always been hanging about, and she had it on good authority that, had she stuck around, he would have tried and courted her with all he had. Right now, this was not the concern so much as the fact that he had likely called up his folks and passed on the news of the prodigal daughter returned, complete with a daughter of a certain age.

Early the next morning, the quartet had left the hotel, with everything they would need in order not to return until after the party. They were then on their way to Charlie and David's house, where they would be met by a small band of travelers having left Austin in the very early hours.

"Mommy!" Nellie proclaimed, bolting toward Katy, who caught the flying hug without falling, soon joined by three more pairs of arms piling on. She was so very happy to see them, enough that she looked ready to cry, but she did her best not to show it, bringing only smiles. There was a rush of voices, as they all spoke about how they had gotten to go shopping for new clothes for today – courtesy of the Friars – and then they had gotten on a plane, and it was dark, and then they ate in the airport, and then they drove, and they were here, and there was a lady that looked like her…

"Where are we?" Gracie inquired, after the pack of arms had migrated to Shawn, and Maya and Lucas… "Who are they?" she also asked, in a whisper, looking to Charlie – who observed the scene in quiet fascination – and David, with a barely awake Caitlin in his arms.

"You see her there?" Katy asked, crouched before the four of them, Haley clinging to her like she'd been away from her mother for one night and didn't care to repeat the experience, thank you very much. The other three turned and looked at Charlie, then back at their mother to confirm that they did see her. "She's my sister," she revealed to them, turning a small smile to the woman in question. It was the first time she'd gotten to say the words, and they fit her just fine. "That means she's your aunt. And that's your uncle with her, and your cousin."

"Since when?" MJ inquired, puzzled.

"Well, I only met them yesterday, but since always. We just didn't know them. And today, you're going to meet a lot more people like that. It's going to be strange, I know, but I know you'll do alright."

Nellie had been the first to detach from the 'family huddle' and journey across to the Olsens, forever their most valiant ambassador. She introduced herself, Penelope Jane Hunter, but they could call her Nellie… Actually, she preferred to be called Nellie, because she usually only got called Penelope if she was in trouble. Charlie had met this explanation with how _she _was only called her full name for those reasons, too, so she understood. Nellie loved her instantly. Soon, the rest of the group followed, and more introductions were made. Little Caitlin found herself a kindred spirit in her new cousin Gracie, and the feeling was mutual.

"Is it going to be weird that I'm here?" Sam asked Maya and Lucas. He had been put in charge of the four little ones, put on the plane with them by Mr. and Mrs. Friar.

"Listen, I'm swimming in uncharted waters as much as you are, but as far as I'm concerned, you're family, so you're right where you belong," Maya told him. Katy and Shawn had already expressed their thanks to him for bringing the kids over, and they would have answered the same.

Though the party wasn't until that evening, the circumstances made it so that everyone got ready, right there at the house, and soon after lunch they split off in their cars and started on the short drive to the Clutterbucket farm. As reassured as Katy had been through her sister's tale, enough to have the kids flown over to be part of the anniversary and the reunion, they could hardly blame her for the trepidations that accompanied this final stretch of her return home. She was about to see her old house for the first time in the better part of her life, which would bring plenty of memories, too, but her parents… Maya knew how much she'd been thinking about them ever since the invitation had come, and ever since she'd decided to go. Whatever she'd thought in particular, she hadn't shared it all, but now… They had to imagine a lot of those thoughts had gone and been challenged. Whatever happened next, they could only guess it would challenge a lot more.

Maya and Lucas both had seen pictures of the house, the land, in the album from Katy's box, so as they approached, they could see as much as she did, to some extent, the changes of the last twenty-eight years since she'd gone away. There weren't none so drastic. The structures were still where they had been, though it could be said they had been restored over the years, some new paint here, some updated bits there, but on the whole very much as they had been left. Looking to Katy now, as she took it in, this might not have been a bad thing at all. The biggest difference, temporary as it was, came in the form of decorations, set about the place in anticipation for the party.

There had been a lot of discussion as to how they would do this. They couldn't all go into the house at once, had to give people time to react, to adjust. This was going to be a shock no matter how they did it, but they could administer it in waves. In the end, they had decided to start with a trio. Charlie, Katy, and Maya with them both. Katy may have been 'ready as she'd ever be,' but she needed support, and for this she turned to her eldest, as she'd done for so many years. Charlie led the way, opening the front door for them and letting them in.

Maya could feel her mother breathing deep at her side. She slipped her hand into hers. This had been her home, since she was born. The way she looked around, it couldn't have changed all that much. Katy squeezed Maya's hand, who squeezed hers back.

"Mom? Dad?" Charlie called out.

"In here, baby girl," a man's voice called out, not shouting. It simply carried through the quiet of the house. The effect of hearing her father's voice for the first time in so long hit Katy about as deep as it did for Maya to find her own nickname may have had roots here…

"You're early!" a laughing woman's voice followed, and Maya felt a tremble go through her mother, even as she breathed deep to try and steady herself. "Where's my little hugaboo?" the woman went on to inquire, in a tone that suggested that 'hugaboo' was Caitlin, presently still in the car outside with her father.

The woman emerged from the kitchen now, her hair a mix of what had to be dyed blond paling into silver and styled simply but with care. Maya knew her grandmother was sort of a home hairdresser of sorts, or had been back in the day, maybe still now. One way or another, she had aged well, from the eighteen-year-old bride on the cover of that invitation card to the sixty-eight-year-old woman whose granddaughter seeking smile went through what could only be a very startling shift, as her eyes found Charlie, and then… and then…

The noise she made came off as something between a shout and a cry of disbelief, the whole thing soon muffled beneath her hands as they came to be clamped over her mouth. Her eyes were fixed on Katy, like the whole world had disappeared except for her.

"Angela?" the man's voice responded to this sound, and a moment later there he was, too, and immediately brought to a standstill as he saw what his wife had seen.

He was… tall. Maybe later, Maya would joke about how a man that tall had any way of being related to her, but right now… He was tall, not lanky but definitely not broadly made. He had the look of someone who had been born and bred on manual labor, bronzed by the sun, weathered, though not so much as to rob him of good looks of youth he had passed on to the grandson he didn't even know he had. He was seventy-five years old, but you wouldn't have known it by looking at him. For all that… When he saw his daughter, his firstborn, it was as though for a moment he had been made to bear his age, because in that moment he finally allowed himself to feel just how long it had been since he'd last seen her with his own eyes.

Maya had been told how her grandfather was not a man known to show him emotions, but she had to believe, with what Charlie had told them yesterday, and with what she saw now, that Tanner Clutterbucket could be given over to some emotional displays, under certain circumstances. That day, Katy and Charlie both saw their father cry for the first time.

He walked across the room, like a man approaching a dream, and if he came too fast, if he wasn't careful, it would turn to stardust. Maya recognized so much of her mother in him, small things Katy herself might not have been able to recognize in herself, but here… Tanner came to a stop, standing in front of his firstborn, and it reminded Maya very much of Katy's encounter with her sister the day before. The difference here was that, whereas she had reached out to Charlie all at once, her father looked as though he wanted to reach for her and didn't know how. His hand took three or four tries in touching her face before it finally landed. When it did, Katy whimpered, and her father wrapped his arms around her.

Maya was so caught up in bearing witness to this, getting choked up for her mother, that she startled at the feeling of a hand touching her shoulder. When she turned her head, she found herself face to face with her maternal grandmother, who had finally noticed her standing there, understood who she had to be, and approached her with what could only be described as instant love and affection.

"Hi…" Maya spoke quietly and then, speaking the first thing that came to mind, "Happy anniversary." Her grandmother had that same smile she had passed on to both her daughters. She went and hugged Katy now, when her husband stepped back, and she might never have let go of her for how she held her, and cried like she was unleashing twenty-eight years of tears but also had not been so happy in so long, because she was back in her arms.

Now here Maya stood, faced with her very tall grandfather, as he noticed her for the first time, too, noticed her and realized who she had to be. This man had been the antagonist to so many of her mother's stories of her childhood, the ones she'd shared, only to be cast in new light that left her wondering just who he was, and now… here he was, staring back at her like he had no idea how to break the ice, how to even begin.

"My name's Maya," she held out her hand, slipping on confident openness and hoping it held. This proved to be the right call, as he met this with a firm handshake, not so much the kind that felt like your bones would break, more so the kind that told you nothing could harm you so long as he was on your side.

"Tanner Clutterbucket," he introduced himself, and somewhere under that beard, Maya thought she caught the hint of a smile.

"Of all the days, I can't even…" Angela declared, holding to one of Katy's hands even as she reached for one of Charlie's, allowing her to have both her daughters side by side for the first time in any of their lives. This whole time, the younger daughter had been left to stand back and watch, doing her best not to blubber so much as her hormones played tricks on her. That was her story, definitely just the hormones.

"I… I sent an invitation," she confessed, to her mother and father both. In no time, the story came spilling out, how Betsy had tracked Katy down quite by chance – though exactly how _that_ had happened didn't come up, as it would be a story for another time – and passed on the information to Charlie, who then decided to send an invitation, unsure whether it would ever pan out. But Katy had received it, and after a bit of soul searching she had decided to go, and when they had arrived, it came to be that Maya and her aunt crossed paths. Now here they were.

"A miracle…" Angela looked from one daughter to the other, and to her granddaughter, who she'd only discovered. "Is your father here, I would love to…"

"My father… my birth father passed away, almost three years ago," Maya confessed. "It's a long story, we were estranged for a long time but we had time to mend before we lost him." Her grandparents took this information in as anyone could. "My stepfather… my father," she smiled to her mother, "He's here, waiting outside, with my sisters, and my brother… and my stepbrother, and my fiancé…" she counted off. "And my uncle and my cousin," she turned her smile to Charlie now.

"Well…" Tanner spoke after a beat. "A whole lot of people to leave out in the cold," he looked around to the four women standing here with him. "I'll put on some coffee. There will be so much… so much to talk about, before the guests arrive." He moved toward the kitchen, and by the looks on both his daughters and his wife's faces, Maya had to guess this was her grandfather's version of letting out a build-up of emotions. He could not have asked for a better gift on this golden anniversary day.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	141. Their Time in the Attic

May 20th 2020

_Chapter 141  
Their Time in the Attic_

"What do you mean I have to scrap the seating chart?"

"Hey, Sophie," Maya tried not to laugh, though she did smile to herself as she sat back in her chair, up in the attic. She'd only answered the call, tapping the speaker key, and before she could even say hello, this had been the greeting she had gotten.

"The wedding is less than four months away," Sophie stated.

"Is it?" Maya played surprise. "Look, I'm sorry, but we don't have a choice." Opening the drawer at her side, she pulled out a stack of small envelopes, which had been arriving day by day over the past week. "And I did wait until I had exact numbers, so it could all be done in one go instead of little by little. _And_… well, I'm the bride…" she stated, putting forth all the power of 'innocence face' into her voice. There was a pause.

"Fine. Hit me," her wedding planner requested.

It had been little over a month now since they had been in Arkansas for her grandparents' golden anniversary, and in that time, well… the landscape of life, of family, had been brought to reshape itself, accounting for existence of this whole side of her family tree she could not have known she might ever get to claim for herself.

That day, back at her grandparents' house, it had already been overwhelming enough that they could all have forgotten what they were there for in the first place, caught up as they were in reunions, and introductions… And then there had been the doorbell, reminding them that there was going to be a party that evening, and there would be guests. Of all the people to show up in that moment, they could not have asked for anyone better as the follow up to the couple of the hour. Charlie had gone to answer, and in a moment the voices had started to fade away, as though the arrival's shock had turned to a shockwave.

"Mom, is that…" Maya had touched her arm, and Katy turned to lock eyes with the one staring back at her with eyes already welled up with tears.

"Hey, Bets…" Katy stood from the couch, where she'd been sandwiched between her mother and her daughter, three generations in a row.

If Tanner Clutterbucket had been left to suffer under an antagonistic portrayal all these years, Betsy Young had stood like a beacon of virtue. Maya had not seen so much as a picture of her for most of her life, and the ones she _had_ seen were nearly thirty years old. Despite any of this, when she saw the woman standing there with her aunt, there was no doubt in her heart that she was exactly who she'd made her out to be all along.

"Katy…" her voice had trembled, her whole posture existing on that same spectrum of 'is this real, am I dreaming?' as the others of her family they had encountered so far. She had found her, after the concert, she'd called and left that message, but that had been the extent of it. She had not seen or heard from her cousin since then, not for a good quarter of a century before that. And now here she stood.

"I should have called you back, I just… I didn't know how to…" Katy shook her head, which was enough to pull Betsy out of her own shock and send her hurrying to embrace her cousin. She very nearly lifted her off the ground. When they pulled back, still holding to the other's arms, it was as though they had both travelled back in time for the way they looked to one another…

For as long as Katy could remember, Betsy had been so much more than a cousin. She'd been her best friend, practically a sister. She was the one person who would feed that little beast in her heart that thrived on drama, on performance. She would show her movies, and she had magazines, and she had music… If ever the opportunity came where she needed a babysitter and Betsy was the one to do it, oh… they would have the best of times.

The day she had learned of her departure from Arkansas, with no explanation except that she was gone and would perhaps never return, Katy had cried herself breathless. Betsy had made their small town feel just bearable enough to be in it, and without her… A few weeks later, she'd been approached by a girl on her way home from school. She'd been a classmate of her cousin's, and she'd received a letter containing another which was to be passed to her. Katy had been so careful taking it into the house, afraid it might somehow get taken away from her.

She had never spoken to her aunt and uncle again after that day, realizing _why_ Betsy was gone. Oh, she'd known her secret already, and she'd kept it, but they…

Another thing had happened because of that letter, a small seed of an idea had taken root in Katy's mind. Betsy was in New York. _New York…_ The city felt like it couldn't possibly be real sometimes, but now Betsy was there, and she was making her own life. If she could do it…

When Katy had run away, when she'd made it to the big city and found her cousin, she hadn't expected for her to be upset, but she was. She'd heard through their cousin Randall of how she'd disappeared, and everyone was looking for her, and now what was she supposed to do with her? For a few frightening days, Katy had been so sure her life was about to get a thousand times worse, and she had started to entertain the idea of grabbing her things and striking out on her own. She couldn't go back, she wouldn't…

And then Betsy had told her she could stay. At the time, Katy had just been so thrilled, she hadn't considered the logistics of it, but over the years, she'd had to wonder. There had been no subterfuge when she had been put in school, she'd had her own name, and Betsy was responsible for her… How had child services not gotten involved? The only thing that could make any sort of sense was if Betsy and Katy's parents had undergone some kind of arrangement, essentially making Betsy her young cousin's guardian, something… What must have happened then, three years later, when she'd up and disappeared again?

"Hello…" Betsy had finally turned to Maya, with the stilted reach of someone who wanted to ensure it would be okay to hug a stranger. Maya had nodded, and they had briefly hugged. "When I saw you on that stage, I can't even begin to tell you…" Betsy shook her head, smiling that smile of someone meeting a very dear friend or family member's child for the first time, even if that child was now a twenty-five-year-old grown woman. Maya had so many questions for her in that moment, but she knew those would need to wait, especially as the reunion turned into a new introduction match.

The growing party now counted another woman walking in, carrying a large wrapped object, all the while corralling a pair of identical boys ahead of her, both of them carrying loaded bags. The boys had no idea of what was happening here, but the woman stopped at once, seeing the spread of strangers around them, but there with Betsy, someone she recognized, even though they had never met. She was introduced now as Betsy's wife, Sasha, along with their sons, Dax and Miles, recently turned ten years old.

"You have twins, too?" Katy had laughed, turning to motion for Nellie and Gracie to come forward now. Nellie had been quick to come up, scooping her twin's hand to ensure she'd follow. This had led MJ to go after his sisters, and Haley to go after all of them, and little by little all the introductions were made. The two sets of twins would spend much of this day together, sharing a curiosity for others like them.

Maya recalled when she had gotten to talk to Betsy really for the first time, in a proper conversation, later that same day. The party had been going for a while now, and so much was being processed at once, with new family members almost everywhere she looked, some easier to get along with than others, some bombarding her, or her mother, or sometimes even the little Hunters right up until Shawn would put an end to it… She and Lucas had gone to sit somewhere quiet for a few minutes, and when he had gone sneaking back to get them something to drink and eat, she'd been joined by her mother's cousin, which would make her a… first cousin, once removed? She could never get it right…

"They're a lot, I know," she'd said, laughing.

"Yeah," Maya breathed.

"I didn't come back out here until about twelve years ago, so I sort of get what your mother must be feeling right about now." From what she'd been hearing through the day, this would have been about the time she and Sasha got married. "You know," Betsy told her as she came to sit next to her. "One time, I swore I saw your mother with you, on the train. I'd just gotten off at my stop though, and it left before I could go and know for sure." By the way she said it, Maya guessed this was one of the great regrets of her life.

"Did you know? When she left…"

"That she was pregnant?" Betsy asked. Maya nodded. "I suspected it," she sighed. "She never brought your dad to the apartment, but she'd talk about him all the time, and as much as they were into each other, when I came home and found her note, saying she was going to go to live with him now, it felt like a leap. But then she'd been off for a few weeks, and well she was starting to change, physically. She'd say it was stress, the end of senior year and all that, but she was doing fine. And then she was gone, I… I looked for her, for months. I couldn't get why she would go like that, never calling, never visiting. She didn't want to be found, I just didn't get why she wouldn't want to be found… by me…"

"I think maybe she thought she let you down. And she didn't want it to get back to her parents," Maya shared.

"The day I had to finally tell them I didn't know where she was anymore…" Betsy shook her head to herself, but then just as soon turned to Maya, took her hand. For all that had happened, she was glad to know her cousin's child, at long last. "You give me a call sometime, alright? I'm dying to hear about you working with Ree Forster." Maya had laughed, promising she would do just that. And she had. She'd called, and she'd written, and over the last month the two of them had been in constant contact. The same went for Betsy and Katy. They were planning already for Betsy and her family to come over to Texas for a visit sometime in the spring.

"Well, she sounds amazing," Sophie declared, upon hearing all about the woman.

"She's pretty great, yeah," Maya smiled. "And she's coming to the wedding, the four of them are, two adults, two kids. If the boys aren't with their moms, can you see about getting them near Nellie and Gracie?"

"I will do that, yes," Sophie promised, voice trailing like she was taking notes as they spoke. "Alright, who's next?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	142. Their Time in Arkansas

May 21st 2020

_Chapter 142  
Their Time in Arkansas_

Most times, when Maya would find herself at home on her own, that stretch of time would be spent up in the attic, at the desk Lucas' aunt had made for her, just sketching, or painting, doing anything to clear away the clutter of ideas begging to come out. It was remarkably sort of… soothing, like quieting a cacophony until at last… harmony. Today, up until Sophie's call had come in, she had been painting, the large canvas taking up the whole of the wide surface of the desk pulled into its more upright position. This also enabled her to pull out an extra panel, to set any tools she might have needed as she worked. She really loved this desk so much…

She was working on a belated present for her grandparents' anniversary. When they had gone up to see them weeks before, they hadn't known what they were walking into, they had brought a present that felt, in hindsight, sort of impersonal. Now that she knew them, Maya really wanted to give them something… to signify this renewal in their family, this introduction. And this painting was as good of a way as she could think of. It was a portrait, a reproduction of a photo she had there at her side, under her phone.

"You know, I found out the other day where the Penelope name came from," she told Sophie as she worked at details on the canvas.

"Yeah?" Sophie asked.

"Turns out it's Betsy's actual first name. Her full name is Penelope Elizabeth, and somehow there was another Penelope in her class, and instead of going by any other form of it, she went for her middle name instead. After a while, that got shortened, too, and she was Betsy. My mom said she would have wanted her to be my godmother when I was born, but then that was only possible if she went back to her, so… she gave me the name, to connect us in some small way." She wondered if her mother had told Shawn about all this, when they had then passed the name on to one of their twins, too.

"Wow," Sophie responded, a smile in her voice. "Does Betsy know all that?"

"She does now," Maya nodded. "She said she was looking forward to making up for 25 years of missed godmotherly opportunities," she chuckled.

"Okay, good… okay…" Sophie went on scribbling, the activity so clear in her voice that Maya could practically visualize her stamping a decisive period with her pen, all those miles away. "Are Aunt and Uncle Who-Must-Not-Be-Named coming, too?" she went on to inquire. Maya smirked, understanding who she meant all too easily. Betsy's parents.

"Oh, they are," she confirmed, pulling the envelope from the stack.

"We don't get to choose, do we?" Sophie sighed.

"Honestly, I wasn't sure if they'd decide to come," Maya told her. "We didn't talk much the one time, I mostly sent the invitation out of courtesy. But they're coming now, so we have to put them somewhere." Sorting through the envelopes, she pulled out a few more.

There had been plenty of holes to fill in when they had all gone to the anniversary party. Lucas had reminded her of the time they had all been made to create family trees in Mr. Matthews' class. At the time, she'd had next to nothing on her father's side, but her mother's side… Most of it had been names, and vague estimations of dates, and all of it based on what had been on that tree back when Katy had left her hometown. Plenty of her cousins had been young like her, unmarried, no kids of their own… And the rest of them, aunts and uncles and the likes… they had been little more to Maya than those names.

After Betsy had arrived, they all knew it would only be a matter of time before others started to arrive, and they didn't have long to wait. Maya had been nervous, couldn't help it, but she had done her best to push it down, to focus instead on her mother, who was definitely taken on a rollercoaster of emotions, every time someone new came along. She had been lucky so far in meeting her sister and her family, and then reuniting with her parents, and her cousin… but then once those had come through, what did she have to look forward to?

Charlie had been able to shield her parents from hearing about Katy's return before she got the chance to see them, but others had heard rumors around town. This included Angela's younger sisters, Mary and Anna.

"Just how bad do you think it'll be?" Maya had gone and whispered to her Aunt Charlie. Hard as it was to put someone a year older than her on the next step up when she felt more like a cousin than anything else, it had been very easy to feel kinship, with the age and with the affinity toward music.

"Honestly, I'm wondering that myself," Charlie had whispered back, as she also watched the small group walk in. The door was unlocked at this point, no one rang the bell before entering. "That's Mary, Betsy's mom, and Peter, her dad," she filled in, for Maya, Lucas, and Sam, standing around her. "That's Anna, Mom and Aunt Mary's younger sister. You never met, but her husband was called Roger, he died… eleven years ago now," Charlie had counted. "You would have liked him. Those are their kids, Roger Jr, and Lilah," she indicated a pair who had to be in their early to mid-thirties. "RJ was married, been divorced two years. Lilah recently broke off an engagement, it was messy. I really shouldn't have brought it up, but it's better that you know, so you know to… well…"

"Don't bring it up?" Lucas guessed.

"That would be best," Charlie confirmed.

"How are they going to be with my mom?" Maya had to ask. She wasn't just meeting the family, she was checking for trouble.

"I…" Charlie needed to think about it for a moment. "Aunt Anna should be fine. She'll ask a lot of questions, to her and you both, probably, but it will come from a good place. She and Uncle Roger were her godparents," she revealed. This sparked a memory in Maya, if an incomplete one, but she was almost sure that had to be the aunt and uncle she'd go to sometimes because they had a television she could watch. RJ and Lilah, she figured, would have been somewhere about five or six when Katy ran away, possibly they remembered her, vaguely, but if she would be at their house a lot, they hopefully had good memories of her and would be happy to be reunited with her. Charlie made the same estimation, and they were proven correct in the end.

"And what about them?" Maya asked, giving a discreet nod in the direction of Betsy's mother and father. Charlie considered this for a moment as well.

"The sentence 'I really do like you but you make it hard sometimes' comes to mind," she'd finally told them. "It's like they think they mean well, but they really don't stick the landing. You learn to navigate it after a while. As for Katy, far as I heard they were there for Mom and Dad when she left, they helped with the search. Then they found out that she'd run to Betsy, I guess, and that kind of complicated things. When I was little, I remember hearing them all talking, and they were big on not making the same mistakes with me that they made with either of their daughters. They all knew they could have done so much better by them."

"Does that mean they're okay now? Them and Betsy and…" Lucas had asked.

"I don't know if 'okay' is the right word, but they do visit, at least a couple times every year. I think by now they will sort of recognize if they say something they shouldn't, if you point it out to them. They've come a long way."

Throughout the day, both Maya and Lucas had been able to witness this for themselves. When 'Aunt Anna' had come to introduce herself to Maya she had been very sweet but also very chatty, wanting what felt like a rundown of the past twenty-five years, stories of her childhood, and adolescence, and now young adulthood… She wanted to hear about school, and now her job, and the other things she did, and oh she was in a band, that was wonderful, and oh she was getting married, what a beautiful ring, and he seems like a fine young man, and were they thinking about kids?

"That woman makes me dizzy…" Maya had breathed, when she'd been dragged off by her daughter, Lilah, who'd turned a smirk to the two of them like 'sorry about that, I'll take her off your hands.' "And I swear I'm this close to wanting to have a kid right now, just so everyone will stop asking about it…"

"Hang in there," Lucas had chuckled, pressing a kiss to the side of her head.

"Okay, but it's just really kind of weird to think about," Maya had maintained on this diatribe. "When we were in high school, it was all 'don't have sex, you don't want to get pregnant, do you?' and then we'd have to go sneaking around. Now it's turned into 'we want grandbabies, why aren't you making them for us already?' and that's a lot of pressure we don't need," she grumbled, turning to Lucas to find he was trying very hard not to laugh. "You're supposed to be on my side," she pointed her finger at him.

"I am, I am, hey," he caught her finger in mid-air. "As the person on your side, I'm telling you: take a breath, forget about all that, okay?"

"Fine… I'll try," she'd squinted at him.

As dizzying as Great Aunt Anna had been, at least they had more or less expected as much going in. For all they'd heard from Charlie, they really had no idea what would happen once they were put in the path of Mr. & Mrs. Young. Back then, neither Maya nor Lucas had gotten to the point where they could consider the idea of inviting any of these people to their wedding. They were all new, strangers to one another. If they _had_ been thinking about it, they would have had a debate already in their head whether or not they would ever want either of them to be anywhere near their family and friends on what was to be their special day.

They had been very polite upon coming up to introduce themselves to their niece's daughter and her fiancé. If not for that bit of background information playing in the backs of their minds, they would had had no trouble seeing them as perfectly good people, without finding themselves staring at them like they were waiting for either of them to say something bad. Throughout the evening, whenever they had either found themselves in conversation with them or within earshot of other conversations where they were involved, Charlie's words from earlier had come to mind, whenever Betsy or Sasha were nearby, or mentioned, and the same to Katy as well… The Youngs would sometimes teeter on the edge of faltering, but inevitably would find their balance again in some way. It didn't mean that their past was entirely forgiven and forgotten, but when it came time to make out those new invitations, it just hadn't felt as though they could be singled out. If Betsy had given them a second chance, Maya and Lucas could give them a first.

"Right, so you've got one couple and three solos, any idea if any of them will bring a plus one?" Sophie asked Maya, as she paused in her tale once more, switching from one paint brush to another.

"Only RJ ticked yes on that," Maya informed her. "He's still single, but he's hoping he won't be by then, I guess. I've got a few here now with couples and kids," she grabbed two more envelopes.

"Ready when you are."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	143. Their Time in Uncertainty

May 22nd 2020

_Chapter 143  
Their Time in Uncertainty_

The more she worked on the painting for her grandparents, Maya couldn't help but feel like she had this tune trying to work itself out of the back of her mind. Truth be told, there had been some kernel of it coming through for the past months, like a reoccurring theme, a few spare notes, playing inside her head whenever she thought about any of her mother's family… like a jingle. And now that she was working on the painting, those notes were being pressed in so much, under each stroke of her brushes, that they almost had no choice but to expand if they didn't want to become so repetitive as to be annoying instead of appreciated. The whole reason she had her phone there next to her like this was so that she could open a voice memo and gather up the bits of music and lyrics that came to her as they did.

Or it had been, at least, until Sophie had called, putting an end to the song work as Maya now found herself retelling her adventures at the anniversary party. She'd mentioned being out there before, when she'd returned, but she'd only really given broad strokes up to now, their arrival, and meeting Charlie, and her grandparents… It wasn't that she'd felt any need to hide or anything, it was more like… It was all still so new, and she needed a little while with these new memories to really put them all into perspective.

"Okay, let's see…" Maya looked at the envelopes in her hand. She only even really needed to look at the return labels of each one and faces would flash in her mind's eye. Couple more cousins of my mom's, on her father's side… These ones fall under the category of 'First encounter was a bit weird, not totally writing you off but you're on probation, mostly I liked your kids and that might be the biggest reason you scored an invite.'"

"That's a very wordy category," Sophie declared, laughing.

"Yeah, well, you know…"

"Oh, I do, yeah. A bunch of my father's side of the family, the ones who sort of fell out of touch after he died, only showing up on occasional holidays, calling on my birthday for like a minute, didn't necessarily do well with the whole lesbian… situation…" she declared, the last word feeling like a summary of their feeling on it. "Made seeing my cousins who I do actually care about a bit more complicated. So, who are these cousins?"

"Marissa, no plus one unless you count her daughter, Sara Mae. She's twelve. Then Kyle, his wife Liz, plus two kids, Chris and Kyla, six and three." Just mentioning these six names, in her head, felt like placing six tiles on a board and then rearranging them into two trios, one under a smiling face, one under a big question mark.

As before, Charlie had been her way in, dropping a bit of shorthand info whenever new people arrived. Marissa was one of Tanner's youngest brother's daughters, while Kyle was Tanner's only sister's only child.

"I'm going to need a chart," Maya had declared, shaking her head, reaching over to stop Sam pulling his phone from his pocket to do just that even as she said it.

"A lot of these people you'll only see from time to time, if you come back to see us," Charlie had shrugged, to which Maya had given her a look she hoped her aunt would know meant that she had every intention to do exactly that, especially for her. It had made her smile. "Anyway, it'll come back to you when you need to remember, you'll see."

"Right, keep going," Maya had told her.

"Okay, well, there's not really much to tell on Marissa and Kyle, I mean… They're my cousins and I don't really know them all that well. The age difference didn't help, I guess. Like we're all supposed to be on the same level, but they just saw me like I belonged at the kids' table when they had grown out of all that. Kyle isn't even that much older than me, six years, but he and Marissa were always more like brother and sister than cousins, and he did everything she did. Our daughters are the same age…" she shook her head in the general direction of where they could see the new small group just arrived. They were greeting their aunt and uncle, congratulating them on the anniversary, and of course the big news of the day was that Katy had returned…

As far as Charlie had been able to piece together for her niece, Marissa's older sister had always been so close to Katy when they were kids, less so Marissa herself, which had turned into something like resentment, which was then turned into a desire to groom cousin Kyle into a similar connection when he came around. They would have been all of eleven and four when Katy ran away, so only one of them really had substantial memories of her, but they definitely kept a united front in how they reacted to her return or the introduction of her kids into the mix.

The brief interactions she had with the two of them, and Kyle's wife along with them, put much of that into perspective. Oh, they were courteous, sure, but the whole time it felt like they would stare at her like 'So this is Katy's big secret, huh? This explains a lot, actually.' They all seemed to have made up their minds and stuck to them throughout the evening, and the only real contact Maya had had with them since was these two envelopes returned to her and confirming their presence at the wedding. She didn't know if she'd end up regretting this or not, but the way she saw it… their first encounter had come as a bit of a shock for everyone, a need for readjustment, and she was a big enough person not to let that be the final nail, not to give them all a chance to know each other better.

"If you can find a way to put them further back and get the kids at the kids' table though, that'd be doing me a solid," Maya told Sophie as she paused her tale.

"Already done, my bridal friend…"

While their parents had been busy getting filled in by Auntie Angie and Uncle Tanner at the door, the trio of kids had been left to detach themselves and roam, which had easily been more fun for them, what with all these new people around, and look at that, more kids! Six-year-old Chris had taken his little sister by the hand and the two of them had gone and met the little Hunters. Looking at the two of them, it was easy to get a handle of the dynamics.

Chris had that whole way about him like he might as well have been going around the entire time in a shirt that said 'I'm the big brother' in bold letters stamped across his chest, and the back, too, in case anyone didn't see the front. This was not in any overly protective way at all, but there was absolutely no doubt that he loved his little sister very much, and it was imperative to him that she be happy, and safe, and loved. One look at the three-year-old girl tailing him every step of the way would suggest that she was exactly all of this, and where their own father had been shaped under his older cousin's judging hand, Kyla was shaped under her brother's care to be just as he was turning out to be, which was just a good little dude, funny and welcoming. When the pair of them had come up to Maya and Lucas – directed there by Nellie and Gracie – Chris had greeted them with a bright hello, followed by an introduction of himself and his sister, who had seen something peeking out of Lucas' sleeve and stared at it for so long that he'd finally crouched and shown her the tattoos on his arms. Both kids had been fascinated by this, little Kyla prodding at the birds and laughing. When they had discovered Maya had these same ones on her arm, too, the whole process had been repeated. Throughout the evening, they had come to 'visit' a few more times, before ending up asleep on a couch in wait of their return home. When their parents had come to collect them, they had groggily woken up and demanded to say goodbye to their new cousins, which they did.

As much as those two had been naturally open to the new arrivals, their cousin Sara Mae had been a similar but equally different scenario, all of this made supremely evident for how she first discovered her relation to Maya Hart. By now, both she and Lucas, and Sam as well, were familiar enough with this one particular look to recognize when someone would see Maya and know who she was, maybe not as family, but as the lead singer of TXNY, or that songwriter people were starting to talk about after she'd appeared on stage with Ree Forster…

"Hi," she had actually approached Maya, which seemed in complete contrast to how very small her voice sounded.

"Hey," Maya had smiled at her. The girl looked so overwhelmed as to be rendered speechless, though the question had been there in her eyes. What was she doing here of all places?

"Are you okay, Sara Mae?" Charlie had chuckled, not understanding this behavior in her cousin's daughter. Maya had looked back at her now, realizing she still didn't know, which was somehow even more surprising to Sara Mae, who found her voice again, if only to 'educate' her aunt. There had been a barrage of words and very little breath between each one, but somehow the message had come through, that this person here standing next to her was a singer she knew very well, and Sara Mae was a big fan. Charlie had turned back to her niece now with a new understanding of how she'd ended up in Olsen's in the first place, and also an intrigued smile that said 'tell me _everything_.' Maya had countered this with a look that promised she would do exactly that, but for now there was a girl who needed to be filled in on a few things, and it might come more easily from her. "Well, Sara Mae Clutterbucket, it is my sincerest pleasure to introduce you to your… oh dear, hold on… second cousin… Maya Hart."

It was a wonder she hadn't fainted.

"The rest of the night, whenever we happened to look and spot each other, she'd get this big smile on her face and wave. Took a while for her to recover enough so that I figured out she wasn't actually that shy in real life, but once we got there…" Maya recalled to Sophie, smiling to herself as she remembered when Sara Mae had gotten up the nerve to come and ask for them to get their picture taken together. Maya had caught a look of Marissa, who watched her daughter with her cousin's daughter and seemed to finally figure out why her face looked familiar, for reasons other than… well, family.

"Kids at the kids' table, parents in the nosebleeds, got it," Sophie was scribbling.

"I am not getting married in a stadium," Maya laughed.

"You get what I'm saying though, don't you?"

"Yes, and I agree," Maya breathed, flipping through the remaining envelopes for the next batch. "Right, more Clutterbuckets here…" She caught the tiniest bit of a giggle on the line. "Stop laughing at my family name or I'm giving your job to someone else, Wedding Planner Zvolensky."

"You wouldn't dare," Sophie 'gasped.'

"Wouldn't I?" Maya 'challenged.'

"So, who are these people with the totally not ridiculous surname?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	144. Their Time in Expansion

May 23rd 2020

_Chapter 144  
Their Time in Expansion_

Maya pulled the photo from under her phone. Leaning back into her chair, she looked to all those faces, everyone gathered for the shot… The photo had been taken relatively early in the night, the better to ensure that the kids in the family would not have to be awakened in order to be featured. It was very important for the couple of the day that they had at least one image with everyone, on this day made that much more golden by the return of Katy into the fold, and the introduction of her children.

In the back, like wizened pillars, stood Tanner and his two brothers, tall as he was. The three of them had all been born a year apart from one another. Maya's grandfather was in the middle of this trio, with brother Walter a year older, and brother Carter a year younger. And then, after spending fifteen years as the Clutterbucket brothers, they had been joined by a sister, Georgia. She wasn't so tall as they were, but she was absolutely taller than average for a woman. They stood in a row in that photo, the four siblings, linked with their spouses. So here was Tanner, and his older brother and his wife, and his younger brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband.

By Charlie's own knowledge, she had told Maya that if she ever wondered what her mother's father looked like without facial hair, she only had to look to Walter, the eldest. Maya's grandfather had not had the whole beard off, to Charlie's recollection, for somewhere about eighteen years. By now, the thing seemed to invade the majority of his face, but somehow he made it work.

"Mom will tease him and say he's had it so long now he can't _not_ have it, because his face will be two different colors," Charlie had indicated the hairless areas of the man's face, which had made Maya laugh, all the while stealing a look to Lucas to find him absently touching at his own face.

"So, where do I stand with all of them?" Maya had asked, when the new group had arrived.

"Okay," Charlie considered this for a moment, hand absently running over her belly. "So you've got Uncle Walter and Aunt Kris, and they ran the family business for years, now they're retired and Randall took over. He's not here yet. Walter and Dad, they got along but they also didn't, like Dad was all about the farm, and manual labor, and Walter was all about the business, suits and an office and all that. Aunt Georgia told me how they used to have these really bad fights, smack each other around and everything. They didn't say a word to one another for like seven years."

"Woah…" Maya breathed, a sentiment echoed by Lucas and Sam as well. "When was that?"

"The seven years before Katy ran," Charlie looked back at her. "When she left, Walter showed up immediately, helped with the search, all the way. The two of them were driving around, and then Carter went with Georgia's husband… They've stuck together ever since. They'll still have arguments sometimes, and they might freeze each other out for a few days, but it'll usually unfreeze in time for Sunday dinner."

To see how Walter and his wife, Kris, had reacted to Katy's return, Maya could see Charlie's tale so clearly. Walter did not have the physical fortitude of the years of work Tanner had put in, but he was still very solid at seventy-six. Maya could not hear what they all said to each other, but it gave her the impression of someone kindly asking after their niece's life, like nothing mattered so much as whether or not it was a good one. The past was in the past.

"And little brother?"

"Pastor," Charlie nodded, as they looked to the third Clutterbucket brother embrace his niece.

"Oh, yeah…" Maya blinked, a vague memory tugged from the back of her mind. "Mom mentioned him a few times, I just didn't realize that was her uncle…"

"Did she tell you how they got into an argument over Harry Potter?" Charlie tried to bite back the urge to laugh.

"Yeah, she did," Maya nodded at once. That was one of the stories she'd told about 'the Pastor,' without bringing up the fact that they were family. Somehow, that first book had landed in Katy's school library, the year before she ran, and she had been the one and only student who'd gotten to take it out and read it. Carter had been at the house with his wife, Martha, and their girls, and when Katy was asked about school, she'd instead gone on and on about this book she was reading. "He didn't agree with all the magic…" she recalled.

"He still doesn't," Charlie had told her. "But then, you know, even though there's that whole side of him, he's also a really good guy. I don't know, maybe old age and grandchildren mellowed him out a bit. Just don't get him started on any kind of media these days."

"So I shouldn't tell him about the band is what you're saying," Maya smirked.

"Definitely save that for a third or fourth meeting kind of thing," Charlie agreed. "Oh, also, do you already have your officiant for the wedding?" Maya and Lucas both nodded. "Oh, good, just make sure to maybe slip it into the conversation somewhere, before he gets it in his head that he'll be doing it."

"How do you slip _that_ into a conversation?" Sam had asked, baffled, and Lucas had given him a look, while Maya and Charlie laughed quietly.

"Right, so, two uncles down, that leaves her," Maya indicated Aunt Georgia. Standing amongst her brothers, she looked like she could have been any one of their daughters. "That makes three generations of big age gaps between kids," she stated, considering her mother and her aunt, and herself and her Hunter siblings…

"Good to know," Lucas joked, looking to Maya, who was already having a similar thought.

"She was living in Australia, wasn't she?" Maya asked Charlie, piecing more old stories together with context.

"She was, yeah, that's where she met Uncle Toph. The first of the family to split out of here, and don't think that was forgotten after Katy left. Even after I was born, we'd hear about it. _She_ left when she was in her early twenties, travelled the world for a few years before landing in Australia, and then she met Christopher, fell in love, settled down, had Kyle. That's when they finally moved back, though they'd go back a lot. I got to go with them one summer, came back with a suitcase full of new music I wanted to share with my friend, and next thing you know…" Charlie pointed to the ring on her finger, to the small girl who'd been quietly holding to her leg for several minutes, and to her belly. "Kyle stopped going with them when he grew up and met Liz, so now Georgie and Toph are back living in Australia, visiting a few times a year. You should see the house out there, it's just…" she mimed what they took to mean huge.

From everything Charlie had told her, Maya had a solid idea of how she would fare with her grandfather's siblings. The brothers would require relatively opposite tactics, where she might bring up her work with the theater, and the Stage Ready program she'd put together and helped spread across the state and beyond, or even her contract with the record company which had her songs out in the world, while she would say none of this to the other brother, where she might need to feel out how to proceed and then figure out what to say to him until she had a better idea of how he'd respond to her. And then the sister… Oh, she wasn't even worried about her, and she was absolutely correct in the end, much as she had been with the brothers.

"Goodness, look at you," Georgia had been one of the most excited people there that day when it came to meeting Maya and her siblings, and it showed right from this moment, when she'd come up and embraced Maya as one might an old friend. "You must have some of your father in there, too, but aren't you just the picture of my mama when she was young."

"Am I?" Maya could only blink at this.

"Oh, yes, come here, let's see…" she'd taken Maya's hand and led her off. Maya had let herself be led, even as she'd whipped her head back to ensure Lucas and Sam were tagging along. They very rarely split up throughout the night, the better to minimize opportunities to be cornered by any one relative. "This is her and Dad, day they got married," Georgia stopped at a picture on one of the walls. The bride and groom posed in front of what looked like this very house, decades prior. The man who would be Maya's great grandfather had clearly passed on his height to his sons and daughter, and some of those looks that reminded her so of MJ. And then the bride… yeah, she could really see what Georgia meant.

"Woah…" Maya reacted, once again finding Lucas and Sam there to echo her sentiment, although in a much more amused spirit than the last time.

"Wait until she gets a look at you," Georgia was all smiles.

"She's still alive?" Maya turned to her.

"Ninety-nine years old," a man's voice had answered this, and they had all turned to find Walter Clutterbucket standing there, looking to the picture of his parents, and to his niece's daughter. He must have seen it, too. "She'll be here soon. She lives over in a residence down in Dallas," he revealed, which made Maya turn to Lucas. She had been living in the same state as her great grandmother all these years and she hadn't even known it. When she mentioned how they lived in Austin, Walter nodded. "Your mother mentioned as much. I used to travel down that way, back in the day. Shame we never ran into one another."

"It's never too late, is it?" Maya pointed out, and it got a smile out of the man, who appeared to be the most at ease at showing genuine emotion out of the three brothers. Where Tanner was mostly reserved though, Pastor Carter came off mostly like someone who had perfected the pacifying smile, though not so much as to keep it from feeling put upon. As suggested by Charlie, Maya and Lucas had found a way, in what felt like swift tag team effort, to reveal to him the fact that they were getting married _and_ include the fact that there already was someone very close to the family who would stand up there and perform the ceremony.

"And they're all coming?" Sophie asked, trying perhaps but ultimately failing to rein in her laughter.

"They are, yeah," Maya confirmed, setting the picture back in its place before taking her phone and the envelopes to go and sit on the beanbag, where she had another project in the works. Along with the invitations she had also asked around the family for photos that she might get, to keep and put together for herself and her siblings as they grew up. The family had come through, and she was in the process of compiling albums. Copies had been made, so each one of them might have their own, including their mother. Katy had loaned her the albums from her own box, so the contents could be included. Over time, being out here, having this family of hers just grow and grow, and maybe also having a father who had taught her to appreciate photography, she had really taken such a liking to preserving these memories in such a way, preserving and expanding as well.

"Is that everyone?" Sophie inquired, still taking notes.

"Getting there," Maya told her, looking to the small stack. "No more question marks from here on out."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	145. Their Time in Family

May 24th 2020

_Chapter 145  
Their Time in Family_

"Hello?" a shout came from below as Maya was shuffling her small envelopes around. Her hands fumbled and the stack tumbled loose before she could catch them again.

"What was that?" Sophie asked from the phone.

"Hang on," Maya sighed, starting to gather the responses before calling out. "Attic!"

"Who's there?" Sophie's voice requested.

"Little brother… not so little as he used to be," Maya tried not to let her thoughts color her voice, but it was no good. "I kind of miss him being ten, he had his glasses and… Shh, be cool," she whispered, turning her head a moment before Sam's appeared, coming up the steps into the attic. "Hey! How was the movie?"

"Okay, I guess, I…" he shrugged.

"Heeeeeeeey hey, Hart!" a surprisingly booming voice echoed from Maya's phone on the ground, which startled Sam so much he yelped and Maya burst out laughing, dropping off the bean bag until she managed to sit up again.

"Hey, Sophie," Sam muttered, trying to act like he was totally relaxed. "I'll just go and… start dinner," he pointed down the stairs.

"Sounds good," Maya beamed, waiting until he was gone before turning to her phone again. "You call that being cool?" she asked her friend, grinning on.

"I thought it was cool," Sophie innocently insisted. "So, what's with the mopey nostalgia about him?"

"Never mind that, we should keep going before Lucas gets here and I have to go eat. Let me just…" Maya shuffled through her envelopes. "Right, well, I've got two more of Mom's cousins, one with a husband, one with a… plus one that may or may not materialize itself…"

"What does that mean, like a magician?" Sophie snorted.

"Not exactly," Maya chuckled.

"Right. Kids?"

"Well, yes, one each, but they're both twenty-three, so if they're not with their parents it's not a big deal or anything, but maybe keep the two of them at the same table…"

Of all the names Maya had been aware of in some big or small way coming into this day, about the only one she'd yet to encounter was one Randall Clutterbucket. He was Walter's son, only child, inheritor of the family business, and once upon a time willing driver who would take his younger cousins, Katy and Betsy off in search of music stores, and clothing stores, the likes of which they would not have found in their hometown.

He had been twenty-two when young Katy had made her mad dash, and everything she had heard of him from her mother suggested to Maya that he would have been right there in the search parties when she went away, devastated at the thought of anything happening to another of his cousins, after Betsy's departure. Randall was the golden boy in their town, back in the day. Star athlete, top of his class, hardworking and on track to follow in his father's footsteps, which he had done… For all that, he was golden in the way of one warmed by the sun, not someone who could fall under the category of 'not all that glitters is gold.' Unlike Katy, he did not seek or require anything beyond what the town could give him, but it didn't mean he couldn't indulge others, couldn't find value in discovering what lay beyond their bounds. If Katy and Betsy wanted to go out there to get CDs, or books, or other things like that, he preferred driving them than risk them getting around in less secure manners.

If he hadn't gone on those drives with the pair of them, he would never have met the girl who would one day become his wife, and the mother of his daughter, Regan. She had passed away years ago now, when Regan had been just about nine and a half. He had raised her on his own ever since, never remarried, never really held much of a relationship either. He focused all his energies on his girl, and his work, and it was all he needed.

The day of the anniversary, he had arrived on his own, and soon it had become clear that he'd heard someone somewhere in town whisper of the return of one former Clutterbucket daughter, gone very nearly thirty years. His hair had gone to gray early, but it suited him well, even as he had walked into the increasingly crowded room with a half wild look in his eyes. He'd spotted Katy, and she'd spotted him, and there was no telling who had walked faster, but then he was hugging her and she was hugging him, and they held for several beats before standing apart again, talking excitedly. It was as though no time had passed at all.

Later, much as she had learned of her mother's original intention to make Betsy her godmother, she had learned of her dream – in a world where he would have even known she existed – for Randall to be her godfather. Like his cousin, he showed a wish to involve himself in what way he could.

"This is… Wow, of course you are, hello," he had been brought to meet Maya at the party, had shaken her hand with energy she warmed to at once. When Katy started to tell her cousin how her daughter was an artist, a singer, musician, and songwriter, he wanted to see it, hear it at once, and she had no doubts at all that he really did. She couldn't exactly do that there, but there would be time, some other day. After that day, they had that: they had time.

"Hey," Charlie had come and found Maya again, signalling toward the door. "Last cousin for the day," she smiled, and Maya turned with a laugh. One look at the woman who had just walked in, and it was like someone had taken cousin Marissa and ticked her age up just a bit. To no surprise then, she was revealed to be her sister and the eldest of Pastor Carter's two daughters. Carrie was just a few months younger than Katy, and so the two of them had grown up together, been in the same class in school… Maya's mother had been closer to Betsy and Randall, yes, and it was never really the four of them together, but as far as school went, Carrie had been her closest friend.

"So she'll be excited to… No?" Maya had started to say, before catching the look on Charlie's face.

"Anyone's guess. They kind of grilled her a lot after Katy left, and she'd keep saying she didn't know anything, but she did."

"How do you know?" Lucas had asked.

"Christmas, like ten years ago. I wanted to try a beer," Charlie casually shrugged. "Carrie stole me one. Took one sip and hated it, so she took it back, chugged it down. Next thing I know, she's going on about how my sister was so ungrateful, how she'd covered for her with her 'big plan,' and then she never wrote her, never called…"

With this bit of information on hand, Maya, Lucas, Sam, and Charlie had stood there, waiting to see how this reunion would go. Katy and Carrie had seen one another. There was a brief moment of silence, and when Katy had started to go toward her cousin, they had seen the uncertainty melt from Carrie's face. They'd met, they'd hugged, then Carrie had said something, and Katy had shaken her head, said something back, and Carrie had hugged her again.

"Crisis averted?" Maya asked her aunt.

"Looks that way."

While Carrie had arrived with her husband, Taylor, her daughter had come along about twenty minutes later, along with Randall's daughter. Kyleigh Hinton and Regan Clutterbucket might as well have been fused at the hip. Though this had been achieved due to the fact that Kyleigh had been born five weeks prematurely, the two cousins had been born on the exact same day. For this, the four parents had been brought closer than they'd already been, and even more so when Randall had lost his wife and Regan her mother. The girls had graduated high school together, and they had gone away to college together, and they were now roommates, living in Memphis.

"I'm just going to turn to you on this," Maya had turned to Charlie when the girls arrived.

"Well, Kyleigh's the only reason Sara Mae's not like her mom, you know, so…"

"Does that mean…" Sam had raised a hand, likely about to express the same thought Lucas had, and Maya, too. The answer came in the form of the aforementioned twelve-year-old dashing up to the new arrivals and excitedly telling them something before scanning the room and pointing over to where Maya stood.

"I really shouldn't be _as _surprised anymore, but… wow…"

What had soon resonated with Maya and the others was that, rather than approaching her and freaking out, the newly discovered second cousins had come to say hello, introducing themselves, and revealing how they had been at the Ree concert with Betsy back in December, so they had seen her on stage, too. They had essentially known that they were related to her since then, but without any expectations of ever actually meeting, what with the circumstances of their family, they'd sort of left the whole subject alone, like they might have been contented by the knowledge alone. Now that she was here though… well, they were happy to finally get to say hello, and share how much they had loved her performance, and the song itself.

"By the way, don't tell my grandfather about any of that," Kyleigh had requested, giving a discreet nod over to the pastor.

"Wasn't planning to," Maya had laughed.

"All he needs is one good reason and he's going to make her move back home," Regan declared, nodding over to her twin-ish cousin.

"I would like to see him try," Kyleigh raised her chin, barely holding it together before she started to laugh, along with Regan, and Charlie, and Maya, too.

"Great, you want to tell him about that boyfriend of yours?" Regan had asked, moving to turn and 'signal' her uncle.

"No, no, no, no, hey," Kyleigh had caught her into a hug that was part chokehold.

"Well they'll be fun, maybe I'll put them at my table," Sophie told Maya, after being told about these new additions.

"Works for me," Maya smiled, setting the envelopes aside to flip through some of the photos she still had to place in the stack of albums. She didn't want to make them entirely identical, but they still had to make sense, yeah? "I'm starting to wonder if I would have been named after Randall in some way, if I had been a boy…" Maya stated, stopping at a picture of her mother and Betsy and him. Her mother looked about seven, which would have made Betsy somewhere about ten, and Randall fourteen. If she had to guess by the clothes, it had to be around Easter.

"Speaking of once removed Randall, he's the one with plus one you said 'may or may not materialize,' isn't he?" Sophie guessed. Maya chuckled at this.

"He is, yeah."

"Still don't entirely know what it means…"

"Well," Maya put the pictures back down. "Like I said, from what I heard he hasn't seen anyone, hasn't been in a sustained relationship with anyone since his wife passed."

"So this plus one…"

"Would you believe it, after nearly fifteen years, someone may have shown up to get his heart doing a little dance again," Maya declared, and she could practically see the intrigue forming in her friend's face, way back in Houston.

"What? Who? When?"

"Three excellent questions," Maya snickered, reaching to pick up another of the remaining envelopes.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	146. Their Time in Legacy

May 25th 2020

_Chapter 146  
Their Time in Legacy_

Sometimes it still felt like so much of her life now had to be a dream. This had to be her thirteen-year-old self, back in her bed in New York, thinking about what it would be like to have a family beyond just her mother. She knew it wasn't, knew it was absolutely reality, and yet… How had she gone from having hardly anyone to now having so many people as to feel like she might lose count? All these brothers and sisters, parents given by blood or marriage, cousins, and aunts and uncles, grandparents, and one tiny great grandmother… If that wasn't enough, she was given a place on another tree or two, by virtue of her relationship with Lucas. Would there ever come a time where she _didn't_ feel like she was an outsider looking in now and again?

After she'd run out of aunts and uncles and cousins to be introduced to, Maya had been left to contend with any number of family friends and acquaintances, each as curious as the last, and Lucas had taken her hand, giving her a look to quietly ask if she wanted to step outside and get some air. That was when she'd ended up having a chat with Betsy, just the two of them, after they'd gone out and just as soon felt like something to eat and drink. Lucas had gone to get those, and Betsy had come along… When Lucas had returned, with a plate and a couple of glasses deftly held in hand, Betsy had taken this as her cue to exit, but Lucas instead informed the both of them of a new arrival.

"I think it's your great grandmother," Lucas had told Maya, and at this Betsy had turned a smile toward her cousin's daughter that felt like 'oh, you are going to love this.'

"Fair warning," she'd told both Maya and Lucas as they'd walked around the house, "Her head's not as clear as it used to be. She's mostly alright, but sometimes she'll think you're someone else. Just go along with it."

"Got it," Maya had nodded.

As they had come back around the house, they had found Maya's grandfather walking down the house steps and toward a car which had pulled up near enough so as to reduce the distance for one of the passengers. While he'd opened the door to speak to the woman in the front, the driver had come out to retrieve a walker from the trunk. When it was unfolded and ready, it was placed in front of the open door, and Tanner and the driver helped the passenger emerge.

Great-grandmother Katherine, at ninety-nine years of age, had the look of one who would fit in your pocket, if you carefully scooped her up. She couldn't have been very tall to begin with, but age had curved her back so as to make her appear even shorter. As she was helped from the car, the impression was of someone who did not particularly care to be helped as though she needed it, but also someone who had gotten to the point where she had to admit that she actually needed that help, and so she had to suck it up and say thank you. Her appearance as a whole spoke of someone who both embraced her age but also found importance in maintaining her appearances.

"How's her heart, or… I mean, how's she going to react when she sees my mother?" Maya had asked Betsy. The last thing she wanted was to see the old woman drop dead from shock.

"If anything, I'd say it would do her heart some good," Betsy had reassured her at once. "Your mom was her first granddaughter, not for nothing she was named after her. From what I've heard over the years, from the Clutterbuckets, I think the two of them might have been a lot alike. The difference was that… your mother left. It would have been a different world when _she_ was younger," Betsy nodded to the woman as she was helped up the steps. "There was really nowhere for her to go. But then she met someone who gave her all the reasons to want to stay. Her family is everything to her… she'll be so happy to meet you, too."

"And my mom…"

"Katherine lived with them until about fifteen years ago, when she moved down to the residence in Dallas. When I'd come over, when Katy and I were little, she'd refuse for us to just stay in the house and play. Go outside, go somewhere… We would run off and do it and be glad for it, wouldn't think much of it. Now I think she just wanted us to get some ideas about the world. She's kind of the reason we all ended up in New York."

"What do you mean?" Maya asked.

"Well, that's where she went, for her honeymoon. This would have been… 1950… and she fell in love with the city. She'd never left Arkansas up to that point, barely left town, and that stayed the same pretty much up until she went to live in Dallas. Anyway, she made a friend in New York, and the two of them stayed pen pals from that day on. And Katherine, she still loved the city so much. She had this whole cabinet of figurines, snow globes, thimbles, all these trinkets with some landmark or another. Anyway, the amount of time Katy and I spent out at the house, it was hard not to have New York on the brain."

Maya smiled at this, even as she thought of this one very old looking figurine of the Statue of Liberty her mother had on her dresser back home. She was almost sure now it had to have been a gift from her grandmother.

"How did she take it when my mom left?" she'd asked Betsy.

"Better than most, I'd say. When they were all looking for her, from what I've heard, she would just sort of… ask if there were news, and that would be that. And then when they found out that she was in New York, that she was safe, she looked… happy," Betsy smiled.

They had hurried to follow after the new arrivals, anxious not to miss this last reunion. The woman who had accompanied Katherine Clutterbucket from Dallas appeared to be a nurse from the residence where she lived, who had travelled along to be there with her throughout her stay in Arkansas. From what they gathered, this was her first time here, though there had been someone else before her who the family had grown to know very well. They were introducing themselves to her now like someone they expected to interact with a lot.

"Georgia would have loved to have her mom come and stay with her, but it wouldn't have been right to take her so far away from everyone else, so she compromised by getting her into the best home she could find. This was before I started coming back around, but I heard it took about five or six moves before everyone was happy and that's how she ended up in Dallas."

Maya watched her mother as they walked in, found her chatting with her new brother-in-law until he tapped her shoulder and nodded to where tiny Katherine was coming along. She watched as her mother's face shifted, spotting the old woman, recognizing her… She would have been seventy already, seventy-one, when Katy went away, and in her head she must have been convinced her grandmother was already dead. Somehow, it hadn't come up in conversation since she'd been here, that this was not the case. And now here she was, alive and… maybe not kicking, but certainly walking… She had approached her with almost that same caution her father had used when he'd approached her. Soon, Katherine had noticed her, and she'd watched her coming forward like she was trying to figure out who she was. She looked familiar, but she didn't know why.

"Nana…" Katy called her, standing just across from her walker now. Katherine looked up at her, the name just tugging at something in the back of her mind, and then curiosity turned to disbelief, like this couldn't possibly be… oh, but it was…

"Katy girl… That's you, isn't it… my Katy girl…"

"Yes, Nana," Katy was smiling, crying. Katherine scooted up just a bit closer, looking her over.

"You've grown," she declared. "And I've gotten smaller," she added after a beat. "How's New York?" It made Katy laugh.

"It's good, Nana. Just like your stories," she nodded. The fact that she hadn't lived there in nearly a dozen years was not important for now. The way she looked at her, and stole brief looks to where she saw Maya now, it was as though she was finally realizing what Georgia had already shown, seeing just how much her grandmother and her daughter looked alike.

Once Nana Katherine had gotten to the couch and sat down, keeping a close eye on 'her Katy girl' like she meant to ensure she would always know where she was, Katy had introduced the woman to Shawn, and the little Hunters. Nellie was chatty as ever, excited at the prospect of a new grandparent and even more so at the novelty of this being a great grandparent. When MJ heard this, he took it to mean that this person was really nice, and so he liked her immediately. Meanwhile, Gracie had never met an old person she didn't like or couldn't charm, and Nana Katherine was no exception. Haley was the only one who looked mildly uncertain at first, though she'd watch the woman with clear awe and interest.

"Nana, this is my first one, my baby girl," Katy told her grandmother, as Maya came forward. When Katherine looked up at her, she let out a short sort of gasp, reaching out a bony little hand toward her, which Maya carefully took in her own as she took a seat next to her.

"I know you…" Katherine whispered, emotion in her clear eyes. Maya felt her own eyes were possibly tearing up. This was not her being recognized for the band or anything like that. She was like a memory, crossing wires in her great grandmother's mind. She could see her now, reasoning with herself, trying to convince herself that the young woman at her side was not who she thought she was. "Now, what's your name, dear?"

"Maya," she smiled, and Nana Katherine nodded.

"Like the bee…"

"The very one," Maya nodded.

"I want a tiny granny…" Sophie sighed, hearing the tale of their meeting. Maya, Lucas, and Katy had since gone up to Dallas to visit her once, at the same time getting a feel of things for when Katy would be here for her new play. There had been calls, and the promise of more visits. And there was the wedding… She could not wait to go to the wedding.

"She's pretty great," Maya smiled. "You put her in a good place, yeah?"

"Right next to me," Sophie joked.

"Your table is getting crowded now," Maya teased.

"We'll squeeze in, it'll be cozy. Hey, so, you never said, what's up with Randall's plus one?"

"Oh," Maya laughed. "Well, I told you about Nana Kat's nurse, didn't I? Well, once the family was there with her, she was going to leave, but my grandparents insisted she could stay. And then after a while, she and Randall started talking… and talked some more… Word is, some numbers were exchanged, calls were made, and according to Regan, a first date is imminent."

"Alright, Randall," Sophie cheered, which made Maya laugh once again. "Is that it then? No more new people?"

"I think you're forgetting a few," Maya told her, taking up the last two envelopes.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	147. Their Time in Discovery

**_A/N:_**_ The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!_

* * *

May 26th 2020

_Chapter 147  
Their Time in Discovery_

When they had gone back to the hotel at the end of the night, after the party, they'd needed to work out sleeping arrangements for Sam and the little Hunters, now that they were there as well. They weren't going to go and rent another room for the one night, so instead Sam would take to the couch in Maya and Lucas' room, while the twins would scoot in between the couple in the bed, and MJ and Haley would do the same between their parents in the room across the hall. After having put the twins to bed, Maya had gone across to say goodnight to the younger pair. They were not about to let themselves get short changed on a goodnight from their big sister when she was in the same building as they were.

"What time are we leaving tomorrow?" she'd asked her mother in a whisper, after MJ and Haley had dozed off.

"Just before lunch, I think," Katy told her, as they stood out in the hall together. There was a look about her, and she wasn't sure why but it prompted Maya to ask if she was alright. "I'm fine, baby girl, really," Katy smiled, touching her arm, her face, before pulling her into her arms for a hug.

"You didn't think you would be, did you?" Maya quietly asked.

"I don't know why part of me thinks it would have been easier if it had gone wrong," Katy shook her head as they stood back and looked to each other once again. Maya considered this question, but her mother just told her goodnight, and they went into their respective rooms. Entering hers, Maya found that Sam was already lying on the couch, either asleep or heading that way, which Lucas sat on his side of the bed, waiting for her to join him before lying down properly, knowing it wouldn't be long that Gracie would burrow to his side as she'd done for about as long as the twins had been known to climb between them in the night.

"All bed guests off to sleep?" he whispered, then, "What's the matter?"

"Nothing," Maya assured him, going into the bathroom to change. When she came back out again, she climbed in on her side of the bed, where Nellie soon curled in at her side, and Maya put her arm around her sister, delicately trailing her fingers through her brown hair so she'd go on sleeping.

Her mother hadn't said it, but she didn't have to. Maya knew… When all was said and done, the party had been wonderful, the hiccups were minimal at best as far as her reintroduction to the family… This should have been good news, effacing all worries, and yet… All it had left Katy with, on this night at least, was the notion that she could… that she _should_ have gone back to them years ago. Maybe in the days where they lived in New York, it was understandable that she wouldn't have done it, when they had been struggling the way they'd done, but after Texas, after their lives had taken the turn they'd taken… Why hadn't they gone back, why hadn't they put her family out of their misery and shown that they were alive, and well… Why had they let so many years go by in staying apart, when being together again had been so far from the end of the world Katy had allowed herself to imagine?

"Maya? Hey, you still there?"

"What?" Maya blinked, looking down to the phone on the floor. She picked it up again, standing from the ground after a beat. "Sorry, spaced out," she told Sophie as she ran a hand through her hair and took a few slow steps along the attic floor. "Where was I?"

"The last additions to my once perfect seating chart for your big July day," Sophie reminded her.

"Yeah, okay," Maya turned and snatched up the last envelopes. "Well, there's my grandparents, plus my mom's sister and her husband, plus their daughter and then… She'll have had the baby by then, but she's not sure yet whether she'll bring him. He'll be… something like four months old by then, I think, or… not quite four."

"And will he be having the meat, the fish, or the veg?" Sophie joked, making Maya laugh.

"Wish I could ask, but he's a bit unreachable at the moment."

"Well, I'll make sure and put them in some choice spots. Might have to bump some people, but hey, nothing wrong with a bit of mingling, getting to know some new people…"

"Thanks a lot, really," Maya smiled.

"Hey, what wouldn't I do for you, Hart?"

In the weeks since the party, Maya and her mother both had been in contact with several of the family members they had encountered back in Arkansas in one way or another. Maya had needed to correspond with all of them, of course, with the invitations being sent out and then the responses she and Lucas had received, and then the pictures for her albums, but beyond that… On the whole, there had been a couple of phone calls from some of them, no contact from others… The ones she'd been in contact with the most, as she had expected, were Betsy, Randall, Charlie, and her grandparents.

Charlie she had been texting back and forth with… daily, from the day they'd left and returned to Austin. There had been some calls, too, but their message thread was constant and lengthening by the day. There would be life updates, Maya asking after the unborn Olsen boy soon to be born, Charlie inquiring after the wedding preparations… Once, about a week ago now, she had slipped away into the back of the theater, got that wedding dress back on, and recorded a short video she had then sent off to Charlie and Betsy. If they had been in her life back in October, when she'd shown her dress to others in the family, she would have shown it to them, too, wouldn't she?

The responses had been animated as she had imagined they might be. Charlie had shown the video to her mother, as Maya had asked that she do, knowing her grandmother would not have had the means to receive and see it any other way. According to Charlie, there had been many happy tears, and the request to know whether she had all of her 'something old, something new…'

The bond to Charlie had been easy. They were nearly the same age, shared a deep love of music and making music. Her aunt had a beautiful singing voice herself, which Maya had discovered once she'd gotten her to give a small performance over a video call. They both had their guitars, and by the end of the call the two of them had been playing and singing together, miles and miles away but together. Since then, they'd started to make these sort of jam sessions a weekly thing.

As easy as it had been with Charlie, Maya had expected it. The ease she felt toward her grandparents, now that was the one able to catch her by surprise. Well, maybe not surprise, but… It was like that night back at the hotel, wasn't it? Her mother had not expected her return home to go as well as it had done, and Maya hadn't foreseen herself growing so easily attached to the pair she'd grown up thinking of as little more than antagonistic characters in her mother's story. But she had met them now, and she had spent time with them, spoken to them, and… she loved them. In many ways they were all still getting to know one another, but that only gave them more ways to connect, more blank areas to fill in, and there was an eagerness on both sides to do exactly that. Maya was really coming to appreciate, thanks to them, thanks to her father and her siblings, that there was such a thing as a time for everything and to everything its time. They would not have had a relationship as they were forging now, not if things had happened any other way than the way they did now.

The first time she'd gotten to have a moment with each of her grandparents, where it was just her and Tanner, and her and Angela… Those were just memories she knew she would turn back to, when she needed to. Just as it had been with Betsy, sitting outside the house, there had been a couple more moments when the whole overwhelming spirit of the party had sent Maya seeking just a minute away from all the new faces, and all the questions coming left and right.

One of those had sent her into the kitchen, where she discovered an as yet unseen member of the Clutterbucket household lying under the table and staring up at her with round curious eyes.

"Well hello…" she'd whispered, crouching to extend her hand to the dog, who took a sniff and slowly stood up and approached her while she sat down on the floor. The dog was rewarded on this approach with some good scratches which endeared Maya to him at once. "That's a lot of people for you, too, huh… Scout," she read off his collar. He lay his head down on her knee, and for a minute or so they just sat there, enjoying the silence, near enough to silence…

"What… oh, it's you," her grandmother's voice startled her and she looked up, finding Angela looking back at her and the dog with a smile. "I was wondering where you'd gotten off to."

"Sorry, I just wanted to…"

"Please, no need to apologize, I can imagine this must be a lot all at once," Angela told her.

"Yeah," Maya nodded. At least they all understood this, yeah?

"Scout's warmed up to you," her grandmother declared, pulling a chair from the table so she might sit near the pair of them. "He's almost two years old, still keeps shy around most people. Your grandfather says he's just picky about who he likes."

"Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence," Maya looked down to Scout, who licked at her hand and made her laugh.

"We had his mom before him, and _her_ mom before that," Angela informed her granddaughter. "That line's gone on since the first of our dogs… well, fifty years ago."

"Wow…" Maya blinked, looking down to shy Scout again. "So my mom…"

"We had Chestnut, when she was born, and then Champ when Katy was almost six, and then Fleet…" Her grandmother looked so happy to recall all of these, but now her face had changed again, and Maya felt bad for even sending her down that path. "Oh, it's alright," her grandmother assured her, noticing the look on _her_ face, but it still left Maya feeling like she was intruding on this memory. Reaching up her arm, she'd set her hand over Angela's, where it had been sitting on her knee. Her mother's mother looked down and smiled, turning her hand over so she might grasp Maya's. "Do, uh… do you have a dog back home?"

"A few, yeah," Maya laughed. For a while, she sat there, petting Scout with one hand as she told her grandmother about Trix and Lou and Archer back home, about those who had come and gone along the way before then… Eventually, they'd had to go back into the party, leaving Scout to keep on enjoying the quiet.

Maya had half a mind to go back to him, the next time she'd decided she needed a break. But then by chance she had crossed eyes with her grandfather, who seemed to read this need on her face. He'd pointed discreetly toward the steps leading up to the second floor, and she had gone off that way without question. Reaching the top, she'd turned to find he was coming along, too.

"Second door on your left," Tanner told her, and she continued forward until she reached the closed door. She turned back to look to her grandfather before pushing the door open.

The room had not been kept like some time capsule out of 1999, but she still knew this would have been her mother's room back in the day. For having heard about her childhood and adolescence here, it wasn't as though the walls would have been lined with posters or anything at all that really said 'Katy,' but this had been her space, and she could just about imagine her in it.

"Was this Charlie's room, too?" she'd asked her grandfather, neither of them having ever stated aloud that this had been Katy's.

"Yes," her grandfather confirmed. "Angela wanted to put her in one of the other rooms, wanted… to keep to the belief that Katy would return to this room." He grew quiet here, showing he had known well enough this would not be the case. "She was afraid that we were saying we had forgotten about her, as though she had never existed," he went on, walking slowly over to the window sill. Maya watched as he dragged one of his long fingers along the edge and, taking a step closer, she could just see letters etched there in the wood. She smirked.

"Mom did that?"

"She was eleven… no, twelve. It was her birthday. She said that she wanted to leave her mark." Maya had a feeling this hadn't gone over well, but she didn't ask it; that wasn't the point. "No, it was right for Charlie to have the room, to share in her sister's space," Tanner nodded, turning back to his granddaughter. "Did she tell you about when she left here?" She hesitated, but she nodded. "It was the television, wasn't it? The last straw?" She didn't reply, didn't know what to say, but it wasn't necessary. "I shouldn't have done it," he shook his head. "Didn't mean to, got carried away. It was too late after that."

"My father, my birth father, he left when I was six," Maya told her grandfather, who looked back at her when she said it. "It was just Mom and me after that until Shawn came along and the two of them got together. It was rough for a long time and… well, she should get to tell you that part. The point is… my father came back into my life when I was twenty-one. I had… a little over a year with him before he died, but… once he was back in, he was in. All the years in between, I couldn't forget them, but they didn't affect things going forward. You, and Grandma, and everyone, and Mom… you lost so many more years, but that time's over now, yeah?"

Her grandfather had looked at her, his baby girl's baby girl, and maybe in that exact moment they had become family in more than name and blood.

"So, you're getting married," he nodded to her hand and she looked down to her engagement ring before nodding to him. "This young man of yours, he's a good one?"

"Kind of the best," Maya smiled.

"I'd like to hear about him, and you… if that's alright?" He was almost as nervous as the dog down in the kitchen, this Grandpa of hers.

"How much time do you have?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	148. Their Construction of an Idea

May 27th 2020

_Chapter 148  
Their Construction of an Idea_

"I know that face…" Lucas breathed, kissing Maya's shoulder as he held her one morning. They had both woken up early, which had very much gone the way of 'one thing led to another,' and now as they lay there, feeling their hearts slowly regain a normal pace, she was staring into nowhere, the way she might, when 'nowhere' was in fact filled with thoughts from her mind. "Hey," he called on her attention with a few more kisses to that shoulder which soon began travelling nearer her throat as his arms held her closer.

"Just because I say nothing, doesn't mean I can't hear you," Maya breathed. "But please don't let that stop you," she smiled, dragging fingers along his arm. He was more than happy to carry on, and they both knew where this would go… again… if neither one of them interrupted. Tempted as she was to go down that road, she couldn't help sharing the idea now occupying her brain. "I want to make a studio." Lucas made a noise to confirm he was hearing her, still attached to the soft skin of her neck for a few more seconds before the words finally connected with the part of his brain that could still think about anything else but…

"Wait, what do you mean?" he propped himself up on an elbow to look at her.

"I mean a space somewhere, for band practice, and for recording songs. I'm not saying I'm looking to make some kind of empire here, but at this point it just feels like I need to take a step above, more than our basement and my computer, you know? Plus, sooner or later we're going to need that space in the basement for more than this."

"I hear you," he nodded. She smiled. "What did you have in mind?" he asked, even as he knew the answer to this question would have to be something like 'a lot, too much.'

"Do you remember when you first told me about the house, Pappy Joe leaving it to you?" Maya asked.

"I do, I remember you hated that I told you because you were going to have to wait almost four years to do anything about it," he nodded. She smiled. "Realizing that was almost six years ago now…"

"Right?" Maya chuckled. "I suggested you could build yourself a clinic of some kind, out on the land," she reminded, which had him grinning.

"You called me a hot shot veterinarian."

"I stand by that," she beamed.

"Yeah, I noticed," he teased, stealing another kiss. She held to his face as he pulled back to look at her. "I also remember I suggested making you a gallery room, or…" He stopped, figuring out why she'd brought up the memory now.

"Or a studio," she finished the sentence for him, sealing it with a smile.

"You want to build a studio… out there," he nodded toward the back of the house.

"Seriously considering it, yeah, which is why I'm mentioning it, because I can't just…"

"Okay," Lucas cut in, and her eyebrow raised. _Really?_ "Yes," he told her, in no uncertain terms, and her face spread into the biggest of grins.

"Yay…" she whispered.

When they had gone downstairs for breakfast and he had seen his sister come along with a sketchbook, pencils, and her laptop in tow, Sam asked her what she was working on now.

"Building a studio," she declared, setting her load down on the table. Sam looked at her, confused.

"What… how… Where?" he asked. Maya and Lucas pointed off in the general direction of 'out there.' "That only answers one thing," Sam frowned.

"Barely had the idea like twenty minutes ago, leave me alone," Maya stuck her tongue out at him and Sam retorted in kind, while Lucas chuckled and shook his head, just as the quiet of the morning was broken with the distant sound of Maya's ringtone coming from upstairs. "Figures…" she dashed off back up the stairs, the urgency riling up the dogs, who started barking and running after her.

"I know you did all that work on the house when you were going to propose and everything, but this is different, isn't it?" Sam turned to Lucas.

"I'm not just going to go and buy materials and try to do it on my own, come on," Lucas pointed out. "We know people, we can figure this out. It'll be like a fun family project," he tapped at his brother's arm, which seemed to encourage him some.

Maya came back downstairs a minute later, looking like her whole outlook for this simple Saturday at home had gone out the window.

"That was my mother. Randall called, Charlie's in labor…" she revealed with a smile. She'd been texting with her aunt just the night before, and Katy's little sister had been certain her baby was gearing up for an exit any day now. "Dad's going to stay here with the kids, but Mom wants to go out there. We might not make it before the baby's actually born, but she wants to try and well…" And she was going out there with her, which now posed a new question: what about the two of them? She had to leave soon, so they had to decide.

"I have a project I need to work on," Sam told his sister. "I'll be fine, I can go and help your dad." Maya looked at him like she wanted to catch up his head in her hands and kiss it.

"How are we travelling?" Lucas asked his fiancée, leading on as they went and got dressed.

It would be a good seven hours or so on the road, depending on traffic, but soon they were off, Maya, Lucas, and Katy. Lucas took the wheel, leaving the mother and daughter to share the backseat, the better for them to simultaneously keep the other from spiraling into wondering how long it would take, and if they would get there in time… Maya ended up telling her mother about her plan for the studio, and this kept all three of them talking for the length of the ride. Katy was only mildly surprised at the plan, and then it all became logistics. How big of a structure were they thinking about? Where exactly on the land were they going to put it? Who could they get to help plan the thing and what needed to be done to make it happen? Lucas had first pointed out that Rosa would possibly have something to provide, with her studying architectural history and interior design, and then just as quickly, recalling a conversation he'd had with Maeve, he'd realized…

"Carter," he spoke even as the name passed through his mind.

"My uncle?" Katy asked.

"No, no, uh… My co-worker, Maeve, he…" Lucas started to explain, unsure now what they had or hadn't told Katy regarding Maeve's baby and the plan for her father to have sole custody. It felt like it had all been going so fast, and Maeve was already seven months along. She wasn't actually all that big, though it definitely showed. And now she knew the baby was a girl. She hadn't meant to find out, not at the time, but then someone had slipped up and said something, and there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. Now Carter had asked if she would consider, in full respect of her wishes to pass their daughter on to him, if she would like to pick her name. Maeve had agreed, but that had also been weeks ago, and she was coming no closer to choosing.

"Oh, right," Maya cut in here, allowing them to get to the point. "He could actually help out, might know other people for it, too. Do you think he'd do it?"

"Doesn't hurt to ask," Katy declared, to which Lucas nodded. "And with a new baby coming…"

"That applies to like half the people we know these days, doesn't it?" Maya had to reflect. Maeve, Abigail, Charlie… Nadine, too, before long, if she and Zay finally actually managed to get pregnant… "Alright, maybe not half, but you get what I'm saying."

The drive had been rounding up on eight hours, from the moment they had taken off from the Hunter-Hart house to pick up Katy and through to when they pulled up to the hospital. Maya and her mother had gotten out and headed in while Lucas went to park and joined them after.

"You know, I can't figure out if this place has changed at all in thirty years," Katy commented as they walked through the hospital. "Last time I was here, I was about thirteen, burned my arm trying to do… something to my hair, don't even remember what except that it didn't work, I burned myself, and nearly torched the bathroom along with it."

"Wow, you were a menace," Maya teased and laughed at the almost penitent look on her mother's face. "Starting to feel a lot better about some of the stuff I pulled."

"You really want to test that theory?" Katy gave her a new look, which put an end to the statement.

The nearer they got to the delivery rooms to find the family, they quickly figured out that they had not missed the birth at all, though any minute now that was going to change. Out in the hall they came upon the small party in wait. This included Randall, who had called Katy, David's father, David's mother – with little Caitlin in her arms – and Tanner Clutterbucket. He had the slouched shoulders and slow walk up and down the hallway, of a father who could not help but worry while his daughter could be heard from inside the room. There, as expected, she would be surrounded by her husband and her mother.

"Ma-ya!" Caitlin exclaimed, the way she'd taken to do, whenever she called her cousin's name. The others had looked up at this. They all looked glad for their arrival; Tanner, even now, looked startled to find his eldest daughter stood before him. Now, to have her here on this day already promised to be one great one… It was almost too much joy for the emotionally restrained old man to take. Katy had gone and hugged him, and he'd wrapped her in those long arms like the preciously returned gift that she was.

"Hanging in there?" Maya asked with a smile, when her turn came to be greeted by the giant of a man that he was.

"Yes, I think so," he nodded to her before looking to Katy again. "Charlene said to send you in when you came, if you…" She didn't need convincing, and soon Katy went into the delivery room.

By the time the cries of newborn Harry Olsen were heard, not twenty minutes later, Maya was sitting with Lucas, as three-year-old Caitlin sat in her cousin's lap, toy guitar in her arms as always. According to David's father, they had tried giving the girl stuffed animals, or dolls, and none of them had worked. It was the guitar or nothing at all. The announcement of the birth was received, happily so, along with the news of both mother and son doing well.

"I'm really glad we got to be here today," Maya told Lucas as they waited for their turn to go in and see Charlie and the baby.

"Me, too," Lucas nodded. "Oh, thank you," he looked down to find Caitlin holding out her guitar to him. When he took it, the girl was able to hop down from Maya's lap, after which she held out her hands again. "There you go," Lucas returned the guitar.

"Time to go meet your little brother, huh?" Maya laughed, seeing how the girl stood there, as though ready to go in and put on a show. She nodded.

"One of these days, we're going to look back on this, when she's a world superstar," Lucas smiled, after David had come to escort his daughter into the room. Maya turned a smile back at him. She could believe it.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	149. Their Construction of Self

May 28th 2020

_Chapter 149  
Their Construction of Self_

_1st week of construction_

"So, the middle should be somewhere around here, yeah?" Maya hopped into the space freshly cleared, where the foundation of the studio would be created, and stood at the heart of it before turning to face the house again. "Attic's up there, the window," she went on, pointing up. "I'm just saying… zip line," she told Lucas, nodding and holding her hands-on-hips pose for several seconds before sighing. "Hey, it's a good joke, come on, work with me," she gestured toward him. Finally, he blinked and looked toward her, noticing…

"What are you doing down there?" he asked. Maya sighed before walking back over to the edge and climbing up to rejoin him after he gave his hands to help.

"What is up with you?" she smiled up at him. "Is it school? Finals getting you down?"

"We're not there yet, but no, it's not… It's nothing," he shook his head.

"I am getting the strongest urge to call you by your full name right now, because you somehow got it in your head that I would believe _that_," she gave her eyes about a half roll before turning serious again. "I can tell something's got you distracted, and now _I'm_ going to be distracted about _you_ being distracted, and…"

"It was really just those few seconds," he insisted. "Go back in the hole, what were you saying?" Maya looked at him, took a step back and looked some more, her eyes squinting in full inspection mode. His reaction alone would tell her something, and here he gave what she'd describe as 'maybe if I don't look her right in the eye this will go fine.' The problem was that, after all these years, he either really sucked at it or she was that good at it.

"You know something," she finally pronounced. "You know something, and you don't want me to know. Why?" she stepped back up.

"Maya…"

"Just tell me why, that's all. Don't even have to tell me the thing, if it's a good reason, I mean…" she shrugged with winning innocence. Lucas sighed. It was his own fault for getting caught off guard by her of all people, but it didn't make him any more at ease with this moment.

"It's complicated…"

"Got that part, yeah," Maya nodded. He was not helping his case. If anything, he was making it worse by being so flighty about it, and he knew that. The part that complicated it was… well… it didn't feel right to keep her in the dark, but there was also the part where he felt caught between two confidences. In the end, the right thing was just going to have to be the one where the two of them were engaged to be married, and this was a bond that mattered a great deal to him, just as Maya's sisterhood stood above his brotherhood-by-marriage, and their guardianship made them responsible, should anything ever…

"Sam…" he finally replied. Maya looked at him for a moment, and Lucas caught a flicker in her eyes like 'oh…' "You told him to come to me if he…"

"I did, yes, I did say that…" she shut her eyes, like she was trying to keep herself from feeling an involuntary shudder at the image forcing its way into her head. "And he did?"

"Yup."

"When?"

"Last week."

"_Last week?_" she blurted out before stopping and shutting her eyes, bowing her head. "Okay… Okay, yeah, that's… that's good, right?" Maya took a breath before looking back at him. "That he came to you, that he… felt he could…" she went on, like she was trying to convince herself at the same time.

"Absolutely," Lucas bit back a laugh, not so much at her but at the memory of Sam and how his face hadn't looked so different from his big sister's when he'd come to him.

"And you… you helped him out with all that?" Maya asked, making a gesture he took to mean 'all the things I don't know how to say out loud when they have to do with my little brother.' Lucas simply nodded, sparing her any more material. "Great… great…" she told him, then herself. "Last week," she repeated quietly, trying not to think back on the last few days like there might have been a moment when her brother might have said or done anything to suggest he… and Cecilia…

"Hey, they're here!" Sam's voice seemed to come out of nowhere, which made Maya jump, only to look up along with Lucas to see the boy looking down from the open attic window.

"Okay!" Maya called back, unnecessarily loud. After the window was shut again, she huffed, letting her head thump against Lucas' chest.

"You wanted to know…" he reminded, receiving a muffled groan in reply, followed by what sounded like 'wash my brain out please.'

It had been something of a gamble whether or not their idea to call on Maeve's Carter would pan out in any way that led to their studio off the ground – or in the ground – but it was an existing connection… sort of… and they had to try. In the end, it had been just the thing to do, setting things in motion for them. They wanted to get the studio up and running before July, which meant they couldn't waste any time. Maya had done her best to sketch out a general idea for the size and layout of the building, and bit by bit they turned into a proper blueprint, got everything settled to bring them to this moment, the start of the construction. Today was the beginning.

Along with the small crew who would be getting to work around the back of the house, Carter came around, accompanied by Maeve. To see them together, it might have been easy to presume that the two of them were a couple, preparing for the birth of their child, which had to be called imminent if anyone took a look at Maeve. Carter was very careful and attentive with her, always, and it could be seen how the two of them might have hit it off, the one night they had been together, the night which led to this baby. But Maeve had not meant for this, and if this had been anyone else she might not have been so lucky as to have this guy be her baby's father. It made things complicated for her, how could it not? His attentiveness almost made things worse, made her feel like she must have been bad by comparison, for not wanting this little girl growing in her belly. She'd told as much to Lucas and Maya, one day when she and Carter had been over a couple weeks past.

No matter what they told her, that she was a caring person, that she most absolutely was a good person and her not wanting to be a mother didn't negate that, they knew they would not convince her of it. She had to believe it for herself. All they could do was be there and hope she came to that conclusion herself.

"Are you sure this is a good place for you to be right now?" Lucas greeted her with a smile today.

"Back's been killing me all morning. Carter thinks it means the baby's coming. I think it means I'm almost eight months pregnant and my bed sucks," Maeve told him with a frown. "He was going to cancel coming here today but I said he couldn't do that, so the compromise is I'm here and if this kid decides she wants out now, he can be there. I'll just sit in there if that's alright?" she pointed to the front door.

"Sure, here," he went along with his co-worker, walked her into the house and got her settled on the couch before moving into the kitchen to get her something to drink.

"He wants to buy me a new bed, got that whole 'I got you knocked up' guilt going, but it's not… It was fine before, and it'll be again… Everything back to normal," she hummed, looking to her hand going over her belly. "It's supposed to be a good thing, you know? When I do this…"

"Makes sense," Lucas nodded, unsure what else to tell her. After a beat, she looked up at him.

"I… I want to call her… Erin," she revealed, and the way she said it, pausing afterward, he had a feeling this was the first time she'd said this out loud. In that pause, it was like she was letting the sound settle, to see if it felt right.

"Good name," Lucas finally declared with a nod.

"Lucas, I don't know what to do," Maeve looked up at him, and as rattled as she had been by this unplanned pregnancy, he had never seen her so scared.

"Did you change your mind?" he asked, sitting next to her.

"No, no, I…" Maeve shook her head, took a sip from her glass. "Except…" she started again, but this was not working any better. "It was a lot easier for this to be just… cut and dry, in the beginning, when she was so small I could barely tell she was there. But now… Now she's bigger, and I feel her when she moves, and kicks… She kicks so much…" Maeve laughed, running her hand over her belly. "Carter, he's going to be a great dad, the kind she deserves, but… Look, I know that plenty of kids out there get raised by single parents and they turn out fine, but… She should have two parents there for her if she can, shouldn't she? The only reason she won't is because of me, because I… can't… I can't be that for her."

He didn't know what to tell her. He agreed, if that baby could have two parents, that would be great, but what were they supposed to do if that other one wouldn't be her? Maeve had to be asking herself that same question, and she reached a solution before he did.

"Can you help me?" Maeve asked him, and he looked at her, no idea what she meant. "To find her a mom?" Maeve went on, nodding down to herself.

"Find…" Lucas hesitated, pointing out to the back of the house like 'shouldn't that be Carter's choice?'

"Right now the only girl he cares about is inside me. Unless we put this hypothetical woman in his path, it won't be any use."

"So, you want to find a woman who will be up for dating a guy with a newborn baby?" Lucas asked. Maeve hesitated.

"Well when you say it like that…"

"Tell you what, I'll keep a lookout, alright?" She sighed, nodded. "Alright, I'll go see how it's going back there."

"Your couch is more comfortable than my bed," Maeve called after him as he went.

"Naps are free," he called back.

By the time he had gone back to find Maya, Sam had come down from the attic, and he dashed to catch up with his brother.

"You know what would be funny? If we put a zipline from the attic to the studio," Sam smirked.

"I told Maya about the errand you sent me on last week," Lucas told him, and he almost tripped over his own feet.

"Y-You did? What'd she say? Was she upset? Angry?" Sam asked, looking half ready to pack his bags and hightail it back to Tucson like he'd rather deal with his mother than his big sister.

"It's not like that, relax," Lucas tapped his shoulder. "It's just…" he paused, not so keen on the example either, "How are you going to feel when it's Cara, or Eliza, and they…"

"Woah, woah!" Sam had a whole-body cringe, but then, "Right, that's fair," he looked aside rather than meet his brother's eyes.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	150. Their Construction of Creation

May 29th 2020

_Chapter 150  
Their Construction of Creation_

"Are they… drilling?" Maya mumbled, half awake. "It's too early, make them go away…"

"Think that's your phone," Lucas replied in a similar tone. Seconds went by, the noise still heard every one to three seconds or so, before she opened one eye enough to locate the object on her night stand and see that the screen would go on and off along with the sound. It wasn't a drill, it was the vibration of constant notifications.

"It's too early, make them go away," she repeated, turning over to burrow closer to him and back to sleep with any luck.

For about a minute, he happily indulged her, arms closed around her just so, making her feel as warm and secure as she ever could be. But the sound continued, and if the fact that it was annoying and distracting them from sleep, there was the curiosity. What was so important that people were trying to reach her so bad? Was this good? Bad? What if it was about Abigail and the baby?

With a groan, Maya had first tried to reach back her arm blindly, like she might be able to preserve the rest of this cozy position, but she wasn't reaching, and when he heard her mutter something about it being too far, Lucas finally scooted them over just enough that he might reach over and get it for her. It kept on buzzing in his hand and then hers when he handed it over.

"Thank you, sir," she smiled, laughing when he did his own bit of burrowing closer, settling his head in the crook of her neck. "Yeah, you stay right there, that's perfect," she gave a kiss to the top of his head, as he so often would do for her, though this so often happened while they both stood, so was it any wonder? "Alright, alright, where is the fire?" Maya sighed, looking to her phone's screen.

E-mails, texts, notifications from a number of apps, missed calls… She barely had time to frown and wonder what this was before a few words started to set her on the right path. She switched off her notifications, for a little while at least, so her phone could have a break…

"Thanks for that," Lucas told her, then, "So what is it?" In response, she put the screen in his line of sight. He blinked for a moment, focusing on what he was seeing, trying to make sense of… "That's the…" he pointed to her phone, looking up at her.

"The new song, yeah… and the trailer."

The eye of the storm of notifications that morning had been started with a double release. The third song she had written, the one she had learned would be part of a movie soundtrack in months to come, was not only in the movie, but it was the whole background to the official trailer, which had just been put out for people to see early that morning. In conjunction with this, the artist who had recorded the song had released the full track, including credit to the 'wicked brilliant' songwriter.

"Hey, she's not wrong," Lucas sat up, turning to Maya as she did so as well.

"I'm not mad at it," she grinned. "I don't know if I want to hear the song on its own first or just see the trailer," she shook her head, the excitement bubbling in her chest, and she didn't even need to look up to know he'd be smiling as he watched her, that silly goofy look of his whenever his face would take to be overwhelmed with love for her. "You choose then," she challenged, holding out the phone. Lucas considered this for a moment, then climbed out of bed and went to open the door.

"Sammy, get in here!" he called down the hall.

"He's going to think he's in trouble, you know that?" Maya laughed.

"Not from me he's not," Lucas turned back to her, catching her mock affronted look. A moment later, Sam came from his room, dishevelled and half-asleep looking.

"What?" he asked, rubbing at his eyes.

"Come here," Lucas led him along until the three of them could pile on the bed before holding Maya's phone for all to see and starting the trailer video. To Sam's credit, he understood what was going on with very little context.

The opening notes were the very first thing they heard, over a black screen, and already it was difficult not to get pulled into the trailer itself, even as they were listening to the music. Maya had not realized that her song would be right there in the trailer, none of them did, but now it was there and it was a lot to process at once. The trailer was good, the song… if she was so bold as to say it herself… took it to another level.

"What do you think, Sammy?" Maya asked her brother, setting her chin on his shoulder with a look of amused curiosity.

"I think… if I was the kind of guy to mooch off a relative's success to make friends, I would be very popular when they'd find out you're my sister," Sam nodded, and Maya laughed, taking hold of his head with both hands and planting a kiss on his cheek. "You get one! One!" he squeezed his eyes shut even as he would laugh and return the gesture by hugging her. "Proud of you," he beamed when she let him go.

"Please, go make breakfast?" she smiled back.

"You want me to go so I don't see you cry, don't you?" Sam guessed.

"Less talking, more pancakes," Maya nudged until he got up and made his way out of the room and into the hall toward the stairs. Maya let out a breath, looking to the phone over in Lucas' hands still. Even silenced, the notifications were still rolling in.

"Trying to hold it in?" Lucas asked.

"Do my tears amuse you, Huckleberry?" she tried to dramatically lift up her chin, but there were definitely tears spilling from her eyes, wildly happy ones, so the effect was slightly dashed.

"They don't, but the feeling behind them sure does," he pointed out, holding her phone back out. When she reached to take it, she barely had the chance to show anticipation for what she knew he would do. He used the opportunity to tug her forward and pull her into his arms, which sent her laughing out loud, especially as momentum carried them down.

_A Little Louder – Marika Marsden (Just For One Day - Original Soundtrack)_

They had listened to the track on its own, as the three of them sat to breakfast. Even as they did so, Maya could only start and see what all the notifications were, the messages… Of course there were several from friends and family, and seeing these always made her feel like her heart was too big for her chest. Some were reactions to the trailer and its being shared by cast or crew members. Others were taking notice of the song, wanting to know where they could find it, and would be directed to the post from the singer's account, and so of course a vast number were messages reacting to the song, whether they directed toward Marika herself, or toward Maya herself, from those just learning about her, but many more from those who already followed her work and were big fans of it.

"Ree shared the song," Sam reported. They were all on their phones at this point, combing through the messages, reading some of them out… This one he showed to his sister, who just didn't know how to keep from smiling anymore. The singer's involvement was hardly unique now, and today… Maya couldn't stop thinking 'third time's the charm,' as the barely released song, coming on top of the ones she had done for Ree, and for the Violets, was making people take more and more notice of the common link behind them all. The names she saw scroll by, of people who had responded to Marika's post, noting Maya's part in it as much as the singer's… people she had known and admired to some degree or another… She was out here in her home, in Austin, with her fiancé and her brother and the dogs, in her pyjamas and eating pancakes, and still it felt like the spotlight was on her and she didn't know what to do with her hands, or her face…

Soon after breakfast, the girls from the band, as well as Ramona, showed up for practice and some more TXNY10 anniversary discussion. As was to be expected, the release of the song, and the trailer, were hard to ignore as an immediate subject. This, combined with curiosity on the advancement of the studio build, led to the group moving upward rather than down, climbing to the attic to get a look at the progress made on the construction site before going to the basement again for what was to be one of the last few practices taking place there. They could not wait to break in that new rehearsal space.

"Throw in some walls, a roof… Call it home," Rosa declared with a smile as they all crowded around the window.

"We should get one of those big ribbons in front… with the giant scissors…" Riley added, making the motion of cutting with her hands.

_"Look at you,"_ Kayla signed, when she'd gotten Maya's attention. _"You can't stop smiling, can you?"_ she smirked, and Maya laughed.

_"I'm doing my best,"_ she assured her. _"It's a lot, but that's okay. I prefer it feeling like a lot than feeling like any other day."_

As they finally left the attic and started down toward the basement, they would playfully suggest Ramona take her pick of the guys working on the studio. After months living on her own, which was to say living single, after her divorce, she had finally come to a point where she expressed a readiness toward dating again, and this was as good of a signal as any for her friends to flip on matchmaking mode. Ramona was left some concern, with wanting to make sure she wouldn't jump into something that wouldn't be right, or would be rushing in more than anything. Much as she claimed herself to be ready, Maya and Lucas both could tell, from one look, that 'ready' did not mean 'not scared.'

"I'm just saying, I saw that one with the man bun looking up, pretty sure he was looking at you," Nadine gave Ramona a smirk and a nudge.

"He saw the six of us up there, if he saw any of us through that sun. And it wasn't a man bun," Ramona insisted, which earned her a look from Rosa. Ramona looked back at her, turning away almost immediately when she figured out she had gone and tipped her hand in showing she had noticed the construction guy, too.

"That's Ben, by the way," Maya chimed in now, and the others looked at her. "Man bun/not man bun guy. His name's Ben, he's Carter's younger brother. Two of them are working together now, looking to start their own company. The studio is allowing them to sort of… set some things in motion, you know? He's nice, talked to him a couple times. I'm pretty sure he's single."

_"How sure?"_ Kayla asked, as intrigued as the rest, once Maya had given her the quick rundown.

"I can find out," Maya replied, signing toward her but speaking toward Ramona, who was looking on the edge of flighty, as they'd reached the basement and she went toward the couch with her laptop.

"He's working, it's not like… I mean…" she shrugged, flexing her fingers in a way they had long identified as her nervous tic. Maya smiled, picking up her guitar as the band moved into position to get started.

"You never know, opportunity might present itself…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	151. Their Construction of Bonds

May 30th 2020

_Chapter 151  
Their Construction of Bonds_

_4th week of construction_

"Well, who needs an alarm clock when you have a bunch of dudes with power tools…" Maya hummed as she sat up and stretched. Letting her arms flop back down again, she turned to find Lucas was also awake and aware of the noise coming from outside. "Look at you, Grumpy Man," she teased. Lucas gave her a look. "You are though, your eyebrows are giving me this," she mimed. "Don't get me wrong, as with just about anything coming from you, I'm not mad at it." This worked well enough in getting him to smile and forget about the noise.

"Sorry, the temps at the bookstore are just really making things more complicated these days…"

"Getting to you that bad, huh?" she tapped his knee sympathetically.

"It's temporary," Lucas shrugged. When Maeve had finally gone on maternity leave, she had ensured that, on the days he worked at the store at least, he would be taking over for her, looking after the rest of the team on their floor. He appreciated the vote of confidence, although now to find himself in charge of this team that included a couple of less than exemplary temps, one on his weekday and one over the weekends, he was left mildly concerned that it would reflect poorly on him if he couldn't get things back on track. He didn't want Maeve to return and find her well-oiled machine had been decimated.

"How about I see if Sam wants to go hang out with his friends tonight, and after our guests are gone, you and I can have ourselves a nice, casual, lowercase d home date…" Maya suggested. Lucas smiled now… It sounded like the perfect way to let his day off end, just him and her and a quiet night.

"Couldn't want anything else," he replied, and she leaned over to kiss him.

"Great. That's tonight though, and this morning we need to get ready before company shows up and we're not presentable," Maya tapped his chest with a nod before rolling away and getting out of bed.

Sam did not need much in the way of convincing when he was asked if he wanted to go out for the evening. He was supposed to help Dora with something for school anyway, so he would head out and join the Cassidys around dinner time and stay the night, making his way to school the following morning. Until then, there was little else to do but wait.

"Is your mother going to let us know when they're on their way?" Lucas asked Maya as she spied the workers through the kitchen window. "Maya," he called her name when she didn't respond or show signs of having heard him. She spun around, too innocent for her own good. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to see if Ben looks happy or bummed out," she shushed him.

"They can't hear us," Lucas pointed out as he moved to join her.

"Yeah, well, what kind of good-natured spy would I be if I just went shouting around?" Maya frowned, pulling for him to stay as out of view as possible while they looked in on the crew hard at work.

Operation Ramen – coined by Rosa – had been in effect since the day their friend had tipped her hand. It was a delicate effort, minding the fact that Ramona was wading back into waters she was still just a bit unsure about returning to. After a few days of trying to suss out whether he really truly was single – he was – and whether he had actually been spying Ramona up through the attic window as Nadine had suspected – unclear – and whether he might be interested in getting to know her some more, in a potentially date-like scenario.

They had been getting closer to that one when the weather had forced the crew to keep away for several days. By the time they'd come back, they were so intent on catching up on their delay that it never felt as though they could get in the way for 'matters of the heart.' And then… then, just as things were slowing back to a normal pace, and they were getting ready to pull that last answer from him, he had gotten ahead of them. Ramona had been at the house one afternoon, and as the crew was leaving for the day, Ben hung back and spoke to her for a few minutes. Then he left, and Ramona was smiling… He'd asked her out, and she'd said yes.

The date had happened now, the previous night, and there had been no word, good or bad, from Ramona as of yet, so all they had was the worker, busy at setting the wood panelling on the outside of the studio.

"He doesn't look down in the dumps or anything," Maya estimated. "That's good, ri…"

The sound of the doorbell startled them both like a pair of thieves who had tripped an alarm. _Run for the hills!_

"Door," Lucas breathed.

"Yup," Maya hurried off, willing herself to appear normal by the time she reached the door and pulled it open to find her mother and father, the little Hunters, and her grandparents. "Hey! Come in, come in," she stepped aside to let them in. The kids wasted no time in hurrying up to embrace their big sister, after which she was greeted by her grandmother, who still hugged her like she couldn't quite believe she was real, that this was all real and she had her daughter back and her grandchildren with her. And her grandfather, stoic and shy as she'd ever known him, came in with a surprisingly graceful hug, despite the vast height difference between them. When Rosa had been shown a picture of the two of them together, from when they had gone back to Arkansas on the day of Harry Olsen's birth, she'd laughed.

"With that in the gene pool, you have all the makings of becoming a giant someone's tiny grandmother someday."

"You're one to talk, Shorty," Maya had squinted at her.

Knowing that they would be coming, seeing the house for the first time, it had been hard, for Maya and Lucas both, not to harness a bit of that Sam brand of hyper cleanliness. Anyone would have told them that they had nothing to be worried about, that the house was great, and they were by no means messy, but knowing how the Clutterbuckets lived, compared to how the two of them and Sam lived, or how the Hunter-Harts lived… There was no way to know for sure exactly what they might have to say.

"It is really something, your grandfather gifting you this house, Lucas," Angela declared, looking around.

"It was, yes," Lucas nodded. "Can I show you around?" he asked, and Maya bit back a laugh, feeling as though he might as well have been wearing the old blazer again, with that tour guide sort of intonation. It had certainly charmed her grandmother, who accepted the offer and followed his lead. Soon they were all following, headed up the stairs, eventually into the attic, and back down and down again, and down some more with the basement. They ended up in the kitchen, where they all could sit at the table while coffee and juice was brought around.

A knock at the back door a minute later brought Ben into their midst, letting Maya and Lucas know that the crew was done for the day, and they would be back bright and early the next morning.

"Oh, I know you will," Maya nodded, smiling, as Ben nodded to them, and then to the guests as he found them staring back at him, before exiting again. So much for asking about the date, huh?

"How's the studio coming along?" Katy asked her daughter, while Shawn sought the answer to this same question by leaning back in his chair and nudging the curtain aside so he might see through the window.

"Studio?" Angela asked, and there was a brief beat of silence like 'oh, right, we didn't mention that, did we?' It wasn't like they weren't aware of her making music, or like they had been in any way disapproving on the matter… They might call it just… residual expectations?

"Yeah, uh… out there," Maya pointed to the window. "We're having it built there on the land, for practice with the band, and recording…" Her grandparents stood up and looked where she'd indicated.

The structure by now was getting to look more and more like what it would look like in the end, on the outside at least. When it would be completed, it would look as it should, like an extension of this house. There would be a path laid in the ground, leading from the kitchen door to the studio door, and flowers planted around the hexagon-shaped building. The inside still needed a lot of work, but it was coming together beautifully. Maya, Lucas, Sam, and pretty much anyone who came to the house in the last few weeks was drawn to get a look at the growing construction. Carter, Ben, and the rest of the crew were really doing a fine job.

"Maya told me how you got the place fixed up before you proposed to her," Tanner looked to Lucas as they all sat down again.

"Yes, Sir," he nodded. "I had a lot of help, especially with the attic. That wasn't there at all," he turned to Shawn, who smiled and bowed his head.

They talked a while about some of the work they had done here, and Maya could see how this was her grandfather's way of getting a measure of Lucas, of hearing him express himself. Taking in the scene, she could sort of see how this would have been a moment the young restless Katy would have seen as her father fishing for problems, for reasons to step in between the happy couple. Maybe, back then, there would have been some truth to it. Tanner did not hide from the fact that he had made mistakes in the past, mistakes which had sent his then only daughter, only child, running away. Charlie would say that, by the time she had come around, and grown, and started bringing David around, her father was a very different man.

"Do you know what's kind of weird?" Maya asked Lucas, later, after her family had gone back to the Hunter-Hart house. Tanner and Angela were staying at a hotel, would be in Austin for a few days more. Now, with Sam off at the Cassidy house, it was just them and the dogs, curled up on the couch with a movie.

"So, so many things?" Lucas replied, kissing the top of her head as his fingers gently grazed her arm. She laughed.

"Hello, you're engaged to me, what would you expect? Still… Sometimes, my grandfather just… he reminds me of…"

"Kermit?" Lucas filled in.

"Yeah," Maya looked back at him. "I don't know how to explain it, Dad and him, they don't look alike, or act alike, for the most part, but then there's the whole… Grandpa and Mom were estranged, and Dad and I were, too, and after we weren't, there was still this way Dad would get whenever he'd see me. Like he was just so happy, and so sad, at the same time."

"You don't think your grandfather's sick or anything, do you?" Lucas asked.

"No, no, nothing like that. It's… they both made this great big mistake, and maybe they knew all those years, but it never really… kicked in… not until after. And no matter how much they wished they could have done things differently before…" she shook her head. "I'd say Mom found a guy just like her father, but they really aren't, and she couldn't have known it would all happen that way. Like I said, weird." They were quiet for a few seconds. "Really not the best date conversation topic, huh?"

"I'd rather you share than keep it in," Lucas shrugged, and she let out a breath. "Want to talk flowers for the Hex?" he asked, nodding in the general direction of the studio. She sat up at once.

"I really do."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	152. Their Construction of Hope

May 31st 2020

_Chapter 152  
Their Construction of Hope_

_5th week of construction_

"What is this now, like the third date?" Nadine asked, as she and Maya stood up in the attic, looking down on the studio below, the crew back at work once again. Lucas was down there, too, with Zay, who had wanted to get a closer look. From what they could see, he kept trying to get closer, and Lucas would keep having to pull him back, which made the pair in the attic laugh.

"Third, yeah," Maya confirmed. "She almost had to cancel, her computer broke down and she lost a big chunk of one of her final papers for the semester, so she had to do it all again. Ben offered to make them dinner and be moral support while she worked," she recounted, hearing Ramona's voice in the back of her mind and the smile it carried as she'd told Maya about the evening.

"Alright, Build-a-Ben…" Nadine nodded, spying the guy down there, laying in the path with another of the team.

"A lot of crazy things had to happen for those two to even meet, and now date, it's hard to wrap your head around it sometimes," Maya pointed out as they moved from the window. Nadine took a seat at Maya's drawing desk, turning the chair this way and that, inspecting the Clutterbucket family portrait, which was still not quite done, all those weeks after it had been started.

"Yeah…" she replied, eyes still on the painting, while Maya plopped on to the bean bag and stared up at the sky through the window above.

"Not two years ago, Ramona was happily married, and then that all fell apart, and she lived here with us for weeks before she could go back to her apartment, and she became a really close friend, to us, to the band… Meanwhile, Maeve and Carter met at that party, got together, got pregnant, and then the studio plan happened, and Lucas knew Carter was in this business, and we hired him, and he brought his brother, and then… magic…" she whispered, bringing together her two hands, which she had used to stand for Ramona and Ben in her retelling.

When she got no response, she lifted her head to find Nadine hadn't caught a word of it, head lost in the clouds somewhere. It was like something had come and tugged her down into depths.

"Z?" she sat up. Nadine blinked, looked over at her.

"Yeah?" she asked, maybe trying to look natural but never quite chasing out this bead of sadness, of frustration. Maya didn't even have to ask what this was.

"It'll happen," she promised.

"Might not," Nadine sniffed. Maya stood up and moved toward her friend. "It's been almost eight months now, and even if I wasn't in med school, I'd still look at everything that's happened since and be able to reach this conclusion that something's not right, with one of us, or both of us…"

"It's just… It depends, I guess, depends whether everything happens the way it has to, all at once, or…"

"Maya, the New Year's test was positive," Nadine cut in with a confession that left her friend and bandmate blindsided.

"What do you mean…"

"I _was_ pregnant. Went to the doctor's, confirmed it… We were going to wait a few weeks to tell everyone for sure, then a week later…" Nadine's voice faltered.

Maya didn't know what to say, didn't know that she could have said it if she did. She hadn't realized, none of them had realized… And neither of them had said a word about it, which left Maya to wonder if anyone out there knew that this had happened, other than Nadine or Zay or their doctor. She might have asked why they hadn't said anything, not to any of them, but it didn't feel right for her to put the question to a friend who already had the look of one tentatively passing this weight she had carried nearly on her own, that someone might support it with her. Maya only had to think of her mother, who had lost a pregnancy between MJ and Haley, or even of how she might feel, if it should ever happen to her and… It sent shivers down her spine. All she could do was reach out and take Nadine's hands in hers.

"Nadine, I'm so sorry," she told her, trying not to let her emotions resolve in tears. All she could think now was whether they might all have been joking around about this thing and that, never realizing their friends were going through the aftermath of it all, and now… now…

It was a testament to their friendship, twelve years strong, how little Nadine actually needed to say in order for Maya to put the pieces together. She'd only needed to be given one, and then the rest would follow through, painful as it was. She thought about January, and the months since, the last few weeks, and the very terrible conclusion she'd been left to reach was that… it had happened again. They had lost another one, and a great deal of their hope along with it.

There was little for her to do then except to hug her friend where she sat, hoping maybe that she could convey how much she cared for her, loved her, and wanted to be there for her, as much as she needed her to be. Nadine didn't cry, but she held on to her friend, held on like it just might leech the hurt out of her.

When they had gotten to see about all they could see of the studio in construction, Lucas and Zay had gone back into the house, where lunch was just about ready. While Zay had gotten hold of Archer, as the dog was drawn into the kitchen by the sound of the door, Lucas had made his way upstairs to find the girls and let them know they would be eating soon. There was something about the quiet as he reached the top of the stairs that felt instantly foreboding.

Climbing up the attic steps, quietly still, he found his fiancée holding their friend as she sat at the desk chair. Neither of them moved or showed any sign that they knew he was there, and Lucas did nothing to disrupt this. All he could feel of the scene told him that he should leave them be, and so he went back down, hesitating for a few seconds whether he was supposed to tell Zay about this. Nadine was his wife, but whatever was going on with her, it was up to her to decide when to let him in, no?

As he walked back into the kitchen, Zay was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, which he had turned to face in the direction of where Archer was now eating from his bowl, replenished by Zay in the time Lucas had been upstairs, clearly.

Lucas and Zay had been friends now for just about twenty years. Neither of them remembered a time when they had not known the other. Nadine would tease them at times and call him Zay's first spouse, which both of them accepted and called upon from time to time, usually to tease the other's fiancée or wife. All joking aside however, it made Lucas an expert in the minutiae of Isaiah Babineaux. It had all been fine when they were outside, looking at the studio, chatting with the crew, but right here, when his best friend was on his own… the appearance did not match what Lucas really saw. There was something trying to gain on his active thoughts, and he didn't want it to get there, so he busied himself, bringing relief to the forefront, that it might hold back the unwanted invasion.

"They're going to be a few minutes, I think," Lucas told Zay, as he came and sat down across from him. Zay looked at him, like he was about to say 'alright, that's fine,' but then… well… they had both known each other that long, hadn't they?

"Might be longer than that," Zay looked back to the dog.

It was coming on a few minutes when he started to share the story, just as Nadine had to have done it back in the attic. Zay told his best friend how twice now, in nearly half a year, he and Nadine had been on this spinning rollercoaster, with the ups of finding themselves expecting, followed by that sharp drop down of finding it had not held, that they'd lost one and then the other. Lucas was as speechless, as helpless as Maya had been.

"The first one was hard, but the second one…" Zay shook his head, still looking at Archer. "The brave face is just not easy to hold on to. Now she wants us to stop trying for a while, and I'm all for it, I… I don't want to put her through that again, but… well, what happens when we do try again, what happens if we lose it again, if… if it starts off well, and holds, and holds, and then…" he breathed out, running a hand over his face and around to clasp the back of his neck, trying to ground himself when there were clearly so many feelings trying to come out.

After all the crap they'd gone through, back in Boston, the breakup, the time apart and the reconciliation… they were ready for this next step in their lives, but now…

"Look, I'm sorry, maybe we should just go, don't want to bum out your day and…" Zay moved to rise, but Lucas stopped him.

"I'd rather be there for the two of you than have a 'good' day, and I know Maya would feel the same. Stay, please. When they come down, we'll eat, we'll do… something, I don't know what yet… It doesn't all have to be on your shoulders, alright?"

"She's in pain…" Zay breathed. "It's Nadine, and she can carry on and hide it real well, but at home, it's only us and then… I did this to her, man…"

"Zay…" Lucas shook his head, sitting forward.

"No, I know that we decided to try for this baby together, I know… I know… But something's going wrong, two times now, and I can't shake the feeling that it's my fault, and I don't… I can't… She shouldn't have to go through something like that, I should be… I don't know what to do…" He was spiraling, Lucas could see it, and it was difficult to watch, but then he couldn't get in the middle of it, had to let his best friend let it out. He and Nadine had existed in this truth over the past few months, just the two of them, and now to finally open up to other people, it would be something they both needed, on their own.

Lunch was not exactly what they'd expected, by the time Maya and Nadine finally came down to join the guys. One look between them all and it was clear now that all four of them were on the same page. Maya had gone and hugged Zay, as Lucas did the same for Nadine. No one knew what to say, and no one did, that was all they really needed, to have their friends there with them like this.

Little by little, as they'd sat around the table for lunch, they had started to talk, not about Zay and Nadine and their struggles toward parenthood, but about the studio, as they had been before all the secrets had come out. Maya and Lucas both knew it would take time for their friends to properly recover from this, but in the meantime life carried on, and they did all they could to carry on with it, so that was what the two of them would do as well, to the best of their abilities.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	153. Their Construction of Progress

June 1st 2020

_Chapter 153  
Their Construction of Progress_

_6th week of construction_

"I don't see why I have to be blindfolded to see some bare walls and a floor," Maya advanced as slowly as possible, feeling out the ground with her feet so she would not trip. Lucas was leading her in the right direction, his hands on her shoulders, so she could not have been in any trouble, she knew, but the blindness effect made it hard for her not to feel the tiniest bit like one wrong move would send her faceplanting.

"Have you seen those yet?" Lucas asked.

"No…" she responded after a second. "Fine, just be careful, kind of need my face for stuff."

"Yeah, me too," he replied, making her laugh. "Right, you're at the door now," he informed her.

"Is it open… No, door knob, okay… Locked… Not locked, good, my nose is getting itchy from this thing."

"Such a diva," Lucas smirked, relieving her of the blindfold.

The studio wasn't done, not entirely, but by now at least the structure had been completed, inside and out. All that was left to do was a bit more landscape outside and then getting the interior from blank walls and an empty floor to what would officially be the Hex, Maya's studio. The space had gone from a hole in the ground, to a foundation, and walls and a roof, windows and a door, all those things that needed to be done in order to get it to this point. It was her blank canvas ready to be turned into something more.

"It would feel a bit weird if the first thing I said in here to be swearing, wouldn't it?" Maya blinked as they walked in.

"I won't tell anyone if that's what you feel like," Lucas chuckled.

"It really didn't look that big from the outside. I mean I know it's empty right now so that's…" He didn't catch the word, but he had a general idea of what it would boil down to. She was in awe, and a moment later she was giddy, spinning on her heel to face him again. "We actually did this, we… wow…"

"Can't wait to start playing in here, can you?" he smiled, coming up to put his arms around her waist.

"I can feel the music already," Maya grinned.

"You're going to sit in here with your guitar as soon as I'm gone, aren't you?" She nodded. "Do you want me to just go now so you can get started?"

"No…" she said, her voice declared, in a very 'yes' sort of tone.

"Fine, fine, can't disrupt genius," he sighed, borrowing some of her dramatic airs and earning a look from her which promised flattery would get him very far.

He was on his way off to Houston today, to meet up with his friends and classmates for a bit of pre-finals review. It was really starting to hammer in the fact that he was about to finish his second year in this program, which would get him halfway through, and just two years out from being done with school. In two years, he would be working at Sullivan Stables full time. It was the plan for him to at least put in a day every week, from the coming fall and through those next two years. As far as the summer coming up, with the end run to the wedding, no arrangements had been made for when he would begin just yet.

He had been on the road for all of a half hour when his phone lit up with an incoming Skype call. As he allowed it to connect, the car soon rang with his fiancée's voice.

"So I was going to call you on video, but since you're driving, it's probably for the best if I stick to just a call…" Maya declared. There was a slight echo around her, which he took to mean she was still inside the empty studio.

"Good thinking," he agreed, smiling nonetheless. "So, how's it going back there?"

"Oh, you know…" she sighed, as the sound of guitar strings was heard through the speakers. "Apparently I'm a _genius_ or something, so I've been making some genius music out here, all by lonesome." Lucas heard barking. "And Trix and Lou and Archer. But they're no help, not for this anyway. Couldn't leave them on their own or they might have gone in the flowers… again…"

"Got a new song coming, huh?" Lucas asked, picturing her sitting on the floor, the dogs either sitting near her or circling the empty floor.

"Oh, I have several, that's what geniuses do! Want to hear?" she asked with a grin in her voice.

"Could not want to hear anything more," he promised.

For the next hour or so, amid discussion of these new 'masterpieces,' and of ideas for the studio interior, and of when he might be expected back from his study session, Lucas was treated to one song after another, most of them, he assumed, composed on the spot. Calling them songs might have been pushing it in some degrees, as they seemed to have the singular intent of making him laugh. The further on they went, they then shifted into having a new intent, which was to make him blush and make him glad that he was alone in the car.

"Hey, I'm almost at Bishop's now, I think we have to cut the concert short," he finally had to tell her.

"Do you want me to give you an encore of that last one tonight?" she asked, with what had to be a sizable smirk, as she imagined the look on his face, especially as it took him a moment to reply.

"If the genius would be so kind," he spoke then, making her laugh.

"I always am. See you tonight, love you."

"Love you, too."

He was greeted at the door by Leona, Bishop's girlfriend and Maya's former co-waitress over at Isabel's. She was on her way out off to work and realized, upon seeing him and asking after Maya, that she meant to tell Bishop and the others to call in if they wanted something for dinner, and she'd have it sent over. Lucas would take in the message, as he told her, and so she was off. He was still watching her dash off down the hall when the elevator doors opened ahead of her and deposited Josie.

"I'm not late, am I?" she asked, looking at her phone for the time as she approached.

"No, you're good," he assured her. After all this time, there were still those small moments where he had to remember how the girl had gone from being equated to Voldemort to now being a genuine close friend of theirs. But she was that, to the point where he took the opportunity to invite her to the 'grand opening' of the Hex, which she happily accepted.

"Hey, there you are," Bishop greeted them as they walked into the apartment proper and found the rest of the group had arrived. Ramona, Simon, and Robbie were looking at something on Robbie's phone. "What do you think, they want to order a couple pizzas," Bishop informed Lucas and Josie.

"Right now?" Lucas asked.

"I just had lunch," Josie shrugged.

"It's always pizza o'clock," Robbie informed her, which got a chuckle out of Simona and Ramona and an approving nod from Bishop.

"Fine by me," Lucas reached into his pocket to get a couple bills but was waved off at once.

"My place, my treat, man, pull up a chair," Bishop gestured to the table as he went to put the order in. Lucas and Josie joined the table, each reaching into their bags to take what they'd need. When asked what they were looking at, Robbie turned his phone around to show a video of little half-brother Scott running around and chasing after a soccer ball, sending it flying with wild, slightly unpolished kicks. He didn't seem so concerned for his accuracy so much as his ability to send the thing shooting off ahead of him, or sideways at times. He took a spill and got right back up, running again.

"Wow, look at him go," Lucas smiled back to his friend, who could not have looked happier.

"So, he's doing well," Josie asked.

"Couldn't be better," Robbie breathed. He had known the boy less than a year, but you wouldn't have known just by looking at him. The introduction of his father's secret second family and his half-brothers had been chaotic at best, but by now… The instant bond created between Robbie and Scott had just sort of expanded, taking in the other boys as well, and the boys' mother. Robbie would not see his father. The others, they were innocent in this, innocent as he and his mother was, but his father had kept them in the dark like this for years, and nothing he could say or do would convince him to forgive.

"That's amazing," Josie smiled at him. "I'm really happy for you both."

"Thanks," Robbie nodded at her. He still had no idea, none of them did, except for Lucas. None of them knew that the reason little Scott was out there running like a spaz after that ball was sitting right here at this table.

Josie had returned to school, just as she'd said, at the start of the winter semester. She had her whole story down like the world's best actress as to why she had been away all this time, and it was taken without the bat of an eye. Lucas didn't give her away, went along with it and respected her wishes to stay anonymous, though he could just picture how happy, how grateful Robbie would be if he knew she was his brother's donor.

"Anyone need to swap a paper around for proofreading?" Simon asked once Bishop joined them again, holding up his own hand.

"I just finished mine this morning, barely slept," Josie raised her hand, too. "There's probably a typo on every line."

"Leona looked at mine last night," Bishop chimed in. "She is a correction ninja," he added with a smile, thinking of his girlfriend.

"I'm not done yet, but I'll finish it tonight, if anyone wants to look anyway," Robbie followed.

"I'm good, Ben looked mine over for me after I finished it the second time. I think my laptop is officially dead, took half my work along, so it's a miracle I managed to hang on to what I got." It took her a moment to realize what Lucas had already caught, even as the group turned to look at her. She had never mentioned Ben to any of them, not until now, and when she caught it, her eyes flicked to the side, to where Robbie sat. From the look on his face, Lucas would guess that he had suspected his ex-wife had started seeing someone but hadn't been certain until now. And now that he knew, after the surprise had worn off, he just looked happy for her.

"Is he also a correction ninja?" he asked, tipping his head toward Bishop.

"No, he does construction work," Ramona smiled.

"He's been working on Maya's studio," Lucas provided, which led to Ramona sharing the story of how she'd met Ben and started seeing him.

This took them until the pizza arrived, after which they all jumped into their proofreading and reviewing in earnest. They worked through the afternoon, and through dinner from Isabel's, and into early evening. As they were all leaving, and in the spirit of moving forward, Robbie worked up the courage and asked Josie if she would go out with him. Caught by surprise, for reasons only Lucas knew here, she hesitated briefly. Then, she said yes.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	154. Their Construction of Potential

**_A/N:_**_ The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

June 2nd 2020

_Chapter 154  
Their Construction of Potential_

_7th week of construction_

"Hey, I know that face… I know those little cheeks, and that nose… big bright eyes…" Maya spoke in a hush she couldn't seem to shake, whenever she would be presented with the face of her weeks-old cousin on the screen. "Might be from those many, many pictures I have received and hoarded in my phone like a miser…" she hummed, waving to the small boy in her Aunt Charlie's arms.

"Those lullabies you sent me really do the trick," she smiled. "Put him right to sleep, won't go without them now."

"I recorded them for my siblings when they were little," Maya explained. _Now they get to stay in the family…_ "He is already getting so big…" she declared in amazement, looking at baby Harry.

"I know, I can't believe it's already been two months. I really want to come and visit you guys down in Austin, I think he's getting about old enough I could see us travelling out to you."

"You say the word, we'll put you up," Maya nodded.

"And I really want to see that studio," Charlie smiled, resettling the baby when he started to fuss. "It'd be great if we got to have a session in there, actually in the same room."

"Consider yourself pencilled in for life. And as far as seeing it, I'm about to give you the grand tour… as grand as it can get when it's just the one room anyway. This is like opening day, we did the last touches late last night, I swear a part of me thinks it must all have been some kind of dream I was so tired in the end. The rest of the band and others of our friends are coming over later, there's supposed to be a big red ribbon, scissors and all."

"That's awesome," Charlie laughed. "Oh, last Sunday's family dinner, Uncle Carter found out about you having your studio, making music."

"Is it bad I kind of want him to have a fit over our nickname for it?" Maya smirked, walking and keeping the phone up so Charlie could see her. When her aunt asked about the nickname, Maya told her it was called the Hex, and Charlie laughed at once. "Short for hexagon, because of the shape, but…"

"Between that and Harry here, he might finally think witches have infiltrated the family," Charlie smirked. Maya asked what she meant about Harry. "He's convinced that I named him that because of the books."

"What, Harry Potter? He's still on that? Come on, Pastor, it's been almost thirty years!" Maya didn't know whether to shake her head or laugh, so she did both. "Well, did you? Name him because of…"

"I did, actually," Charlie beamed. "It wasn't because of that, not at first, but maybe it was, subconsciously. Kind of a long story."

"Love long stories," Maya promised.

After she had found out the story of her sister and how she'd run away, nine-year-old Charlie had finally started to put some pieces together. There were little clues, around the house, like the name carved out on the window sill in her room. Her room had been her sister's room before it was hers, and knowing that, she had started to look at the space with brand new eyes. And she had been curious. That had often been one of her greatest qualities, even if it sometimes also got her into trouble.

One afternoon, she had scoured the whole of her room, looking for any other remnant of her sister's presence, anything that might inform her on who Katy was. Maybe for having a similar kind of mind to hers, she had found something that neither of her parents had ever found. She had discovered a loose board inside the closet, and when she'd managed to pull it free, she'd taken a flashlight and swept the beam inside to discover… treasures.

A few strips from a mall photo booth, where young Katy had practiced her glamour shots, on her own or with Betsy – who Charlie did not know either a the time – or even with who she'd laughed to realize was her cousin Randall… Clippings from magazines… A few lost, crumpled up dollar bills… A small figurine of the Empire State building that looked like the kind her grandmother had… A tube of lipstick… And a book.

It wasn't until after the sisters were reunited that this old mystery had been solved. After Uncle Carter had heard of this book and gotten into an argument with his niece, Katy had been told to relinquish it. She'd refused, said she had returned it to the library. They hadn't believed her, and they had searched her room, but they had never found it, wouldn't, because luckily she'd had the presence of mind to slip it in her hiding place whenever she wasn't reading it. She'd meant to take it with her when she'd left, but then it was identified as belonging to her school, and she had been careful not to bring anything that might identify her in case she was stopped on the way to New York. She had always been smarter than they gave her credit for.

In the years before, in the moment when young Charlie had found the book, she had felt like at last… she had this connection to her sister. She'd sat there inside the closet, with her flashlight, and she'd started to read. She'd become so engrossed in the story of the boy who lived, discovering who he was, preparing to go to his new school, that she was discovered there by her father, just returned from chores out on the farm. Charlie had gasped, clutching the book to her chest and staring up to her father, terrified that he would take it away from her. He had seen what she was holding, and later she'd understood that he had recognized it. They'd both stood there for a full minute, and then Tanner had just walked away without a word.

A few days after this, she'd come home from school one afternoon to find a bag on her bed, a paper bag with handles, from a bookstore. When she'd looked inside, she'd found a box set, all seven books, including a clean copy of the same one she'd found and already finished reading, in increments, every night after she'd been sent to bed. Most kids her age would have been daunted by all these books, some so big as to look like dictionaries, but Charlie had always been the best reader in her class, and this was a challenge she was up for.

It was about so much more than the books themselves though, it was the fact that she had them at all, that she could hold them in her hands, that she could have them to keep, not in a hole in the wall but there on her desk where she could see them. She'd run down and found her father, and embraced him tight, thanking him about a hundred times.

"You tell me all about them, alright?" he'd told her, which might as well have been a hug back from him.

It had been the start, for Charlie. It had taken her a year, but she'd gotten through all the books, and from there she'd just started over, and over, and over… The entire reason she'd started having people call her Charlie instead of Charlene was thanks to Charlie Weasley. And every time… every time she'd read those books, a part of her felt like she was with her sister. She didn't even know if she'd ever read the other ones beyond that first one, but it didn't matter. It had been important enough for her to have it, to hide it.

So, yeah, she had named her son Harry for a very specific reason, just as she had named her daughter Caitlin, as a subtle nod to Katy. She had never known for sure whether or not she would meet her sister, but she had carried her in her heart from the moment she'd known about her.

"See, I told you I liked long stories," Maya laughed, swiping at a tear coming from her right eye. "Just going to need a minute… and maybe I'm going to be re-reading some books later tonight… Okay, I'm good," she breathed as Charlie laughed. "Ready to see the Hex?"

"Yes, please."

The May morning could not have been a better one to inaugurate the space. Maya held the phone with the camera allowing Charlie to see what she was seeing, stepping out the kitchen door. The path began there, leading up ahead to the structure with flowers all around it. Some might have assumed it was something like a greenhouse, or a guest house. When the door was unlocked and opened however, it revealed something entirely more musical.

"Oh my g…" Charlie blurted out, and for seeing it all completed at last, for the first time, in the daylight, Maya had to agree, it was kind of stunning.

A lot of thought had gone into how best to set the whole place up, from the structure itself through what would be going inside it. For one thing, they wanted to soundproof it as best as possible, but they also weren't looking to have zero windows, so they'd accounted for this in the number, position, and material for the windows. The building, as its name promised, was six-sided. The side aligned with the path had the door, of course, and the sides to the right and left of it had the windows, leaving the back three windowless. The instruments were installed in that half of the studio, with room to spare.

"The desk is here for now, for the equipment when we'll be recording, and when I'll be putting the tracks together," Maya told her aunt. "There's a lot of things I'd like to get, but we've managed without them up to now, so they'll come when they come. Got our couch, of course, and the shelves, and then these… they're my favorite part." About every bit of wall space she had been able to use was covered in photos, and clippings, tracking nearly ten years of TXNY, and now her own solo achievements as a songwriter…

"What are you going to do when you have new things to put up there?" Charlie asked, after having requested some pictures so she might have a closer look at everything.

"I've got binders and boxes on the shelves there, and a file cabinet back in the house," Maya told her. "But, I don't know, sometimes I just think… I might leave it like this. All of it, that's what came before, what led me here… I want to be able to see them, to remember… to not forget how I got here."

"Did you get my package?"

"There's a package?" Maya looked to her aunt on the screen.

"It should have arrived, I made sure. Someone else must have accepted it for you."

Running back to the house, she'd discovered that this package had indeed arrived, at which point it had been hidden away, until this particular moment, the day of the grand opening, by Lucas. She barely had time to pretend to be affronted for being kept in the dark, when she saw the size of the package, which could well have been a long coffee table, by the length of it, though much lighter than anticipated…

"Charlie, what did you do?" Maya laughed, as she worked to get the box open.

"You're a musician, I work in a music store, I really didn't do _that_ much," her aunt pointed out, and how she'd managed in that moment to sound like some perfectly calibrated hybrid of her sister and her niece was as much a mystery as a delight.

Inside the box was a case, in the telltale sign of the object it contained. Maya had two guitars already, sure, one her own and the other passed on by her father, but when she opened the case and saw the one inside, her third… Oh, it was a beauty. She'd seen a similar one in the store, the day she'd gone in and discovered her aunt, had been taken with it. Now that this one was in her possession, it was as though she couldn't stop noticing the details in it.

"Charlie…" she breathed. "This is one of his, isn't it?" she asked, recalling how Mr. Olsen, David's father and the original owner of the store, made custom guitars on the side. It was how the store had even managed to stay afloat for a while in the beginning.

"It is, yes. He's sort of stopped doing them now, but David asked, and since it was for you… Think of it as a… day one in the Hex sort of gift."

"I have got to get us a gig so I can play this one on stage…" Maya pulled the instrument from its case, held it and gave it a few tentative notes… She loved it instantly. "I really don't know what to say, I… Thank you."

They had barely gotten off the phone, and Maya still had the new guitar in hand, when Sam came barrelling down the stairs so fast that it was a wonder he hadn't tripped and landed on his face.

"Woah, hey, easy!" Maya called to him.

"Mom's having the baby," Sam cut in, putting his hurry in context and drawing the two of them into it. Maya looked to Lucas, who went and started looking into the fastest way to get them to Tucson, while she put the guitar back in its case, and this back in the box, before taking it upstairs. The big scissors were going to have to wait.

Hours later, they were standing in a hospital room, looking on as Sam held his brand new baby sister, Maisie.

"Feels like we were just doing this a minute ago, doesn't it?" Lucas whispered to Maya, who was all smiles, looking down at the small babe.

"A whole studio ago, yeah," she laughed. "And we'll be there again before we know it," she went on, which earned her a curious look from her fiancé. "Maeve?" she reminded him, and he breathed.

"Right… Right…"

"Relax, Huckleberry, you'll get your turn."

Holding baby Maisie, Maya looked at this girl who brought the Hart and Lane kids together. She may have had zero genes in common with her, but that did not make her any less of a sister, and she could not wait to find out who she would become, who she would be most like, and how she would be unique.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

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_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	155. Their Progress Toward the Music

June 3rd 2020

_Chapter 155  
Their Progress Toward the Music_

It used to be that a car driving up the lane, at any time where the band TXNY would be practicing in the Friar house's basement, would have its passengers catch some of the music as they passed by. Eventually they would maybe realize that they didn't hear any of it anymore. If they ended up walking around that house however, they would pick up on a faint drone of muffled sound, coming from the six-sided structure surrounded by flowers, parked up on the grounds beyond. And if they opened the door…

After nearly ten years of making basements their home for bringing songs to life, the band in its current lineup had finally taken the next step up and made the Hex its base of operations.

The first time they had all walked in, on the delayed 'grand opening,' the bandmates had been left in awe. One might have thought they had walked into a place which demanded reverence, and where the instruments in the back were somebody's else's and not the ones which belonged to them and had been played by them for any number of years. It had taken some time, where they'd looked around, and inspected the items posted to the walls, the ones on the shelves… but finally they had gone and picked up their instruments, and they'd kicked off their very first Hex session.

The set up soon left its mark, as Maya, Riley, Rosa, Nadine, and Kayla came out on the other side of that practice with this feeling like it might have been the best they'd had. For Maya, it had been her first opportunity to put Charlie's gift to use in a setting beyond a solo bit of strumming, and it left her with that eternally favored feeling of inspiration, where she would just come up with a new song, or start to draw, or paint…

It was their third session now, or it was about to be. They were just warming up when there was a knock at the door and Ramona came in.

"Hey! Wasn't sure you'd make it," Maya smiled.

"I know, I'm sorry, I had to wait until Ben or Carter came back," Ramona explained, dropping to the couch with a sigh.

"How's Itty Bitty doing?" Rosa inquired.

"She just won't sleep…" Ramona told her, sounding mildly exasperated.

Erin Allison Hastings was nearly two weeks old now. Lucas, Maya, and Sam had barely landed back in Austin, after their quick trip over to Tucson that Lucas had found a message from Ramona of all people, letting him know that Maeve had gone into labor. By the time he'd been able to call her back, baby Erin had made her entrance into the world. The two of them, Ramona and Maeve, had been part of two different sections of Lucas' life, his school and his job, and then in the last couple of months, events had conspired and brought the two of them in the same orbit, thanks to the Hastings brothers.

The closer that Ramona got to younger brother Ben soon meant that she got to interact with older brother Carter, as the two of them were also recent roommates. Ben had moved in with his brother, when it had come to be that he would take on the responsibility of raising a child. As such, Ramona had gotten to hang out with Maeve, whenever she'd be by the apartment to see Carter. They'd already known one another, of course, for knowing and being friends with Lucas, but now they were becoming friends on their own. Ramona had accompanied Maeve on her what would turn out to be her last doctor's appointment pre-baby, as she'd gone into labor right there in the waiting room. It had saved Maeve the need to get to the hospital, if nothing else.

Carter had just barely made it in time to see his daughter born, and so Ramona had been the one there with Maeve, close enough to the whole time that Maeve had insisted Ramona should stay to the end. As the story would be told later on, the reason was revealed soon enough why Ramona had to stay. When the baby had finally been born, her sharp little cries flooding the room, she would be handed to her father, as had already been decided. She would find comfort in him, in arms that loved her and cherished her from the beginning, and then Maeve… Maeve had needed comfort of her own, not to be alone, as she processed all that she had just lived, today and the previous months, and how it would all change going forward, now that the baby was no longer part of her.

When they'd gone to visit Maeve, back at her apartment, they had been startled at first by the state she had been in. The way she acted, a stranger would have had no idea that up until a few days before she had been pregnant, wouldn't have known she had a child anywhere in the world. It wasn't long that they'd been left to understand this was her coping, that her never having intended to become a mother did not change the fact that she _had_ been pregnant, and had carried that child to term, and had given that child over to her father when she was born, just as she'd always said she would. There was a lot for her to sort through, and she just wasn't there yet.

In the meantime, baby Erin was placed in the care of her father, and her uncle, and her uncle's girlfriend, Ramona, who had been indispensable in helping the Hastings brothers adjust to the newborn.

"You look like _you_ could use a nap," Maya gave her a sympathetic smile. "This might not be the place for it though," she pointed out, as the bandmates readied themselves to start.

"That's okay," Ramona promised. "There are worse things to fall asleep to."

It was weird to Maya sometimes the way she was able to sing and play, all the while thinking about something else. These days, it was hard not to have babies on the brain. With the birth of baby Erin, they had just about come to the end of what had felt like the 'baby boom of 2027,' but then had they really? Maya could just see Nadine, out of the corner of her eye as she played, and it was hard to be thinking about sweet Harry Olsen, and Maisie Hart-Lane, and now Erin Hastings, without remembering the struggles Nadine and Zay had gone through and continued to go through, in their desire to become parents. The rest of the band still didn't know, because Nadine didn't want them to, didn't want to bring them down. Maya didn't know if she saw it that way, but it wasn't her choice to make, and so she respected Nadine's wishes. Still, she knew all this baby talk had to be difficult for her, and Maya could only do so much to steer them away from it without giving away Nadine's secret.

The music helped, at least she felt that it did, hoped that it did. They had a show coming up, which was always a sure fire way of getting them all pumped and ready to go. Heightening that feeling was a rumor going around – according to Riley and Kayla – that Ree Forster might show up to see their show.

At their previous practice, Kayla had come along, looking giddy to the point where she'd just held out her phone to whichever of her bandmates would take it and see what she'd just seen. Riley had been the one to take it, and a few seconds later she'd… squeaked. Turning to the others, she informed them that Ree would be in Austin on the day of and the day following their show.

"Okay?" Rosa had responded to this, expressing what was more or less Maya and Nadine's reaction, too.

"She's coming, she has to be!" Riley insisted.

"Coming to what?" Nadine asked.

_"To the show, obviously!"_ Kayla signed, still giving off the impression of someone who would be speaking in a high pitched and startling tone.

"Riley?" Maya asked her. Riley read out the short post, which was Ree apologizing about missing some event in San Diego because she would 'have to be in Austin that weekend.'

"Have to be, _have to be_," Riley shook the phone at her.

They hadn't subscribed to the theory just yet, though like a song stuck in your head, the thought kept prodding at them in the days that followed. Eventually, Maya had started to believe it, too, though she didn't say so around Riley or Kayla or the others. It _was_ believable enough however, enough that she'd finally gone all in and called Betsy Young. A quick conversation with her mother's cousin, the captain of the Ree Forster fan club as far as their family was concerned, had reinforced the theory even more, enough that by the end of the conversation, there had only been one solution.

"Hey, how would you like to come see me play?"

Betsy was absolutely on board, and in no time she had confirmed that she would be making the trip back to Texas, there to be met by Regan and Kyleigh who would come up from Memphis as they'd done back in December for Ree's concert.

"Are we debuting the new song?" Rosa asked, as practice neared its end.

"I don't know, are we?" Maya turned this question over to Nadine, who had lead vocals on that new song. It was the one Maya had started composing as she'd worked on her family painting and worked out the new seating chart with Sophie. She'd sort of forgotten about it for a while, with the studio construction, and the trip to Arkansas, and Tucson, and everything in between… But then she'd picked it up again and the more she'd worked on it, the more it started to feel, in her heart and mind, that the voice she was hearing sing those words was not her own but Nadine's instead.

When she had presented her with the sheet music, lyrics and all, Nadine had stared at it for a moment like she didn't know what she was supposed to do with it. But the more she'd looked at it, she'd understood what her part in it was going to be.

"Give it a shot, okay?" Maya nodded at her, smiling. She firmly believe that the music would help. It wouldn't patch up every little wound in her friend, but it could hold her together, just a little closer. The first time she'd sung it, with only Maya accompanying her on the guitar, both of them sitting at the heart of the Hex, it had really felt as though Nadine had taken a great, deep breath. It made her happy, whether or not she could say why.

Now, as she was asked whether she would be ready to perform it on stage or not, she was momentarily uncertain, like she spotlight might challenge that feeling. In the end, she gave a decisive nod. She would perform the new song. As the others started to contemplate where they would put this one in the set list, Maya looked to Nadine, and it seemed as though, whatever path she'd taken in order to make up her mind here had taken her down more than one road. Something else had been decided here, and whatever it was, for now, she kept it to herself

This show coming up in just a few days was essentially kicking off the run up to their tenth anniversary events. Between that and the wedding, now just a little over a month, the coming summer could already have been classified as 'wonderfully hectic,' and she couldn't wait for all of it and everything else in between.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	156. Their Progress Toward Projects

June 4th 2020

_Chapter 156  
Their Progress Toward Projects_

Since the Fall Festival, Maya had found herself working on a number of projects with Lindsay Alcott up at the high school. Now, following a few setbacks with their committee, she had been called on to lend a hand for the graduating class of 2027's senior prom. She was more than happy to do what she could, with one small favor thrown in the mix.

"Hey, Sammy, come up here!" she'd shouted down the open trap without leaving her desk. A few seconds later, he'd popped into view.

"How did you even know…"

"You never got to go to your senior prom, did you?" she'd turned in her seat.

"Well, I was fifteen, so the school wouldn't let me and neither would Mom."

"How would you like to get a do-over? You get to ask Cecilia, big promposal… or small one, whatever you're feeling… She definitely won't see it coming."

He'd stood there for a moment, his thoughts elsewhere, before turning and heading back down the stairs. A few seconds later, he'd returned.

"That'd be great, yes, I would."

Over the next couple of days, Maya and Lucas had been treated to a variety of scenarios, as Sam tried to come up with the best way to ask Cecilia to the prom.

"He knows she'll say yes no matter what he does, right?" Lucas asked Maya, after Sam had hurried up the stairs to find something to show them.

"It's sweet," Maya protested with a smile. "I remember when you asked me to ours, stopped right in the middle of making a shot, stopped the game right in its track. Pretty sure the other team didn't get the ball from you because they were just too shocked by what was happening," she laughed.

"Coach was so mad," Lucas did as well.

"Hey, you won the game… and the prom date," she beamed proudly.

"Well it was you or bust," he nodded, which earned him a greater smile and then a kiss.

Finally, Sam had figured it out. His plan had involved calling on one of Cecilia's classmates and friends, and a textbook. He had no classes on that afternoon, so he'd gone to the girls' school and waited. His partner in promposal had swiped the textbook from Cecilia's bag before hurrying out to bring it to him. On the pages of the chapter they would have been covering that day, Sam had set a series of colorful post-it notes, each with a word: _Will. You. Go. To. Prom. With. Me? I'm standing outside, Sam._ Cecilia's friend had taken the book back, returned it where it belonged, and they were off.

After a few minutes' long wait, likely assuming he was about to be chased off for roaming around a girls' school, Cecilia had come through the door, motioning for him to join her. When he'd jogged up, she'd held up her index finger, with a new post-it stuck to it. _Yes!_

Stepping in as always, Lucas had taken Sam out to get his tux, while Maya had gone with Cecilia to find her dress. Later, when they'd finally get the chance to talk in private, they would swap stories on how this adventure had gone for each of them. Both sides showed how excited Maya's brother and his girlfriend were both so looking forward to this night. It wasn't as though this would be their only prom, with Cecilia having a couple of those ahead of her, but this one had the added bonus of being unexpected, a regained opportunity for Sam, and they were very much looking forward to it.

It wasn't as though she would have done a poor job of things if Sam and Cecilia weren't part of those who'd get to benefit from this prom, but Maya had really putting in all her creativity toward making sure this would be a wonderful night, for everyone. Her position with the theater definitely made it so that she had contacts she could call upon, and she used these wisely as she could.

"I think you've got a few fans out there," Lindsay Alcott informed her, as the two of them worked on one end of a long banner. Maya looked at her, and her former teacher nodded across the gym. When she looked, she found a trio of senior boys doing a poor job of hiding the fact that they had been staring in her direction. Maya had to stifle a laugh.

"I don't know, I guess anyone can be into TXNY…"

"Oh, trust me, I don't think it has to do with the music," Lindsay shook her head. Maya looked at her, eyes blinking like 'oh… oh!'

"Well that's… I mean… They're my brother's age," she laughed, frowned. "Why did that make me feel old all of a sudden?"

"Happens to the best of us," Lindsay promised her as they carried on with the banner painting.

"You know, we're almost right in the spot where Lucas asked _me_ to our senior prom," Maya reflected. The memory had been refreshed in her mind, ever since they'd reminisced over it.

"Yeah?" Lindsay asked, smiling.

"Right over there," Maya pointed with her brush. "The stands were packed, and everyone was cheering the two boys' teams. Lucas got the ball, he was moving along down that way, and then he just sort of stood there for a moment and he _shouted_. 'Maya Hart, will you go to prom with me?'" she imitated, in a muted shout that made Lindsay laugh. "Gotta hand it to him, his voice carries. Everyone just sort of stopped, and I did, too. Wasn't expecting that at all. But it was two seconds, and I answered the best way I knew how." She did not mute herself this time, as she gave hers and Lucas' call. It echoed across the gym, startling the various students going their part of the prom decorations. She laughed now, joined by Miss Alcott.

Just then, a man had appeared at one of the gym doors and signalled for her to join him. She had mixed memories of Principal Wilcox, what with those two years where their school had no basketball teams, but on the whole she did think of him fondly enough.

"He can't call me to his office anymore, can he? I haven't been a student here in six years," she set down her brush and stood.

"Don't worry, he won't put you in detention… I think."

Maya breathed out, straightening herself up a bit as she walked across the gym floor, stealing a look to her trio of admirers and having to hold back from laughing – again – as they worked to appear busy.

"Hey… Principal Wilcox," Maya greeted him. In that moment, she almost felt seventeen again. "Sorry about that, I know it was kind of loud," she pointed back toward the gym.

"Well, it certainly brought back a few memories," the principal tipped his head, and Maya smiled and nodded, going on the side of optimism… and reminding herself she wasn't a student anymore. "Don't think the school has forgotten you and the others of your year for what you did, the way you fought for your teams."

She sort of figured, from what she'd been hearing out of her former teammates, those who had younger siblings at the school especially. But to hear it from the principal, that was sort of… humbling, and she could only smile and thank him.

"And now here you are again," Wilcox nodded toward the gym.

"It's not much, really," she insisted. "Miss Alcott needed help, so…"

"Miss Hart, I have been principal at this school for eighteen years, with fourteen years before this as a teacher. I have seen countless students walk through these halls, enough to be forgiven if I should forget some of them, or recall others mostly by a name, or a face. But there are those precious few who leave a mark, and you are one of them."

"Was this a… a good mark?" she had to ask, just a bit startled by this statement. The principal chuckled.

"Yes, a good one. I'd be so bold as to say a great one. And I remember you, enough to know you're not just here because Lindsay needed a hand after Margaret quit. You're here because this school meant a lot to you, didn't it?" Now she felt young again, maybe as much as thirteen, though she wouldn't have been here in _this_ school yet. In Austin, both in middle and high school, Maya had found her love for learning. After struggling as she'd done back in New York, she had gone and started turning things around in such a significant way. She'd ended up in advanced placement, which had never in a million years been something she foresaw herself having any kind of a chance to reach. She had graduated, with a vision in her mind, for her future.

"It did… it does," Maya told the principal. "They were some of the best years of my life." The principal nodded at this, as she'd confirmed his assumption. In the beat of silence that followed, something he said made her pause. _Margaret quit._ Was that… Margaret Yang, the art teacher?

"Then in that case, I think you might just be what we need right now, or what we will, at the start of the next school year in the fall," the principal informed her, and Maya hoped more than anything that she wasn't standing here with too shocked of a look on her face. "That is, if you would be interested in applying for the position. I was hoping to get a moment to speak with you, as we're about to begin interviewing our applicants. There is still time if you'd like to be one of them."

It was probably for the best that he'd continued to speak for a few seconds after he'd asked if she would be interested, or else she might have said something dumb she would have regretted forever. But now she'd had the chance at least _some _of her thoughts, enough of them that she was able to give the man a sound response.

"I am interested, yes, I… I am very interested, sir."

"Wonderful. Please come with me, we can get you an interview date. There will be some documents we'll need from you, will you be able to bring them over or send them in as soon as possible?"

"I can bring them in tomorrow morning on my way to work," Maya nodded.

"Good, good," the principal smiled as he led her to the administrative offices.

By the time she was returning to the gym, it felt as though the last several minutes had been a blur, overloading her. This was real, she knew it wasn't a dream, but it felt like one… She landed back in her spot, next to Lindsay Alcott, with a baffled look on her face.

"You alright there?" Lindsay asked.

"I…" Maya blinked, looking at her. "You knew about this, didn't you?" she asked her former teacher and potential future colleague.

"Well, Margaret quit, the position was open, and I thought to myself 'hey, I know a young teacher looking for just this very chance.' So, I mentioned it to Wilcox, and he said he would handle it." She gestured to the door as though to say 'and now he has.'

Maya was still too stunned to pick up her brush. She was more than stunned, she was… hopeful, she was… overwhelmed. It was happening, if all went well, it was really happening. She'd been out of school nearly two years now, and it wasn't as though she'd left this dream behind, but then there had been so much happening, with the theater, with Stage Ready, and then her contract, and… Oh, something was going to have to change, if she got this job… But what?

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	157. Their Progress Toward a Goal

June 5th 2020

_Chapter 157  
Their Progress Toward a Goal_

Somehow she had kept working at the school for an hour more, which she suspected was benefit given over by working on the prom decorations with Lindsay and the students. The whole time, she was just doing her best to focus on that and keep that little ball of frenzy contained. She could not let that thing crack open until she was home, not until she was with Lucas, with Sam...

After she'd left the school, for just a moment she really didn't know what to do next. Something in her wanted to pick up something on the way, make dinner special, while the other insisted she had better not get ahead of herself. She had an interview, not a job, not yet, and oh... There was so much to think about...

Pizza. Pizza was thinking food.

Maya got a good idea of where her brain was at when she left the restaurant with three large pizza boxes balanced in her arms. She drove home, singing loudly to the songs on the radio, and arrived to find she was the first one there.

"Not a problem," she told herself as she let out a breath. "I can control myself."

When Lucas came home from his weekday at the bookstore, he found his bride to be sitting outside on the porch.

"Waiting for me?" he wondered, as he got out of his car and she was already on her feet and watching his approach.

"Kind of, yeah. It was either that or going like a vacuum at the pizzas," she nodded back to the house. The temptation had been too strong in the end, so she had removed herself from the situation.

"There's pizzas?" Lucas inquired, curious.

"Way too much of it," Maya nodded. "I figured Sam and Cecilia would be here, too, but they're having dinner at her place tonight, so it's just you, me, and a ridiculous amount of pizza," she shook her head in 'shame.' Lucas paused before the porch steps for a moment, considering this statement, calculating.

"I'm up to the challenge," he finally nodded, which made her laugh. "So you just felt like a lot of pizza or..." he asked, extending the one option he could think of so she might fill in the other if it existed.

"I... have an interview... to fill the position of art teacher at the high school..." Maya revealed, with barely contained giddiness. It became even harder to contain when she hadn't even finished the sentence that Lucas had climbed up to join her and caught her in a lifting hug. She giggled and held on tight.

He had been right there with her, all through the job searches, and the worrying over whether she would ever get the job she was after, which had led to her coming up with the idea for Stage Ready. She had found something that stimulated her, kept her in touch with at least something like what she'd been after. That didn't mean she had abandoned that original dream, and all this time Lucas had not just been there, he had been in it. He and Maya may not have been married yet, may not have said their vows to one another, but as far as he was concerned he still held to all of it. Her dreams were his dreams for her, her worries were his to share, and her triumphs... or potential triumphs...

"How did this happen?" he asked after having set her down.

"I did mention there was a lot of pizza, right?" Maya took hold of his arm and pulled him back into the house.

Soon, they were at the table, with plates and glasses filled and eager pups underfoot, queued up for their share. Maya relayed the story of her encounter with the principal, everything he had said about her - to which Lucas agreed wholeheartedly - and then the job offer set in motion thanks to Lindsay Alcott's good word. Even as she said it all, there was still something in her that couldn't believe this was really happening.

"When's the interview?" Lucas asked.

"Monday," Maya breathed out, pulling another slice from the box on top.

"Hey," he tapped her foot with his own so she'd look at him. "You've got this."

"Maybe. I don't know who else is applying, there could be some really good people, ones with experience..."

"Did they all get glowing words of encouragement from the principal, too?" Lucas asked, making her snort.

"I'm just saying I... I don't want to get too excited yet... Okay, that's a lie, I really want to jump around and shout and all that, but I also don't, because then if I don't get it, that'll only make it worse."

"So you just make sure that when you walk in there you give them all the reasons to make sure they don't let you go, so that they see you are the one they need and no one else," Lucas declared, leaving her unable to keep from smiling.

"Well, your pitch is excellent, are you sure you don't want to go instead of me?"

"I can give it a shot," he shrugged with confidence. "But you're the one they need to see."

She had to hand it to him, he always knew what to say to make her feel better, to push away those clouds of worry that kept her from seeing the sun in the sky.

"I don't want to go and tell too many people, just in case it doesn't pan out, okay?"

"Sounds fair," he agreed. "Does that include Sam?"

"Please, the guy has no poker face. I love him, but the odds are not in his favor," Maya shook her head.

"Alright, then it stays between us?" Lucas asked. Maya nodded. "What about your mother?"

"We literally just said..." she frowned, taking a bite of her slice.

"I mean because you two work together. Aren't you going to have to say something to someone over there?" Lucas elaborated. Maya stared back at him now, the pizza stuck between her teeth as she considered his words.

The theater... What was she going to do about that, about Stage Ready? The songwriting part, that was easy enough, she could do that whenever, wherever, and she already did, didn't she? As far as the theater went, she had some flexibility, which made it so that she could sometimes work from home, or go in and do things, like now with the prom... But she still had to put in a certain amount of hours actually in her office, at the theater. Even if she wouldn't have classes to teach from first to last bell, she doubted she would be able to just go and be at the theater in the time when she wasn't in class.

"I'll have to talk to Siobhan," Maya replied once she'd swallowed her bite. "I'll have to tell her tomorrow, she's out of the office on Friday."

"She has to know that this would happen sooner or later, right?" Lucas pointed out.

"Sure, yeah, I guess..." Maya nodded. "This is starting to feel a lot less cheerful, isn't it?" she turned an awkward smile toward him.

"This is still what you want, isn't it?"

"Completely," Maya replied.

"And you are going to own that interview, aren't you?"

"You're kind of not giving me much of a choice," she smirked.

"So come on, Miss Hart, celebrate a little," he smiled back.

"My stomach is full of pizza right now, if I celebrate too hard it won't be pretty," she reminded him.

"Maya..." he gave a pointed look.

"I will think of something, can't rush art, you know that," she waved him off by plopping another slice on to his plate. "I was told you could handle this," she teased, making him smirk.

"Come on," he collected the boxes and his plate, leading the way into the living room.

"Hey, hey, hold on," Maya hurried after him, caught in a race along with the dogs, equally eager to be reunited with the pizzas. "Is it weird that I want to see if you can actually eat all that?"

"You're helping," he reminded, dropping on the couch.

"Oh, but I need to watch my figure..." Maya breathed, giving something like a bridal pose.

"Right, for that dress I haven't seen yet," he stated, in a tone that said 'I understand why but I can't help being curious.'

"That would be the one, yes," she grinned.

"In forty-seven days, you won't even remember these pizzas."

"You're totally counting down now, aren't you?" she laughed, sitting next to him. Archer hopped on the couch now, sniffing at her plate. "Hey, now, what are we looking for here, huh?" she asked, scooping up the dog and tearing a piece of her slice he could eat. It was good and gone in the blink of an eye. "Started on fifty days, then forty-nine, forty-eight..."

"I just like to keep track," he told her. "I'd call it building up anticipation but we definitely hit that peak already."

"Few times, yeah," she agreed, getting a kiss to the top of her head as she ate her slice. She had a thought now, and she turned a grin over to Lucas.

"What?"

Once again, and as they had barely relocated to the living room, Maya and Lucas took up the boxes. This time, they walked out of the house and up the path to the Hex.

"Open the windows or else it'll smell like pizza in here for weeks and no one will be able to focus," Maya told Lucas as they walked into the studio. After he'd done so, he turned to find Maya had pulled down two of her guitars, her first one and then the one her father had left her. She handed the first one out to him.

"What's happening?" he asked, intrigued.

"I am going to teach you how to play," Maya announced, a bright smile on her face.

"You are?" Lucas blinked.

"Yeah," she nodded, waving the guitar at him until he'd take it. "It's how I'm choosing to celebrate. I can't celebrate the job just yet, have to crush that interview first."

"And you will," he maintained, making her smile.

"For now, I can just celebrate the possibility of the job, and i want to do it by sharing some joy. I think you might just get into this."

"You might be on to something," he admitted. He had sort of been intrigued, having watched her play for a good decade. "How did you learn?"

"Book in the library, videos... I wanted to learn, so I did," she shrugged. "Ready for lesson one?"

"Wait, hold on," Lucas grabbed a pizza slice. "Ready."

"Okay," Maya laughed. "Sit. You need to know your instrument first."

By the time Sam returned home, he found a quiet house, three sleeping dogs, and no one else. Spotting the lights on in the Hex through the attic window, he went back down and headed to the studio, where he found his sister and Lucas laughing uncontrollably, sitting on the studio floor, surrounded by empty pizza boxes, both holding a guitar.

"Hey, baby brother!" Maya called out when she spotted him. "Come here, come here, you gotta hear this," she waved him over. Sam approached almost apprehensive, like the two of them might gave been drunk, when they really weren't. "Tell me what that sounds like," she told Sam, waving for Lucas to play.

"She likes to make fun of me," Lucas informed his brother.

"I do no such thing, I'm just amused, that's all," she innocently vowed, looking back up to Sam. "It's been a really good day."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	158. Their Progress Toward Calm

June 6th 2020

_Chapter 158  
Their Progress Toward Calm_

Siobhan had been absent from the theater the next morning, and by the time Maya left the theater for her interview on Monday, she would still not have gotten the chance to talk to her. So for all her intentions to at least discuss things with her ahead of time, Lucas was still the only one who was aware of her being up for the job outside of the few people at the school who were expecting her that day.

It had been nearly five days since her conversation with the principal, when he had made the offer, and no matter what else she did, Maya just could not stop thinking about Monday afternoon, and the interview, and the possibility of her getting that job.

Getting through the days did not end up being nearly as difficult as she had assumed it would be. When she was at work, she had work to concentrate on. If she wasn't mindful about things, she would run the risk of getting caught in that spiral of 'what if these are my last couple of months here?' or 'what if Siobhan just fires me, what happens to Stage Ready?' So, all she could do was what she always did. She did her job.

That wasn't so bad, was it? She was pretty good at it, and the proof was in the ever expanding success of the program. Plus, they were coming around to the start of a new season for the Stage Ready Summer Camp, which had been a rousing success the year before, and that demanded a lot of work, especially in how new camps were popping up this summer, at their other Stage Ready locations, and she was getting a lot of calls and e-mails from the other coordinators.

All of this would only open up the way for more thoughts though, again making her wonder what might happen if she had to leave the theater. And then there was her mother, just a few doors down from her. Oh how much she had been dying to tell her about the interview… But she had to resist, had to, and so she did, promising herself that soon she would get to give her some excellent news.

If work was filled with any number of potential slip-ups, home was a whole other type of mine field. On the one hand, there was Sam, who had no idea and was supposed to keep having no idea, until… She hadn't decided what she'd do if she didn't get the job, if she'd just keep it to herself or not. Either way, she had to keep Sam in the dark for now, and this was easier said than done. When she was at home, it was supposed to be the place where she could get her guard done, wasn't it? So if the notion that she was interviewing for this job in four, three, two, one day was keeping her emotions on a seesaw, it was bound to flare up in one way or another.

It all soon got to feel something like restlessness, and _that_ usually resolved itself in her grabbing one of her sketchbooks and some pencils, and just putting to paper any and all thing her mind felt eager to show, whenever her hands weren't otherwise occupied. On those days, it got to the point where she had to take breaks, or else her hand would cramp too much, and when that happened, well… she had to do something else.

On Thursday and Friday, it had meant being down in the kitchen before anyone else, getting a start on breakfast. Sam was so used to being the first one there, the one to make breakfast for the three of them, that he looked confused. And in the evening, she would be on her laptop, being a tiny bit secretive, not letting her brother see what she was doing. What she _was_ doing was prep work – to the best of her abilities – for the interview. What Sam thought she was doing, well… She'd tell him that she was doing 'wedding stuff,' but the secrecy made it so that her brother didn't buy a word of it, and she could imagine so many things he might have believed she was doing instead.

On some levels, when it came to Lucas and his being the one person who knew about the interview, it was just as hard if not harder than with Sam. The fact that he knew gave her freedom to express any and all things she was feeling about Monday… and that was kind of dangerous. What she felt about Monday was just so many things all at once. She was excited, beyond excited, but also apprehensive, worried, scared to fail, scared of how it would feel if she failed.

"Am I going to be losing my shirt again?" Lucas asked her when she pulled him into their room and asked for his help in picking her interview outfit.

"As fun as that sounds, not this time, no," Maya breathed, looking through the closet.

"So going on stage with one of your idols in front of hundreds of people was less scary than a job interview?" Lucas asked, not even to joke around, more to know where her head was at.

"Much less," Maya agreed.

"Right," he breathed, looking over her shoulder and into the closet. "Here, can I?" he pointed, and she stepped back. "This one?" he pointed to a dress.

"No," she responded at once, shaking her head, even as he reached and pulled out a shirt and pants. She didn't speak, but she made a noise that sounded a lot like 'that might work, actually.' After a moment, she turned to look at him. "You showed me the dress first because you knew I'd say no, didn't you?"

"Does that mean option two works?" he answered with a question of his own, and a smile, too.

"I hate waiting…" Maya frowned, taking the clothes and hanging them aside, for the next morning.

"That makes two of us," he assured her.

They had gotten the weekend to go by just a little faster, the two of them together in the Hex, as Maya had continued her guitar lessons. Lucas was in every way a good student, motivated. Maya couldn't say what percentage of that motivation came out of his interest toward the subject at hand, and what came out of his wanting to give his fiancée something else to think about than whether or not she'd get the job.

"You know, pretty soon I'll be able to stand down here, under the attic window…" Lucas suggested, bringing their lesson to a halt due to the instructor's fits of giggles. When he'd wake up the next morning, Lucas would find her sketchbook open in the empty space next to him, depicting this very scene, with him standing there, guitar in hand, hat on head, and – because it amused her to no end – shirt nowhere to be found. Cartoon-like, he played and appeared to be singing, up to his lady in the attic, leaning on the open window frame and dreamily looking back down at him, with little hearts floating about her head.

After all those days of distractions, and nerves, and preparation, she was finally here, at the high school, walking through the door on her way to her interview. For the first time since she'd been given the offer, Maya started to realize it might genuinely happen. It sounded weird to say, but up to now she'd just been riding the high of even getting the chance. And now… now, in a few short months, she could be working here, she could be… a teacher here… It hadn't dawned on her up to now just how strange that might be. She was twenty-five, sure, but she still got carded a lot, still had people assuming she was much younger than she really was. If put in the presence of actual teenagers, sure, the difference might become more evident, but even so… The short gap between her and her potential students would be something curious to navigate. She could handle it… she hoped…

"Maya?"

She stopped, something about his voice combined with these halls making her feel once again like she was a student all over again, even though he had been a part of her life long before here and long after, too, up to this day.

"Hey," she turned to face Mr. Matthews as he stood nearby, a stack of papers in hand.

"Are you here for the prom decorations again?" he asked, pointing off in the general direction of the gym.

"Uh, no, not today," she told him. It would have been a rough lie to make stick anyway, and surely he'd end up hearing. Come to think of it, she was surprised he hadn't said anything to her before, but then again this would just be the kind of thing to slip him by, too. She wasn't sure where to go from here, what to tell him about the real reason she was here, but then she just looked at him and something in her demanded that she tell the truth. He of all people… "I'm actually interviewing, to be the new art teacher," she revealed, feeling a new thrill at saying it out loud, the second time ever.

Cory blinked, looking confused for a moment, and Maya could just about work out his thought process. It went from 'what about Margaret?' to 'come to think of it, _where_ is Margaret?' to 'oh there was that sub…' to 'oh of course, Maya…' to 'my former student, part of the faculty… wow…'

"Hey, Matthews, how are we doing, I don't want to be late?" Maya whispered at him. He blinked again, and now he was smiling at her, smiling with a pride like none other.

"Look at you now," he let out a breath, and Maya had to be careful not to laugh.

"You're not going to cry, are you? You can't get me started, I'm trying to make a good impression here!"

"Well, I'm sorry, you know? One second there's this kid crawling through your daughter's window, and the next thing you know you're sharing the faculty lounge," he whispered back, and now she was grinning, loving his nostalgia parade way too much. _Hey, don't actually have the job yet._

"Please don't jinx me, I really want this," she begged.

"I fully believe you _will_ get this, and no jinx would even dream of getting in the way of that," he returned in the same tone. After a beat, he smiled.

"What now?" she asked.

"I get to work with my best friend's kid, that's what."

"You don't breathe a word, Matthews," she pointed a finger at him. "He doesn't know yet, no one does except Lucas, not even Riley." This had all the necessary power to establish the degree of importance she'd placed on this secret.

"Not a word," he vowed. Another moment and, after taking a look around the empty hall, he leaned forward to hug her. "If he knew, he'd want me to give you this."

"I'll allow it," she smiled.

"Even when I was teaching you, you never exactly behaved like a student, more of an equal," he pointed out as he pulled back. "I guess we were always headed to this."

"Maybe," Maya nodded, liking the idea. "And now I have to go, I…" She took a breath, let it out. She'd been really nervous, walking in here, but talking with him, she'd taken control of her nerves, hadn't she? They were gone now, and she wasn't letting them back in. She'd sworn to walk in that room and make them want to hire her, and that was what she'd do.

"Knock 'em dead," Cory called after her.

"Dig the graves, Matthews!"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	159. Their Progress Toward Evolution

June 7th 2020

_Chapter 159  
Their Progress Toward Evolution_

"Good morning," Siobhan paused with a smile as she found Maya sitting in the front row of the empty theater. She walked through here, every morning when she came into work, like clockwork, always with this look in her eyes like maybe she was remembering some production they'd put on, some performance she had witnessed… Knowing this, Maya had made sure to arrive ahead of her on Tuesday morning, to be here when she passed by. "Doing a bit of morning contemplation?"

"I was waiting for you actually," Maya told her. "Do you have a minute? Or a few?" Siobhan looked at her for a moment, like she'd flicked on whatever part of her was more mom than theater owner, the part who'd known this young woman nearly half as long as she'd been alive.

"Is everything alright?" she asked, taking a seat next to her.

"Oh, yeah, it's nothing bad, I just need to talk to you about something. Actually, I meant to talk to you last Thursday, but I didn't get to, and then yesterday…"

"Why didn't you just call me over the weekend, or at home?"

"I… didn't even think of that," Maya blinked.

"Well, I'm here now, and I'm all yours, so… what can I do for you?" Siobhan sat up, motioning to her, and Maya smiled. She could still remember the first time she'd met the woman, how she'd felt that immediate and inexplicable connection you'd get in meeting some people, when they were just that kind. With Siobhan there had always been that added layer of being a creative person, like she was.

"Right, well, when I was at the high school last week, helping Lindsay Alcott for the prom," Maya started, and Siobhan nodded. "The principal was there, and he wanted to talk to me. The reason they needed my help over there was that their art teacher quit, very suddenly. The year's almost done, so they're getting by for the remainder of it, but now they were seeing applicants to fill the position and… he wanted to know if I might be interested."

"Tell me you said yes," Siobhan reached out and touched her hand, the look on her face possibly not so far off from the one her own mother was likely to give, once she finally found out. To have it come from Siobhan now, Maya felt some of her concerns dissipate. She had dreaded telling her, dreaded the possibility that things might be thrown in shambles between them, and now that they sat here, she didn't know how she could ever have believed she would receive anything but support.

"I had the interview yesterday," Maya nodded. "I really wanted to talk to you before, to tell you before I went in there," she added at once. Siobhan waved this off; she didn't mind.

"How did it go?" she asked instead.

The question brought her back to the moment when she'd come home the day before. She'd ended up falling asleep on the couch, after lying there to just… breathe, and not allow herself to fall in the trap of reviewing every second of the time she'd spent in that office until she'd find out one way or another about the outcome. When she'd woken up again, she could hear Sam and Cecilia in the kitchen, probably working on dinner, and there was Lucas' face overhead. He'd looked back to ensure the others wouldn't be listening in before crouching next to her and asking about the interview.

"I think it went pretty good," she nodded. "Not that it means I got it. I'm sure a lot of the other applicants were good, too, better even, with experience. When I was in there, it was like I turned off that part of my brain, I was just focused on the interview, but now that I have to wait it's all been turned back on and put on full blast," she gestured at her head.

"Call it favoritism, but I don't see how they could find anyone better suited for it than you," Siobhan declared with a firm nod that made Maya laugh, her heart thudding happily in her chest.

"But what happens if I do get it," she finally had to ask, getting them to the proper reason why she'd needed to speak with her boss.

"Well," Siobhan sat up in her seat, not so much switching caps strictly back to boss mode but maybe halfway from one to the other. "I would recommend perhaps that we wait until we know exactly what your schedule will look like, should you get the job. There's no reason to disrupt things as they are for the time being. I brought you on here to see after the Stage Ready program, and that has been yours from inception. I would never dream of taking it away from you. It really would not be the same without your guiding hand, Maya," Siobhan smiled, and Maya felt ready to cry, seeing once again how ready people were to show this appreciation for her work, in one place or another.

"If I do get the job, I don't see how much time I'd be able to spend at the theater… if any…" Between actual class time, and then preparations for those classes, and everything else in between…

"You might consider your assistant," Siobhan told her. "She's been with you practically from the beginning, hasn't she?"

"She has, yeah," Maya nodded. Lily had been indispensable in helping her bring Stage Ready from an idea on a page to what it was now.

"I would say the two of you should get together on this, come up with a plan on how to go forward and then bring it to me. From that point, we will see what we will do. How does that sound?"

"Like… we can definitely do that," Maya breathed.

"Excellent," Siobhan smiled, motioning for her to lean over and hug her. "Now breathe a little, you look like you're scared of me. I'm not scary, am I?" she asked, pulling back.

"I don't know, there were a couple of Halloweens when you let out your inner villain," Maya smirked, which made her boss laugh. "It's not that I was scared. For almost as long as I can remember, there have just been people who've come into my life, who've been… unwavering in making it better… And the last thing I would ever want would be to let any of them down, and this just felt like that, right here, for me and you, not just because of Stage Ready but all this time you've been in our lives…" If it wasn't for Siobhan hiring her mother to work at the theater, all those years ago, their lives would have been so, so different.

"You know, I was your age when I took over this place from my father," Siobhan pointed about the room, turning a smile to Maya, who couldn't help but blink. Somehow, even though she'd known for a long time just how long Siobhan had been in charge here, she'd never stopped to put it into context like that. "This place was his dream, and he put everything he had into it. My mother had passed away before I could even remember her, and it was just me and Dad, all my life. He'd say the theater was his dream, but I was his miracle. He sacrificed so much, for this place, and for me, so much so that it just about killed him in the end, made it so I took over for him.

"When your mother called about the job, she told me how it was just the two of you. Actually, after a while she practically told me your whole life story, you and her. She'd been looking for new opportunities for you both, back in New York, and nothing was panning out. But then it turned out that the woman who had the job before her was an old friend from acting class…" Maya had heard the story, about how she'd heard about the job at least. "Listening to your mother on the phone, there was just something about her… I understood exactly where she was coming from, because that was just how my father was. So, I took a chance, for your sake as much as hers."

Maya didn't know what to say. She remembered though… She remembered the first time her mother had brought her into the theater, and she'd met Siobhan. She had been so immediately kind to her, and looking back on it with this story in mind, she could just see how important it had been to Siobhan, too, to meet both of them, because she had been where Maya was. And now, today, the thought that she would get to do this job she had wanted to do for so long… Of course Siobhan would be right there with her to find a way, to continue nurturing this project of hers and all the while get to go after that dream.

Maybe for that unseen connection between them, Siobhan had quickly pieced together the fact that Maya had not yet told her mother about this job opportunity, and the reason behind it. Her advice here was simple: Go and tell her.

"Principal Wilcox said I should know within a week, I'll just…" Maya shrugged, tried to tiptoe around, but Siobhan held her gaze, and the words were still there in her eyes. "I don't want to get her hopes up until there's something…"

"Or you don't want to disappoint her more than anyone," Siobhan suggested knowingly. "Because of everything she's done for you." Maya sighed. "That is just the reason why she'd want you to tell her, why she'd want to wait with you, why she'll be with you no matter whether you get it or not."

Maya had parted ways with Siobhan as they'd reached her office. As she continued down the hall toward her own office, Maya would have to pass by her mother's door, and with her boss' words swirling through her head, there was just no chance for her to just walk by. And of course she would have stopped anyway, to say hello, so instead of just popping her head in or knocking at the small window and making a funny face, Maya had walked in and shut the door.

"Good morning," Katy smiled. "What's…"

"So, I have news…" Maya started, before launching into the story of Wednesday and the prom decoration session at the high school, which had led to her talking with the principal, and what he'd said about her, all boiling down to The Big Thing. "He asked if I would be interested in applying for the job, and I said yes, and then yesterday I did the interview, and now I'm just… waiting for the call to know if it's all going to happen or not, and I'm just… maybe freaking out… a little bit… which is to say a lot…" she breathed out, before starting again. "And I know I haven't said anything about it the last few days, I just wanted to wait until I knew, but then I had to tell Siobhan, because she's my boss, and she made a lot of great points, and so I'm here, and…"

"Breathe?" Katy suggested. Maya did as told, while her mother got up from her desk and came around to join her. "How did the interview go?" she smiled. "Tell me everything, set the scene for me."

For a good hour, Maya sat with her mother, recounting her interview and her encounter with Cory Matthews right before it. By the time she left the office, she was feeling so many things. A lot of it was nerves, still, though talking with her mother seemed to have pulled some of that away. Some of it was feeling how much their relationship had grown over the years, until she found herself here, an adult like her mother. And some of it was feeling more than ever a connection to Siobhan Hughes and this theater. She would find a way… She was not ready to leave this place.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	160. Their Progress Toward News

June 8th 2020

_Chapter 160  
Their Progress Toward News_

Looking back on it from the other side, Maya would come to decide she was glad she had lifted the ban on telling people about the interview. She was no good for waiting, but at least she wasn't the only one doing it. Seeing her people be just as anxious to know had a way of alleviating some of that feeling in herself, like a weight divided among many who were glad to bear part of the load.

After she'd told her mother, she'd gone home that day and told her brother. As soon as she'd seen Sam, it was like her brain had already made the decision and told her mouth to say the words. And oh how she'd loved her brother for how excited he'd been for her. She'd expected no less, from him or anyone who knew her enough to know how much it would all mean to her, but it didn't make her experience of it any less sweet.

By the time she'd told those two, and Siobhan as well, of course, taking those next leaps felt less like jumping into the unknown, less like a risk to disappoint anyone. They cared about her, they would be excited for her, and if she didn't get the job, well… they'd be there to support her as she continued her search. The offer had already given her the push she needed to promise herself this would not be the end. She had been content in carrying on with Stage Ready and her song writing lately, but that had mostly meant that she hadn't gone seeking new possible postings as a teacher. That was going to change.

"If I don't get this, and if I don't find anything anywhere in the city, I'll have to see if I might find anything outside of Austin," she'd told Lucas, after she'd made up her mind about it. They were loading up for TXNY's show, there to meet Betsy, Regan, and Kyleigh, and potentially Ree Forster, if Riley and Kayla were right.

"Okay," Lucas had said, the one word being enough to encompass the fact that he would support her choice, whichever choice she made. It was all she could want to hear. "I still think you won't have to," he'd added after a moment, making her smile. Leave it to him to have all this confidence in her, right?

It wasn't as though she didn't have some confidence in herself, too. As easy as it was to end up doubting and worrying – and she'd done a lot of that in the past few days – she also couldn't help but tell herself that she would be fine, that she would get the job. It was the kind of confidence, of hope, she had not always allowed herself, which made it inevitably powerful to her when she did.

Over the weekend, she had acted as her brother's personal chauffeur as he headed to the prom with Cecilia, all so she might get a look at the finished product of everything she had helped create. Walking up to the building, her old school, she couldn't stop thinking about her own senior prom, now six years behind her. She still remembered how it had all looked that night, remembered her dress, and Lucas in his own tux…

She'd wandered the halls for a little while after seeing Sam and Cecilia into the gym, and taking it all in… Stopping in front of the trophy case, she'd looked in at the team pictures hanging there behind the trophies. There she was, with her arms around Sophie and Nadine on either side of her. That victory had been the sweetest, how could it now? Yes, it was their last year on the team, in high school, but it had been only their second season, hadn't it? They hadn't gotten to play for the two years in the middle, and then they'd come back and they had dominated, them and the boys, too.

She'd said how her years here had been some of the best in her life, and that was the absolute truth. She couldn't be in here without remembering it, feeling it deep down. She would be happy to get to teach at just about any school, but the idea of her getting to teach here, of all places? She liked this idea very much, loved it and really just craved it now. The thought of spending however many years of her life in these halls… Yes, that would do very well.

After leaving the school again, she'd gone to join Lucas and a few of their friends at the movie theater, where they'd had a solid double feature before she could then swing back to the school to pick up her brother and his girlfriend. She found them waiting outside, sitting on not just _a_ bench but _the_ bench, where Maya and Lucas and their friends had spent so many mornings before heading into school. They looked so happy and exhausted and in love… They'd had a wonderful prom, even if this was not their school and these were not their classmates.

"So, what's going on over on the Ree front?" Lucas asked as he climbed into the passenger seat of Maya's red minivan.

"Well, according to our very own investigators, she's in town. Not much else on the radar, no word if she's actually going to be there tonight. I did hear from Betsy though, she and the girls have checked into their hotel," Maya revealed. They were staying two nights, the better to get to spend the following day with Maya and Katy and the rest of the family in Austin before flying off to their respective hometowns.

"I'll find them when I'm out there," Lucas assured her.

"I don't know why it feels weird to know they'll be out there tonight. I've done shows in front of friends and family for… years…"

"Because they're brand new to you?" Lucas suggested.

"Probably, yeah…" Maya breathed.

"Nervous?"

"Not even a little bit," she laughed. "Like I said, it's just weird. The band has been part of my life for almost ten years now, it's just… the band. Having to tell family about it, them not even knowing, it's like… Ree's family not knowing she's _The _Ree Forster. Not that I'm saying I'm like her…"

"No, I get it," Lucas nodded. "Once you're on stage, it'll be any other show."

"Even if _she's_ actually there?" Maya wondered. "If she does show up…" she entertained the idea, voice trailing. "Do you think she'll come say hi before we go on stage or just sort of… play it covert in the audience?"

"I… can't say. Do you _want_ her to show up before?"

"Honestly, probably not, if it's going to throw any of us off, but wouldn't be so bad if she did, either, I mean… it could get us pumped up before we go up."

"So either way is good," he summarized.

"Ups and downs, all around," she nodded.

They were met by the rest of the band as they arrived, which sent Lucas to go and find the audience contingent of their friends, as well as Maya's family. Katy would be there, too, that she might get to attend the show with her cousins' girls and Betsy. The way Maya had been hearing it, Katy and Betsy had always dreamed of going to a concert together, back in Arkansas growing up and then in New York, too. Betsy had wanted nothing more than to make that happen, once her younger cousin had come to join her, but the opportunity had never come along. And then just as she'd been plotting to surprise Katy with tickets… Katy had run off on her. Now here they were, a quarter of a century later, and their old dream was finally coming true… with Katy's girl under the spotlight.

"I have never seen so many people who kind of look like Maya," Zay declared, as Lucas found him and the others, already joined by Katy, Betsy, Regan and Kyleigh.

"You think this is weird, I met a ninety-nine-year-old version of my fiancée," Lucas told him.

"Yeah, okay, you win," Zay agreed.

"Is Nadine nervous about Ree maybe being here?"

"Nervous, no. She doesn't believe she'll be here. Anyway, she's nervous about other stuff," Zay shrugged. Lucas had to wonder, and he asked if he meant that they were trying again. "No, not that," Zay shook his head. "I'll tell you later."

It wasn't long that the show started. The noise of the crowd, of people who'd shown up to see Maya, Nadine, Riley, Rosa, and Kayla, was still something that kind of took Lucas' breath away, and he knew it didn't leave the girls unaffected either. He could still tell, just by looking at Maya, that there had been no Ree encounter leading up to the show, so if the singer _was_ here…

"I think that's her there," he heard Kyleigh whisper from nearby, and he looked to where she was looking. There was a bit of a disguise going, but she was on her own, and if she was trying not to cause a scene, not to take the band's thunder away from them, that _would_ be the way to do it. The features didn't lie; that was definitely Ree Forster.

As much as they kept quiet about it, Lucas wasn't the only one who'd take the occasional sneak peek over at the woman in the corner throughout the show. He debated just as many times whether or not to try and signal Maya, letting her know that Ree was here, but he never went through with it. Anyway, with how often their group tended to sneak a look over to where Ree was standing, he had a feeling all five of the bandmates had gotten the message. If it affected them in any way, they managed not to let it show; the spirit of the stage was in them now, they were in their element.

When he wasn't looking out in the corner, Lucas was also busy capturing the family's reactions, the better for Maya to see later on. It was almost as much fun seeing the way the four women got into watching Maya up on that stage, enjoying the music the band performed… Even if they hadn't been related to her, they would have loved to be here. There was really no putting into words how wonderful Maya was up there, like she came alive, three or four times over. She was electric.

As the performance came to an end, it took some time for the cluster of friends and family to separate from the crowd around them as they made their way out. Finally, they were able to get around to go and find Maya and the band. When they came up to the door and knocked, they could hear voices in conversation, and laughter, too… Lucas gave a knock – one the group and the band had agreed on as a sort of 'hey it's us' signal – and a moment later the door was opened… by Ree Forster. The costume was gone now, and she was all smiles as she recognized Lucas from their previous encounter in December.

To see the looks on several of the small group's faces when they saw her… Lucas wished he still had his phone out to snap a shot, but then Rosa was way ahead of him.

As the rest of the venue had been cleared, they had all been able to go out, family, friends, band, and Ree, where they remained for a solid hour, talking, sometimes busting out a guitar and having a song or two… It really felt like something out of a dream, but instead it was a memory being made, and it would exist in them and be shared by them for a good long while.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	161. Their Progress Toward Titles

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

June 9th 2020

_Chapter 161  
Their Progress Toward Titles_

"Here, here, Sam, take these," Maya held out her boots to her brother as they walked into the house. Well, Sam was walking in, and so was Lucas. Maya, on the other hand, was catching a ride on the Huckleberry Express, as she'd been allowed to hold on to her fiancé's back for the journey from the car. She'd managed to yank her boots off back in the car, but now they mostly thumped at Lucas' chest, every step he took with his 'load.'

"If I sold these, do you think I'd get a lot?" Sam joked as he grabbed the boots.

"Don't you dare, they're my lucky stage boots!" Maya pointed at him, as Lucas was already leading them up the stairs.

"Can you check the dog bowls?" he asked, turning to Sam, who nodded and went off toward the kitchen.

"But the boots!" Maya 'protested,' even as she held on to him like nothing would ever move her from this place, not after the evening had taken all her energy away.

"They will be safe," Lucas assured her, smiling as he felt her burrow her head into his neck. When they reached the top of the stairs and he walked them into their room, he stopped in front of the bed. "Would you like to be set down or dropped down?" he inquired.

"I think you know what I would like right now," she whispered at his ear with a laugh.

"Maya!" Sam's voice was heard then, the call preceding the sound of his steps hurrying up the stairs.

"Put a pin on the 'right now' part," she sighed, as Lucas chuckled and set her on the bed before her brother stopped in the door.

"I'm sorry, I didn't…" he started.

"My boots?" she sat up.

"What?" Sam blinked, then, "No, I left them downstairs. I was in the kitchen though, for the bowls, and the light was on for voicemail, on the phone, so I heard before you…"

"What are you talking about?" Maya frowned, not following.

"The school, they called, about the job," Sam explained, and Maya turned to Lucas for a moment. He was looking at her like he was ready to pick her back up again and bring her down the stairs so she could listen. Her look said to hold on.

"Did you hear the part where they said if I got it or not?"

"I did," Sam slowly replied.

"Well?" Maya asked, at the same time Lucas did. Sam pointed over his shoulder in what they took to mean 'don't you want to hear it for yourself?' "That can wait," Maya waved it off. "Just tell me," she asked, caught somewhere between the exhaustion of the night and a surge of new energy. Sam breathed out, like he'd been stuck minding a balloon in his chest.

"You got it, you got the job," he blurted out, with the expediency of one who knew he would have very little times to get any words in before meaning would lock into place and then everything else would be lost in a burst of reaction, of cheer.

As soon as they had both heard it, and indeed processed it in a heartbeat, Maya and Lucas both reacted the only way they could. For Lucas, the response could only be to catch up his fiancée and sweep her right back into his arms, hugging her this time rather than carrying her like a backpack. Meanwhile, Maya felt the words hit her like a tornado, carrying her away much as Lucas did now, when he picked her up. Her brain was in overload. It was real, it was happening, finally… and as much as she'd been telling herself that she'd made it through the days of waiting with confidence and calm, now that she knew she was in, she could just about confess her truth back to herself, which was that she'd been more terrified of not getting it than anything else.

She had the job… She would be the new art teacher for her old high school, in just a few months… Two years of… not waiting, no, two years of learning, of growing, and now at last she would get to take that next step and get to be this person she'd dreamed herself to be.

She had absolutely no control over her tears, and she didn't care. These were the good kind, and they felt oddly amazing.

None of them could say what time they had ended up going to bed or how long they slept. Morning just sort of happened to them, as they opened their eyes again to daylight and, somewhere below, a doorbell. Lucas was the first to wake, or at least the first to lift his head up and look at the time. It was eleven in the morning, which meant…

"Maya, hey, they're here," he spoke quietly, leaning in again to hold his fiancée close, pressing a kiss to her shoulder as she stirred.

"What?" she mumbled.

"Your family's here, remember? Betsy and the girls…" After a moment, she shifted to sit up, so he did the same. As they both stood, and stretched, and yawned, Lucas went down the hall to see if Sam was still asleep – he was – while Maya went down the stairs to answer the door.

"Did we miss the after after-show?" Regan Clutterbucket asked, sandwiched between Betsy Young and Kyleigh Hinton. Maya ran a hand through her hair, imagining what she must have looked like, a minute out of bed after a show and a near sleepless night.

"Sort of," she shook her head to herself before stepping back to let them in. They were soon accosted by the trio of curious pups, who came sniffing at the strangers and found them agreeable, especially as they received hearty scratches and greetings.

"Were you still asleep?" Betsy wondered.

"Just barely awake," Maya confessed, even as the reason for their late waking came back to her. Her mind was just now turning on the lights again, and it reminded her of the message which had been waiting in their voicemail after coming back from the show. It didn't seem possible that she would forget, but for a moment she had. Now, she remembered, and it inhabited the whole of her mind for a second or two. _You got the job._ It manifested in a flash of a smile on her face, and when Kyleigh asked what this was about, she told them, about the job offer and the fact that she'd just heard back that she'd gotten the job, that she would be starting her first year at the school in the fall.

It might have been that she would have felt bad that her mother wasn't the first to hear the news, with how much it had meant to her to be able to say it, but then she _had_ said it, here, and the first person outside of Lucas and Sam who had gotten to react was her godmother, and that was a fair compromise. Betsy had given her a great big hug, which was near as good as getting one from her own mother.

The visiting trio had taken it upon themselves to go away and pick up a bit of a brunch instead of the lunch they were meant to be having, the better to give a chance to the trio to get dressed in their own time. They were directed to Ma Maggie's, and off they went.

"That is a lot of hair, my dear Sammy," Maya chuckled when she returned upstairs to find that Lucas had finally coaxed him out of bed and out into the hall to drag his feet about. Maya and Lucas would joke sometimes that the reason Sam was usually the first one up every morning was so that, by the time they joined him downstairs and found him making breakfast, he would have had time to do something about the mass of bed hair sprouting from his head. "You _are_ cutting some of it off before the wedding, right?" she teased, reaching up to try and tame it.

"I am, I am," he promised, dodging away.

With the promise of food, they had retreated to start and get dressed before Betsy and the cousins returned. Maya found herself distracted as she looked through the closet, the thought of that voicemail alive in her mind now, with some sleep to lift her back into a more clear headed reflection. Lucas could see it, too, looking at her, and he stepped up behind her, slipping his arms around to hold her. She leaned in to the embrace with a smile, locking his arms in place with her own.

"Here I was, thinking this summer wouldn't get any better," he told her, which made her laugh.

"And for all that, the main event is still the same," she declared. He showed his agreement with a kiss to the side of her face. The wedding and the honeymoon, the band anniversary, the summer camp, the run-up to her start as a teacher… How could she do anything but smile, again and again? "How mad do you think they'd be if we just up and eloped?"

"Sophie would lose her mind," Lucas pointed out, which made her laugh. "I would be the opposite of mad," Lucas countered, and Maya turned about in his arms so she could look up at him. "All I want is to be married to you." She was all smiles, stretching on her toes to kiss him.

"Almost there," she promised. "I guess we waited this long, we can wait a few more weeks and _not_ have Sophie rage eating the food she ordered for the wedding."

"She is _not_ getting our cake," Lucas whispered conspiratorially, causing Maya to have the inverse reaction as she burst out into laughter. Now they really needed to get ready before the others returned.

"Uh, guys?" Sam called from below, sometime later. Maya and Lucas had gone up into the attic when they'd been dressed, as all the wedding talk had reminded Maya she was still working on finishing touches for their thank you cards.

"What?" Maya shouted back.

"We've got company!"

They went up to the attic window looking out from the front of the house and, as Sam had put it, they definitely had company. Several cars were in the process of pulling in from the lane, parking where they could. From above, they could identify them easily enough. There was the rental, which would be Betsy, Kyleigh, and Regan, There was the Hunter Hart minivan, and Tom Friar's car, and Dylan's car, and the Matthews', and Zay's, and the Cassidys', and Ramona's, and Kayla's…

"I was really kidding about the eloping, what is going on? Did you do this?" Maya turned to Lucas, blinking back surprise.

"I didn't, no," Lucas shook his head. By the surprise on _his_ face, too, she had to believe it.

"What are they all doing here?"

There was the doorbell from below, and then voices, as Sam must have opened the door. Maya and Lucas hurried down from the attic, making it to the stairs leading to the ground floor just as Regan and Kyleigh were coming up toward them. They had a look about them like they were excited about something.

"Right, so we didn't know there'd be that many people…" Regan stated at once.

"What did you do?" Maya asked.

"Well, we were in the car, and us and Betsy got to talking, about you and the job," Kyleigh explained, lowering her voice to a whisper on the last part.

"You told them?" Lucas blinked.

"No, no," both girls spoke as one.

"Betsy called your mom," Regan told Maya. "And she said how she really wanted to sort of get to know your people while we were in town, you know? So your mom said she'd make some calls, and next thing you know…" she gestured behind them, where the many passengers of the just arrived cars were making their way into the house. "I think some of them called other people, too."

"I think there's more people coming, too," Kyleigh told Maya and Lucas, who looked to one another with a shared thought: Houston.

They would be proven correct, sometime later, when Sophie, Chiara, Asher, Ray, Pappy Joe, Patty, and the Hillards landed to join the spontaneous party. Maya's godmother had done so much with so very little, like a showing of her promise to make up for all those missed years. She had allowed her goddaughter to share this little bit of news that might not have seemed like such a big deal to some people but was absolutely one to her. And these people here would know it. She would get to tell them all at once, and share in that happiness with all of them at once.

She didn't want to have to make a big announcement out of it, so she'd just gone ahead and cut to the chase, moving to be near her parents at least before trying to get everyone's attention. There were too many of them though, all of them talking in small groups. Lucas came up with the solution, crouching to whisper at Nellie Hunter's ear and, once the girl had nodded with a grin, hoisting her overhead, cutting through the crowded house.

"Excuse me!" she shouted, and the noise died down. She looked very proud of herself as Lucas set her back on her feet next to her twin.

"Thanks, Sunny," Maya smiled at her. "Well, since you guys are all here, I might as well let you know that, as of this fall, I will be a shiny new art teacher," she revealed to the collected guests, who forgot their vows of silence at once, sweeping in little by little to congratulate her and talk a while. It took long enough that, as the summoned guests of Houston arrived, they were soon looped in and added to the roster swarming around Maya.

The impromptu party ran well through the afternoon and into evening, at which point some of the guests had to leave, either to drive back to Houston, or because they had work in the morning, or because they had to get back to their hotel to pack and fly home.

"I'm so glad you got to be here for all of this," Maya told Betsy as they embraced by the door.

"I could say the same to you," Betsy smiled, pulling back to look at her. "Next time I see you…" she let the sentence trail on, the end of it easy to find, and still Maya couldn't help but make a joke.

"… I won't be coming around in my PJs," she told her godmother, who snickered and hugged her once more.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	162. Their Choice of Future

June 10th 2020

_Chapter 162  
Their Choice of Future_

"I was doing rounds yesterday and there was this girl, she'd just surgery earlier and she was just coming around. She opened her eyes and saw me there… She thought she was hallucinating, kept going on about how she knew she couldn't handle the drugs. Took me about ten minutes to get her to sit still and let me look at her," Nadine recounted as she helped Lucas chop vegetables. She'd shown up ahead of time, as she and Zay were to join their friends for dinner that evening. Maya wasn't home yet, neither was Sam, while Zay was just getting off work and would shortly be on his way.

"Does it happen a lot?" Lucas asked, smirking.

He had definitely had more than his share of encounters, as he and Maya would be out and about. People would come up to his fiancée, sometimes like they couldn't quite believe that they were seeing her, right there in person, sometimes showing that this was not their first encounter with her. He was seeing more and more of an uptick in requests for pictures, and autographs… Maya was always humble about it, humble and really just surprised, like she could hardly believe anyone should want this from her. Each one of those instances, it felt to Lucas as though she would take a beat, to keep herself situated, to know that she was and always would be Maya Hart, born in New York, grown in Austin, still the daughter, the sister, the friend, soon the wife, soon the teacher… and then also the singer and songwriter.

"Not really," Nadine shrugged. "Me on a stage and me at the hospital, not the same look, you know?" she gestured to her face.

"Yeah," Lucas laughed.

This dinner had been set the day before, when she'd called the house and asked if she and Zay might come over. She wanted to go so far as to bring everything over, or treat them to take out, or go to a restaurant, but Maya had told her just to come and they would take care of the rest. Lucas suspected she was here now, helping, as her way to put at least some small contribution to the effort.

The whole thing was presented like a simple dinner between friends, but both Maya and Lucas were convinced that there was more to it, and with everything over the last few months, there was only one reason they could think of as to what their friends were coming over to discuss. After losing two already, if they had managed to get pregnant again, they probably would try not to say anything until some time had passed, wouldn't they? Standing next to his friend at the counter, Lucas caught himself more than once either trying to see if maybe something in her had changed, if she was showing… She looked the same though, and he really had to stop before she got the wrong idea.

She looked happier than she'd done for a while, _that_ he definitely saw. Much as she'd been able to get along without giving so much of herself away after those losses, it was impossible not to see a layer of sadness just underneath the surface. It was gone now, or… maybe not gone, but stored away somewhere deeper, not forgotten but also not anywhere that would pain her so easily. Instead, there was a new resolve about her, and he had known her long enough to know her path had been reset. She had a plan.

Sam had soon arrived along with Cecilia. His semester was already good and done by now, enabling him to surprise his girlfriend and pick her up from school.

"There's girls at my school who are planning to do Shirt Day," Cecilia informed Lucas and Nadine. "They'll have to wear them under their uniforms, so they're keeping it quiet in case a teacher overhears and checks all of us. I told them they couldn't do that, so long as our uniforms were all intact and no one could see. It's up to us. And it's the last week of class anyway."

"What's Shirt Day?" Lucas wondered, and Nadine laughed.

"I saw about that earlier, I kind of can't wait to see it."

"The day the anniversary album drops, someone suggested we should all be out there wearing our TXNY10 shirts," Cecilia explained with a smile. The new design had been out for a few weeks now, in anticipation for everything leading up to the official/unofficial day. If they were to put that day on the very anniversary of the band's inception, it would have had to be in August, but the girls had made the collective choice to be contented by 'summer, ten years on.' Proceeds from the shirt's sales, as inspired by Ramona's idea, were to go to the children's hospital.

"There's a lot of fans in Austin alone, so we'll be able to spot each other," Sam carried on. "But everywhere else, too."

"Alright, sign me up," Lucas nodded.

"We've all got so many shirts from the last decade, we could wear a different one every day for a few weeks," Nadine added with a laugh.

"Game on," Lucas gave her a look, knowing it would appeal to her competitive streak. She met this look with just this spirit, and she set her knife down so they might shake on it.

By some chance, Zay had arrived just seconds ahead of Maya. As they all caught up with one another's days, caught up on the plans for Shirt Day and Lucas and Nadine's daily challenge, the hosts were plainly aware of an energy between their guests. They had something to say, and they were trying to figure out when to say it.

"You know you're being way too obvious right now, yeah?" Maya finally had to say.

"It's not me, it's him!" Nadine pointed to her husband, who gave a face like 'oh, sure, throw me under the bus, I see how it is' and made her laugh. "I'm sorry but it is though," Nadine insisted.

"No, hey, that's fair," Zay finally had to agree.

"Well?" Lucas asked, looking from one to the other. "What's going on?"

"Right, well," Nadine started, looking to Zay. "We talked everything over for… a long time. We've been thinking for so long about having kids, about making children that would be part me and part him, and we tried that, and you know how it ended up. We could keep trying, but I just… I can't go through that again, it's too much," she shook her head, the hidden layer flashing through for a moment. She let out a sigh. "So, we're just not going to. And once we made that decision, it all became much clearer. We want kids, we want a family… They don't have to come from the two of us for that to happen. We wouldn't love them any less. They would be ours and that would be enough."

To look at the two of them now, that return of joy in them became suddenly refreshed with context. They had been stalled in their attempts and desires to become parents, but now they were moving forward, starting over from the point where the excitement and the hope in them was new, unmarred.

Maya's immediate reaction had been to turn to her friend and bandmate and hug her, and Nadine responded in kind.

"Any kid out there would be so lucky," Maya declared, and Nadine softly laughed, hugging her tighter even as she smiled to see her husband and his best friend just sort of clapping shoulders for a moment before deciding to go for the full hug, too. She tapped Maya's hand so she'd be able to turn her head and look, too.

By the time they were all sitting around the table, Sam and Cecilia having rejoined them, the news had quickly been revealed to only be one half of the reason why Zay and Nadine had sought to join their friends for dinner.

"So far, it's a lot of talking to people, and paperwork, and research," Zay shared with a nod.

"You should talk to my uncles," Lucas suggested, thinking at once of his mother's brother, Mike, and his husband, Keith, who had adopted all three of their daughters. "They'll be more than happy to give answer any questions you might have."

"That'd be great, yeah," Zay nodded, smiling like he was remembering old days, when the two of them were kids and they'd go get their school supplies in the fall. Michael Sullivan worked at the store back then, and he would happily escort his nephew and his friend around, ensuring they'd get everything they needed, in the colors and patterns they wanted them, too, whether they had them in stock or not. He had moved on from there in his career now, but Lucas knew the tradition had been revived once Lea, Lara, and Lydia had started school.

"There's something else we need," Nadine chimed in now. "We were hoping you both would be able to write out a reference, a letter, about who we are and how we would be as parents, basically."

"Absolutely," Maya nodded at once.

"When do you need them?" Lucas came in right on her heels.

"Can I do one, too?" Sam asked.

"Yeah, if he mentions he's a big ol' genius, that'll help," Maya teased her brother, all the while giving him big 'proud sister' eyes.

The rest of the dinner had gone by in such a lifted mood, it could have seemed as though Zay and Nadine had come to announced they were already becoming parents, all systems go. When they started toward their car to leave, they stood for a minute in wait with their friends, as Sam was saying goodnight to Cecilia. She would be catching a ride home with them.

"Have you told your parents yet?" Lucas asked Zay and Nadine.

"A few days ago, yeah," Zay nodded. "I really thought mine were going to freak out."

"That's your reaction to everything," Lucas pointed out, smirking at the look Zay gave him.

"Fair, I guess," he finally had to confess. "Anyway, they're pretty excited. My mom is probably reading everything she can get her hands on right now, to try and make it happen.

"She's going to write a novel, not a letter," Nadine smiled. She'd always had a solid relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Babineaux, and becoming their daughter-in-law had only improved on this.

"In that fancy penmanship," Zay mimed a fine hand, making them laugh.

"How about yours?" Maya asked Nadine.

"I think deep down they'll always be a bit disappointed that we didn't have one by ourselves, and I can't blame them for that, I wanted it, too. But they get it, and they're just eager to become grandparents."

After they were gone, Maya and Lucas stayed on the porch for a while, looking to the darkening sky as they sat shoulder to shoulder.

"Is it weird to think about how them and Maeve might have been the solution to each other's problems if it wasn't for Carter stepping up?" Maya slowly asked.

"No, I get what you mean," Lucas assured her.

"I almost…" Maya started again, but hesitated.

"Almost what?" Lucas asked, looking at her.

"I wouldn't have said anything, not without talking to you first, but even then, it wouldn't have been possible, with everything else, and you and me…" she trailed off, and she didn't have to finish her sentence for him to understand. She would have offered to be their surrogate, if it would have meant they could have this baby that was half Zay and half Nadine… "This is better, I think. There are already kids out there who need people like them."

"They'll find each other," Lucas agreed, wrapping his arms around her and pressing a kiss to the side of her face.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	163. Their Choice of Assistance

June 11th 2020

_Chapter 163  
Their Choice of Assistance_

In her early years in Texas, Maya's bedroom walls had been plastered all around with her drawings as they came into existence, like capsules of the good things in her life in the form of a page, set in place to comfort her if ever her displacement from New York and her old life got to be too hard. In time, it had become a wall in her basement room, and by the time she'd ended up in Houston, sharing her space with Lucas, it was just a few select pieces. It wasn't about needing that blanket anymore.

Here in Austin again, in their house, there were again a selection of drawings either on the walls or on a surface, all of them framed. One of those, sitting on the dresser, was an old favorite, showing Maya, Lucas, Zay, Nadine, Asher, and Dylan, laid out on the grass, the night of their first sleepover. It was just a perfect representation of who they had been to each other back then. Maya had still been relatively new to Austin and to these other kids, but you would hardly know it by looking at them here.

The first thing that might have come to be noted could have been how much her art had developed in the past twelve years, but that wasn't it. If anything, Maya and Lucas both knew to appreciate that this was a perfect representation of 'the artist at thirteen,' and this showed a girl who had very much wanted to put to paper every little detail of this moment, to capture it in the way only she could, in a different way than a camera might have done.

Looking at it that night, after they'd seen their friends off and said good night to Sam, Maya would zone in on 'Tall Z and Little Z.' They were just friends at the time, of course, and whatever feelings they might have had already that went beyond this line were for the most part subconscious at best or they were new and hardly contextualized. But for all that, there was something about them, even then as the young Maya had put pencil to paper, that felt bonded in a deeper way.

"I still remember that day like it just happened," Lucas commented as he watched her stand there.

"Me, too," Maya smiled, turning back to look at him. "But then I know it was a really long time ago, too. We've all grown up so much, not just physically. Back then, all that really mattered was school, and sports, and playing with our friends… Now, it's…"

"All of that and more?" Lucas offered, which made her chuckle.

"Yeah. Marriage, and careers, and babies… It's everywhere, and it's not even scary, it's just where we all are now, in some way or another. Those two here…" she turned back to the drawing. "They have no idea what's ahead for them. But them…" she turned to another frame, this one with a picture, a couple years old but showing the expansion of their group of six. There were Zay and Nadine again, only this time as newlyweds, with his arms around her. They had gone through many ups and downs already, the biggest being the break of several months, which took Zay to live in New York while Nadine remained in Boston, and they had gone through deeper downs still in recent months…

"Those two," Lucas nodded to the sketch, "I would have said Nadine is very capable to look after a baby, a child, and Zay… Well, he's got her." Maya tried not to laugh. "I've known him nearly my whole life though," Lucas went on, more serious now. "And I've seen him grow from a weird kid to a… less weird adult, but I've always known him as someone kind, down to his soul. It makes it so that it's not so weird now to imagine him as a father."

"And isn't _that_ the weird part?" Maya smiled at him and he laughed. They were silent for a moment now, and in that beat of silence it suddenly felt like a question had laid itself within their universe, and one or the other of them had to pick it up and give it voice.

"So, what about us?" Lucas picked it up, taking a few steps nearer to her. Maya smiled at the thought, knowing he would say it.

"Yeah, what about us?" she innocently replied.

It seemed as though the question was constantly floating in their periphery, triggered by anything from eager family members, to seeing friends of theirs having children of their own… They had dipped their toes in that question not quite two years ago, but there had been so much going on at the time, and the wedding – back when it was meant to happen a year ago – had been imminent. It had been one thing after another, and neither one of them had brought it up again. But now…

"I was ready before, now I'm just whatever comes after ready," Lucas declared, locking his arms around her waist. "I think about it more times than I can say." She could believe that. She could believe it, and really the idea of Lucas as a dad was the easiest image for her to conjure up. She had known this for a long time, of course. The two of them had been headed this way for a while already.

"That makes two of us," she told him, smiling.

"Then maybe it's time we gave it a shot?" he tentatively suggested, and with him standing this close, looking at her with those eyes of his, she could practically see the two of them 'giving it a shot' that very night.

"It definitely wouldn't have time to interfere with the wedding anymore," she slowly pointed out.

"Twenty-three days…" he whispered. She laughed, paused, let out a breath.

"I'm going to be starting at school this fall. My first year teaching," she had to remind him.

"True…" he had to admit he heard what she was saying, knew what she meant. Suppose they started trying now, and they managed to succeed almost right away… She wouldn't get to finish that first year before having to go on leave… Now he looked like he felt bad for not even considering it in that way, and she really didn't want him to have to feel that way.

"Maybe instead of _trying_, for now, we can just say… if it happens, it happens, and we'll just go from there," she suggested. Lucas smiled, and to Maya it felt as though they were both just vibrating for this potential between them. Nothing had happened yet, and they hadn't made any commitment to any solid attempts either, but they were taking steps in their lives, in this shared life, and how could they feel anything but completely and vibrantly alive and in love? "We really need to focus on Nadine and Zay right now," Maya finally had to tap Lucas' chest, feeling that they might have been tempting the fates if they let the silence trail on too long.

"You're right, yes," he nodded, and Maya couldn't help but be amused as she noted the fact that he was still holding on to her. "What?" Lucas asked, borrowing her occasional innocent look.

"Wow," Maya laughed. "You talk about baby making long enough and this is what you get, huh?" she asked, looping her arms around his neck.

"You tell me," Lucas shrugged, smiling down at her.

"I really do have to get up early though…" she reminded him, sounding like she really wished she didn't have to. "And you know I'll be awake a while if we go down that road."

"You might end up writing another big summer hit," he countered, even as he finally went ahead and let her go so that they might get off to bed to sleep.

"Who says I don't already have that one in the bag?" she replied with confidence.

On most nights, it had become like a familiar dance between them. She'd deal with the curtains, he'd turn down the covers, she'd check the alarm on her phone, he'd turn off the lights… When he turned back around in the dark, he found a bloom of light and his fiancée sat cross-legged on the bed, scribbling in the notepad she kept in her night stand drawer while holding her phone to create light.

"What are you doing?" Lucas asked, moving to sit next to her.

"Just thought of a few things and I wanted to make sure I wouldn't forget, for the letter," Maya explained, still writing.

"Your ideas kind of look like paragraphs, how are you writing so fast?"

"Faster I write, sooner I can leave it alone," she shrugged. "If you hear me mumbling in my sleep and it sounds like it's for this…"

"I will try and remember," he assured her.

"I really don't want to be the reason that they don't get a kid," Maya finally set pad, pen, and phone aside before dropping to her pillow with a sigh. Lucas slipped under the covers with her even as she moved to turn into spoon position. She scooted closer as he put his arm around her, which made him smile, leaning in to kiss her shoulder.

"I really don't see that happening."

"Well, you know how I get, it's like the path to the other end of an idea is stuck passing through Pessimist Village."

"That doesn't sound like a fun place," Lucas decided.

"They don't even have a gift shop," Maya shook her head.

"Well that's just not right."

Lucas ended up being so focused in ensuring that Maya fell asleep and stayed that way that it took him a while to fall asleep, too. In the meantime, he thought about his friends, and what he might say about them… took a brief detour into the happy world of Maya and him being just on the verge of starting their family, too… The two sort of mixed together in the end, as thinking about how eager he was about being a dad someday left him to feel for his friends, for his oldest friend, as they had no doubt experienced that very same eagerness and found it dashed, once, twice… He was only thinking about it, hadn't lived through it as they'd done, and it was tearing into him with so much anxiety. No one deserved something like that, but these were some of his closest friends, which only made it hurt more.

When Maya's alarm sounded, the following morning, she stretched her arm over to make it stop. Turning over, she found Lucas sitting up next to her, already awake and taking some notes of his own, on a sheet he appeared to have taken from her notepad.

"Woke up with ideas, huh?" she asked, leaning her chin on his shoulder.

"Just a bit, yeah," he told her. "We should read each other's letters when we're done, yeah? Just to make sure there's not too much overlap."

"Good plan, yeah," Maya smiled before getting herself out of bed. "Is Sam up yet?"

"Ten minutes ago, probably downstairs already."

"Knowing him, I have a feeling he already has _his_ letter started," she came to pull him out of bed and downstairs with her. "I'd call him a show off, but I just think it's really sweet that he wants to write one for them, too."

"Classic Sam, right?" Lucas smiled. She laughed.

"Yeah, definitely."

They came into the kitchen to find their plates already served and their young chef already sitting at the table, eating and reading from a textbook rather than working on his letter, though there was an open notebook underneath, which Maya spent most of the meal attempting to see.

"Off!" Sam nudged her away repeatedly.

"I just want to see what you wrote for them. I'll let you read mine when it's done," she promised.

"This isn't their letter, okay?" he shook his head, and after a moment she understood. He was working on his toast, for the wedding. Maya peacefully retreated at this, nudging one of her pieces of bacon over to his plate for thanks.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	164. Their Choice of Memories

June 12th 2020

_Chapter 164  
Their Choice of Memories_

"What are you doing here?" Lucas couldn't hide his surprise as he arrived up at his floor of the bookstore to find Maeve, store vest on and everything, like she was back on the clock. "Aren't you still on leave?"

"I came back early," she casually shrugged, typing away at the computer keyboard. "Maternity leave is for rest on the end of a pregnancy, and the birth, and then looking after the baby for a while. I did part one, and part two, but I'm not doing part three, so once I was recovered I was just sitting around at home watching way too much television. And now that I'm back, you don't have to deal with those temps you complained about so much."

"They weren't so bad in the end…" he couldn't help but mention. After a few seconds of quiet between them, he had to ask… "Are you sure you're okay to…"

"I'm fine, Lucas," she cut him off, her voice sharp but her eyes pleading. Just leave it alone.

"Ship's all yours, Captain," he tipped his head to her.

"I don't know about that. From what I heard, you've been doing a pretty good job here while I was gone. Talked to Darren when I called to tell him I was coming back early, he told me all about how you handled things. We think you should keep going. You get to be… like a co-captain," she smiled. "Pays better, too."

"Wow… Well, I really appreciate that, I do."

"Figured you would," she told him, moving around the counter once she'd found what she was looking for. Lucas watched her go, the momentary happiness at the thought of this small promotion and raise sliding aside as he was left to consider what this accelerated return tended to mean for his friend and co-worker.

He didn't know it through her but through Maya, who'd heard from Ramona, but Maeve had finally gone and visited Carter and their baby girl just a few days ago. Erin was a month old now, and Maeve had not seen her in any way – her choice – since the day she was born. Ramona had not gone into much detail, already sounding like she hadn't meant to divulge this information, but all signs pointed to this having been a very emotional encounter all around, especially for Maeve. Now he had to think it was this moment, more than just being at home for no reason, which convinced her to get back to work when she did. Staying at home might have made it too easy for her to get caught up in thoughts she wanted to evade.

As the day had started in earnest, Lucas had been drawn back from thinking of one family situation to another. He had his sheet of notes folded in his back pocket, and when he'd ended up in a lull of activity, he'd opened it up on the counter before him, read through it.

He had known Nadine Zhu for half his lifetime, known Zay Babineaux for all but a handful of years of it. The number of stories he had in his head… He could have written a whole novel for whoever would be seeking to know them.

With Nadine… He had met her at the same time Zay had met her, them and Dylan and Asher. There they'd been, playing at the park, tossing the basketball around, and Dylan had overshot, sending the ball flying way past the hoop. They hadn't seen where it landed but then there'd been a screech of surprise and the boys had all stalled where they stood. A moment later a girl had come marching in their direction, the ball in her hand and a curtain of jet black hair swinging to show the intensity of her stride.

"Do we run?" Asher had quietly asked the others. They hadn't made up their mind by the time the girl stopped there and observed them. She looked to be about their age.

"Who threw this?" she asked, holding up the ball in her palm. Four fingers looked ready to point but stalled before reaching their target, overridden by solidarity. "I know it's one of you, so who was it?" And then Zay had raised his hand.

"I tripped," he spoke, staring at the girl like he was trying very hard to come up with the words but also struggled from looking at her. "I just had a growth spurt, my limbs are all over the place," he demonstrated. It had cracked through her frown like a precision hit, causing a smile to rise through and evolve into a small laugh. "I'm sorry, did I hit you?"

"Almost," she revealed. Now that she wasn't so upset, they could see the way she handled the ball, which suggested she might have been a player, too.

"Well, I think the safest thing would be for me to take myself out of the game for a little while. You could take my place, play with us for a while." This had left her intrigued, interested. She'd taken a look back the way she'd come from before turning to them again.

"I need to go and let my grandmother know, be right back," she'd tossed the ball to Zay, who just barely managed to catch it and not be carried to the ground from the momentum, and turned to run back and find her grandmother, who had been watching over the younger Zhu girls over at the sandbox.

"She's kind of intense…" Dylan had declared.

Seconds later, she'd come jogging back their way, even as she worked to pull her hair into a high swishing ponytail. She'd been paired with Lucas, as it would generally be him and Zay versus Dylan and Asher. The introductions were made, and soon the game was on. Within minutes she had shown them just how great of a player she was, and by the time her grandmother had called her back to head home, they had told her they would be back here again the next day, and she'd promised to be back again. They had played this way, day after day, for the rest of the summer, first at the park, eventually at Dylan's house. She would be going to their school, which was excellent, as she'd quickly become an integral part of their group, taking them from being 'the boys' to something more.

He didn't remember the exact day he had met Zay for the first time, though like Nadine it had happened at the park. He had vague sort of memories in the back of his mind, but he wasn't sure if those were his own recollections or simply the narrative he had retained from his mother's stories, and Zay's mother's stories. The two families lived relatively close to one another, and they would both take their sons to the park to see the fireworks in the summer.

As far as his parents had told him, Zay had wandered off from his parents' side, as they'd been chatting with friends, when he'd spotted an ice cream stand, with balloons, and lights, and sweet scents, enough to get the attention of any curious four-year-old. He'd had no money on him, of course, and once he'd realized he needed that in order to buy a cone, he'd turned and his parents… He couldn't see them anymore.

Right at this moment though, as he'd been looking around, Lucas was stepping up, brandishing the bill his mother had handed him. He was five, and he'd seen the boy standing right there, looking distressed. When he'd asked what was wrong, all the boy was able to say was that he wanted ice cream. Lucas had taken this statement in stride and looked to the woman at the counter, holding up his money. Could he have two with that?

Shortly thereafter, escorted by Tom and Melinda Friar, the boys had gone in search of the misplaced parents as they ate their ice cream. As Isaiah and Lynette Babineaux had been found and reunited with their son, they had remained in conversation with the Friars, as the boys kept together and played around until the fireworks started. That was the part that Lucas remembered the most, the two of them staring up at the sky together, faces lit up with the bright display. And by the time that was all over, they wanted to play some more, enough that numbers had been exchanged.

That had been the beginning, and from day one it had been easy with them. They were either so exactly on the same wavelength or they were on opposing ones in such a way that they complemented one another and it just worked. He had not felt that again with anyone else, not until Maya had come along, and that had been all of this and then some.

Zay though… From the beginning, the fact that Lucas was a year older, a grade above, made it so that they didn't get to be in class together. They'd find each other again, at recess, at lunch, and at the end of the day, but they'd be in their own worlds for a while, Lucas on one side and Zay, and Asher and Dylan and Nadine in time, on the other… Sometimes it would get to feel as though he'd be missing out, but soon enough they'd catch up. Then he'd started seventh grade, he'd been at a different school than the rest of them, and he'd missed so much more.

Of all people, Nadine had been the one to tell him, about the boys, the ones who had been tormenting Zay. He hadn't even told her, or Asher or Dylan, but she'd seen it, and she'd turned to Lucas for help. She'd come for advice, but what she'd done instead was set him on the path to suspension.

He'd gone back to his old school one afternoon, bailing out on gym class. He knew his friend well enough that he had to find him under the right circumstances to get him to open up, and this was the right one. There was no telling what he would find, but what he'd found was just what Nadine had said. They had him cornered, and Lucas… Lucas had reacted.

To this day, the moment remained sort of blurred out, blocked off. He mostly remembered having walked away when it was all over, walking back to his own school like an automaton. His nose was bleeding, his eye felt almost swollen shut, his shirt was torn in places, and one of his shoes felt like it had ripped open and he had to walk carefully in order to keep his foot from sliding out. He was so caught up in his head, it never occurred to him that going back to school, looking like this, would let any and all know that something had happened. And he could lie all he wanted – which he wouldn't – except that the boys on the other side had named him, and by the time he'd made it back to his school, the two principals had been in contact. It had happened fast. Before he knew it, his father had come to pick him up, for what would be his last school day in months.

As certain as he had been that he'd been doing the right thing at the time, he had known already that he shouldn't have done it, not like that. He had never gotten into a fight like that before, and all the years since he had never done it again.

"Why'd you do that?" Zay had asked, when he'd been able to come and visit for the first time. He wasn't mad, just sort of confused, possibly apologetic, like this was his fault.

"Didn't mean to. Just wanted to help," he'd spoken quietly. "The big one, he was going to hit you, had to stop him." After a beat of silence, Zay had come and sat next to him.

"Thanks, man, I owe you one." Lucas might have said he didn't have to, but Zay would insist. "Hey, at least now we all get to be in the same class, right?" Just like when he'd met Nadine, he'd managed to find just the thing to lighten the mood, making him smile. It was the kind of thing he knew would make him a great dad someday, the kind of thing Lucas had to convey in his letter.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	165. Their Choice of Promise

June 13th 2020

_Chapter 165  
Their Choice of Promise_

Maya had been waiting on this day for weeks, maybe months, maybe since the previous summer and the end of that first run of the Stage Ready Summer Camp. The whole exercise had been possibly her favorite part of the entire project, and to know that they would get to do it all over again the following year… It had been something like a trial run last time, but now… Now their test had been shown as a success, as far as Siobhan and the theater but also for people attending. Registration had turned into an affair of having to turn people away when they had reached capacity. Maya had felt so bad, seeing how many more wanted to sign up and having to tell them no. She had worked extra hard to find ways to increase their capacities, and she had succeeded, to a degree. It would have to be a consolation of sorts.

Another loophole she had pieced together was to record some sessions like workshops, uploaded to the camp's page on the theater's site. These had come together as she'd seen to their various mentors for the summer. They were getting most of their people from the last camp, as well as a few new additions, but also a handful of what might be called star mentors. The very first of those to offer up her services was Ree Forster, who would be coming to spend a few days with them at the end of June.

"A week later and I would have missed it," Maya had told her, the day they had spoken over the phone to confirm.

"Right, yes, the wedding!" Ree had replied, sounding like she had the biggest smile.

"Yeah," Maya had laughed, and before she realized she was saying it, "Hey, if you're still in town…" She'd had about a second to realize who she was speaking to again, before Ree Forster had given an excited sound and accepted the invitation. Maya was so startled for a moment and had to make sure she'd heard right.

"Of course I'll be there," Ree had told her. "You just send me the details."

Two days later, she'd had to call Sophie again. Her wedding planner had threatened to quit, until she'd learned about the new additions and offered to go sit in the back in order to give them a good view.

Maya left early the first morning of camp, all the better to get everything set and allow her to devote all her attention to the campers. Sitting at her desk for a moment, she leaned back in her chair, swiveling about as she picked up her notes for Nadine and Zay. She couldn't pretend as though this wouldn't be running through her mind throughout the day, too.

Zay had been the first one to see her, to speak to her, the day she'd started school in Texas. Sure, he'd been sitting just eight or so feet behind where she'd been standing, but even if he'd been further away, he would have clocked her for being new and he would have reached out. That was just who he was. He had opened the door for her, an easy invitation into their inner circle.

She vividly remembered that first week, as she'd been finding her way in this new world. The first couple of days, even as her soon-to-be friends were fairly strangers to her, they had made her feel safer, more welcome. It had been enough so that, by the third morning, she had been secure enough to approach them herself. Lucas and Zay had been there on the steps, and for a few minutes Lucas had stepped away when called up by his mother, who'd shown up out of nowhere because she had forgotten to give him something. It had left Maya alone with Zay and led to their first proper one on one conversation.

"It must be weird, being the new kid," he'd told her, out of the blue. She'd had no idea how to respond to that, really couldn't put it into words. He'd seen this, realized he might have said something he shouldn't, might have upset her, and he'd worked at once to divert away from this. "Nadine, she was new last year, too. She didn't come from anywhere as far as you did, but no one knew her either… except us," he'd nodded with some satisfaction, giving her a brief rundown of how they'd met her at the park and started hanging out. "Once you're one of us, you're all good. A year from now, it'll be like you were always there."

"That'd be nice," she'd said, becoming very interested in the strap of her bag, sitting in her lap.

"Hey, you know, there's the Fall Festival starting up, just wait until you see it," he'd picked up the thread of conversation again before it could be dropped. "If you want to go, you don't have to…"

"What do you do out there?" Maya had asked, thinking back to her mother pointing out the poster when they had come in the first day.

"Oh, well, you know, there's all these games, and live shows, and some years there's a scavenger hunt, and then there's food… So much food…" he'd sighed, with the goofiest little smile. "Yeah, so, it's pretty great. Might be fun for someone new in town to get to know the place…" There was zero subtlety in the statement, but it also had one hundred percent genuine kind-heartedness, and it had left Maya feeling like she definitely wanted to go, especially with Zay, and Lucas, and the rest of the group.

That first Fall Festival remained some of her most cherished memories tied to the city itself. It had also been one of those seminal moments in her first year transitioning from New York Maya to Texas Maya, to one of that group of friends that felt plenty more like a family. She had come to Austin and very early on been blessed with three brothers, and a… might have seemed like a brother until feelings became a thing and then that word was forgotten… And she'd been gifted a sister, too, in the form of Nadine Zhu.

Those four guys were very nearly her whole world when she'd been new to Austin, and she wasn't the kind to denote any difference between having guy friends and girl friends, but she couldn't deny Nadine's presence and her relationship to her was different than the one she had with the boys. Nadine became many things to her over time, a friend, a sister, a bandmate, a teammate... Given the chance, they would have loved to have been roommates at one time or another.

Very often she would find herself thinking about those sleepovers they'd have, in that first year especially. It might have been that having five relative strangers spending the night at her house, four of them boys especially, would have been strange, but she'd welcomed it, again and again. The boys would be relegated to the basement, of course, a clear warning that nothing inappropriate was to happen and a ridiculous notion, at least with the six of them at that age. And then Nadine would be upstairs, in Maya's room. This was before the second floor had been built on to the little house, or else they just might have been shuttled up there, too, an additional set of stairs between them and The Boys.

The two of them had been talking for a while, up in the bay window, and then because it was a sleepover and the rest of their friends were 'banished' to the basement, the natural option was to gather up the laundry basket and go pelt them with rolled up socks. The battle had been short and swift before Maya's mother had happened and the two of them had been left to dash back to her room. Giddy and out of breath, they'd gone to settle in for the night. Eventually, and especially as Riley and others would be added to the mix, sleeping bags would be involved, but for the time being Maya had been happy to scoot over and share with her new friend. After a while of lying there and not falling asleep, they had both turned on their sides to face one another.

"Can't sleep either?" Nadine had asked.

"Nope," Maya had shaken her head. "What do we do now? Do you think the boys are asleep yet?"

"No way," Nadine had snorted.

"What do you think they're doing then?" Maya had wondered and, after pondering for a few seconds, Nadine had declared in a confident whisper…

"Either they're trying to spook each other to see which one will make a noise first, or talking about the turtles again…"

"As in Ninja?" Maya had been forced to cover her mouth for fear of _her_ being the one to make a noise and rouse her mother. Nadine pressed her lips together for the same reason as she nodded.

"Everything I know about those turtles, I learned it from them. Summer before last, they made me watch movies, and cartoons… They're so silly about it, they keep changing their minds which boy is which turtle. You have no idea how happy I am that you're here now. Can you keep a secret?"

"Don't like the turtles?" Maya had guessed.

"Can't stand a single one," Nadine confirmed, sending them both in quiet giggles.

"I'm happy to be here, although…"

"You're on their side, aren't you?" Nadine 'squinted' at her.

"Not obsessed like they clearly are, but yeah…"

"Please, can we keep this between us, we will never hear the end of it otherwise."

"My lips are sealed," she had vowed, and she'd kept her word. To this day, the boys had no idea. Well, Lucas knew, but he was Lucas, so of course he'd found out eventually.

That night though, as they'd lay there in the dark, two new friends staring at each other, Maya had been curious. Maybe it was the spirit of the sleepover, the mischief of the sock war. Either way, she'd ended up asking a question that had been on her mind for a little while.

"If you had to date one of them, who would it be?" It had surprised Nadine, though only briefly, and then it had just made her laugh. "Hey, we're sharing," Maya pointed out.

"No, that's fair," Nadine had agreed, all the while holding up her little finger, like a contract of secrecy being extended. Maya had hooked her finger with hers. This stayed between them. "Well, that summer after I moved here, I may or may not have had this tiny dumb crush on Lucas," she confessed.

"Wow," Maya had smirked, thinking to herself 'well, he _is_ kind of cute.' "So you've moved on, huh?" The way she'd hesitated, like the truth was right there on the tip of her tongue and she sort of felt the need to push it back in, to protect it, Maya had known _this_ was more than a 'tiny dumb crush.' To show her she was safe to share, Maya had presented her with not one but two little fingers, a double promise.

Nadine had smiled, and she'd hooked her fingers with hers, and she'd told her the truth, that after having him in her life for just over a year, it had gotten to feel more and more like her feelings could only ever be directed toward the boy who'd first made her feel welcome, who'd invited her to play with him and his friends. They weren't just Z and Z because it was a funny nickname. It was them, they just fit together, always had. At the time, Maya doubted she could know just how true this would turn out to be. For better or worse, they had stuck through it all. Their adventure had been going on for more than half their lifetime, and there were so many chapters left to be written.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	166. Their Choice of Kinship

June 14th 2020

_Chapter 166  
Their Choice of Kinship_

_June 8th 2027_

_To whom it may concern,_

_I am writing this letter on behalf of my friends, Isaiah and Nadine. When I was asked to put into words who they were as people, as potential parents, the answer was easy. I have been friends with them most of my life and theirs. I have seen them both grow from strangers to friends, seen them fall in love and grow together, through ups and downs. And I have seen them through this time in their lives, when their wish of making a family together was challenged by problems beyond their control. Finding just the stories to share was the difficult part._

_I have known Isaiah Babineaux since we were both very young. He was four, I was five. I don't remember a time when he wasn't right there by my side. Neither one of us had any brothers or sisters, but from the moment we met we were that for one another, best friends and brothers. I have watched him evolve from a boy to a man, and naturally he has changed in many ways over the past twenty-one years, but the qualities I have seen carry through those years are the ones that make one of the best people I've ever known._

_Isaiah is kind. This might sound simple, as a word, as a sentiment, but to know him like I do, I could not find a better one to suit him. He is funny, and energetic, and he can make anyone smile if given half a chance. He loves to dance, and he will show off his moves whenever they are needed, especially to cheer people up. But most of all, if I had to pin down one core quality to define my friend Zay, I would say that he is kind._

_When I was thirteen years old, I was suspended from school for the better part of the year, which forced me to repeat the seventh grade. It was a time in my life which plagued me for a long time, still does sometimes. My actions, as good intentioned as they had been, left me deeply shamed. They painted me in a color which many people around me saw as deplorable and permanently telling of my character. Others who knew me better continued to stand by me, but none of them did so the way Isaiah did. He never once allowed me to believe any of the words said about me, no matter how much a part of me couldn't help but take them in._

_Every day for the rest of that school year, he would come over to my house after he got out of class. He was in the sixth grade at the time, a year below me. If he couldn't make it on any of those days, he would call. On the weekends, he practically lived at our house for how much time he spent there, even more so once summer started. Any kid would want to hang out with his or her best friend, but it was about more than that. He understood how lonely I was becoming, and he wanted to cheer me up. He'd always find some reason or another, saying he wanted to show me this game he got, or this movie he'd heard about, saying he wanted to borrow something, or to ask if I thought he'd gotten taller… He probably thought I couldn't see through his visits, and I never saw reason to tell him I knew. He was my best friend, my brother, and he wanted to keep me company._

_The boy he was at age twelve is not so different from the man he is now at twenty-five. He's the one that shows up for you, no matter what. That's the kind of father I know he will be. When Isaiah Babineaux takes you into his heart, you're family, for life. And when you're his family, he will do whatever he can to protect you, to support you, to make you laugh._

_I met Nadine Zhu the summer before she and Isaiah both started the sixth grade, met her the same day the two of them met each other. They were twelve years old, both of them, nearly thirteen. We were at the park, four of us playing basketball, and she came upon us after catching our runaway ball. Isaiah asked her if she wanted to play with us._

_Within an hour of knowing her, we all had a good first impression of who this girl was. Driven and fearless, with a mean hook shot and an honest and open mind… She was funny, too, the kind of funny that complimented Isaiah's right away. We called them Z and Z, Tall Z and Little Z. The name caught on pretty quick. She became one of us without even trying._

_It wasn't just that she was the only girl hanging out with a bunch of boys who'd grown up together that made it so that she took care of us a lot of the time in that first year. She was always the most level-headed of all of us. She was the eldest of three, soon four girls, with a father who worked nights and a mother who needed help with the house and the littler ones. If that wasn't enough, here we were, collecting bumps and bruises like it was our job. She probably saved our necks a couple of times._

_We'd known each other no more than five months when I was suspended. She could have walked away from me, from Isaiah, from all of us, and decided that she needed better friends. But she didn't do that. If anything, that time made us better friends._

_Over Christmas, she had invited my family to come see the lights outside her house. I used the opportunity to ask her a favor. I asked her if she might tutor me, in private. I didn't want it to become a thing with the rest of my friends, didn't want them to know I worried about what it would be like when I went back to school, if I hadn't been in class for almost a year. As I said, we barely knew each other at the time, but she agreed. So, once a week, either in person or over the phone or computer, we'd have our lessons. She would give me something to do and I would do it throughout the week, and we would go over it the next time. We kept it up, from January through August. I don't know that I would have been able to return to school that September with half the confidence I had if it wasn't for her._

_Nadine Zhu deserves to be a mom, as much as any kid would be lucky to have the chance to call her by that name. Mine will only be one of many letters telling you the same thing, in my own way, because anyone who counts her as a friend could tell you what I have come to know over these past thirteen years. And what I've come to know is that this woman has been taking care of us since she was a girl, and now it is our privilege, as her friends, to show her that same amount of care by speaking on her behalf._

_As good as they are as individuals, they have always been a pair, since the days of Z and Z. They were the first of any of us to start dating, just before eighth grade. There is no hiding of the fact that they split up, for nearly half a year, three years ago, just as they would both tell you they had been miserable the entire time. They had gone away together when we all started college, they were so far away, which made it impossible for several of us to do whatever we could, from a distance, to be there for them, as they had always been for us. But then by the time they reconciled it was all too clear that none of us needed to do much. Given half a chance, they were going to find their way back to each other, where they belonged. Looking at them now, they are without a doubt stronger for the experience._

_Two years ago, I had the pleasure and the privilege to act as best man at their wedding. And by the time you read this letter, in all likelihood, Isaiah will have already returned the favor at my own. On that day, two years ago, I made my proposal, on the day of Isaiah and Nadine's wedding, which, to some people, could be seen as inappropriate. It wasn't that to them; it wasn't even a question. Here was an opportunity for one friend to spring an unexpected surprise on another. It didn't take away from their day so much as make it even more memorable._

_The two of them together, they are something to behold. I could go on, sharing many more stories, anecdotes, victories big and small, comically embarrassing memories, for pages and pages. Instead, if I may indulge, I would like to share not a story but a hope. There is so much of the past for me to tell, but when all that is done, there's the future, too. Isaiah and Nadine have been dreaming of this family of theirs for some time already, as I myself have dreamed of one of my own, with my fiancée and wife to be. The four of us, as many of our group of friends, have grown together throughout the years. Now we stand as adults, some of us married, others headed down that direction, and many of us now thinking of this next step in our journey._

_We have grown together, and as the years go on, as our families grow, I imagine days upon days, where we get to watch our children grow together. Just months ago, it was New Year's Eve, and that vision had never felt so clear. For a brief time, it was beginning. I sat with my best friend, and we just started to picture it. He told me how he could just about picture a little boy, sort of tall, all limbs like him but as much of his mother in him as possible. He asked me about when my fiancée and I would be coming around to our own kids. It was still a question at the time, as far as I was concerned, but I knew why he was asking. We'd been part of each other's lives for as long as we could remember, and he liked the idea of our kids together. I liked it, too._

_He asked me what I saw, and I told him, and for a while we conjured up the adventures of a dream boy and girl, watching fireworks together, playing basketball, as we looked on._

_You may not know my friends, but I hope that my letter, and all the other letters you will find with it will allow you to get to know them enough, to help them on the path of becoming the parents they have dreamed of becoming. Theirs will be a happy, loving home, with a lot of laughter, a lot of love, and so _so_ much dancing._

_Thank you for your time,_

_With regards,_

_Lucas Friar_

TO BE CONTINUED

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	167. Their Choice of Love

June 15th 2020

_Chapter 167  
Their Choice of Love_

_June 11th 2027_

_To whom it may concern,_

_When I was asked if I would write this letter for my friends, to present them as they are, to help them on their way toward adoption, the answer was easy. Nadine and Zay have been two of my very best friends, from the day I met them twelve years ago. I can say with confidence that I would not be the person I am today without them. I have been made better, many times over, because of their friendship, their support, and just who they are as people. I can't even imagine what it would be like to seek out complete strangers and choose them to raise one's child, so allow me to paint you a picture of this couple as I have known them and come to love them._

_I moved from New York to Texas when I was thirteen years old. It was a difficult transition for me to make and when the time came for me to start school again, I was not looking forward to it. I would be surrounded by brand new people, and the school year had already started. And then I met Zay. He had been selected by the principal to be my guide, but as a favor to his best friend he respectfully passed on the task. This best friend, by the time you read this, is my husband._

_Zay was no longer my guide, officially, but he became a fast friend. It is easy to like him. He has this easy-going lightness to him, the kind that makes you want to smile, to talk with him and get to know him. There is not a bone in him that isn't genuine, he can only ever be one hundred percent Zay. He doesn't take himself more seriously than he ever has to, he loves life, he is welcoming and kind, humble and caring, and as easy as it is for him to crack jokes, it would be easy for people not to see how observant he is of the world around him, and those he cares for._

_I discovered the depth of Zay's character very early on. I was still having difficulty adjusting to my relocation from New York, still missed my old home, and one night I tried to run away. I had confessed this much to my then new friend and eventual fiancé, Lucas, and he offered to accompany me. Whether he ever expected us to make it out of the city, I couldn't say, but both he and Zay came to find me before I could go anywhere. He was the one who pieced it together. Lucas still wanted to go with me, and Zay decided to come along. He was thirteen, I'd recently turned fourteen. As plans went, there were several flaws from the get go, though none of us were old enough to see them and recognize them. Zay wanted to come along, wanted to protect me, his friend. If he couldn't stop me going, then he'd be there to back me up. It was a big moment for him._

_We never made it out of Austin. If you were to ask any of the three of us, we never expected to make it anywhere, but this feeling had to be spent, and Zay, like Lucas, stood by my side, all the way, because that's just who he is. He looks out for the people he cares for, he is relentless at it._

_This coming fall, he will be starting his second year as a teacher, in the fourth grade. To hear him speak about his class, his students, there is just no limit to the pride he shows in his work and in his kids. And in this second set of fourth graders, as we have all been playfully teasing him, he will get to teach his very own sister-in-law, Nadine's youngest sister, Olivia, who just turned ten. We have all watched her grow since she was born, and though we have been close to all three of Nadine's younger sisters, Zay has always had the tightest bond with Olivia. She was like the little sister he never had, and she treated him like something between an imaginary friend and a teddy bear. Even as he and Nadine relocated to Boston for college, he never forgot her or cut her out of his life, not even in the brief period when he and Nadine were broken up. To see the two of them together is to see the potential Zay has in him to be an amazing father._

_The day I met Nadine, I gained a sister. The two of us being the only girls among a group of six might have made our friendship easy, but really it had a lot more to do with who she was. She was a recent transfer herself, new of the year before, and she understood what it was like. She had so much confidence in herself, an unshakeable strength, and she exuded these qualities in such a way that made me want to strive to grow and evolve, like I could believe I had so much more to offer. I _did_ have so much more, and a lot of it was manifested thanks to her._

_First, she was my friend, my sister, and then she became my teammate. We were on our school's basketball team from the eighth grade through the twelfth. We didn't get to play through tenth and eleventh, when our school's teams were disbanded, but ask any one of us who were on those teams at the time and they will tell you, we never stopped being teammates. We had a fantastic first season together, in middle school, and then we started high school. Nadine didn't know if she would try out that year. She had her studies, and she had the team, and one had to take priority. She didn't want either side to suffer for divided attention. In the end, the two of us worked together, to balance out both sides. It meant a lot of work on my side, to improve my grades enough to reach her level. She was worth all of it, and with her motivation and support, I got to where I needed to be. It is the kind of inspiration I hope to pass on to my own students as I begin my first year of teaching in the fall._

_From friend, sister, classmate, and teammate, Nadine and I have been bandmates for the past ten years. What started out as a few teenage girls trying their hand at music has turned into a journey beyond our wildest dreams. We have been places, met people, and done things that we will remember for the rest of our lives. Nadine had to step away from the band while she was away to study in Boston, but she has been back with us for the past two years, lending her voice and other musical talents to the group she helped create._

_Being far apart from friends has never been easy, especially when difficult times strike any one of us. I was so far away from both Nadine and Zay as they went through their break, and there was hardly anything I could do. Then, three years ago, I lost my father. He lived back in New York, and while I was up there, Nadine and Zay both came over from Boston whenever time allowed, and sometimes even when it didn't. And once I returned to Austin, they would call, every day, either one or the other or both, for weeks and months after. We would write each other, all of us, on a near daily basis already, but they would take this time out of their days, whether it was a few minutes or nearly an hour. There were days when I looked forward to their calls, knowing how just the sound of their voices or seeing their faces would do me good. I don't know that I've ever really thanked them for that, but I hope they know, how much it meant to me, how much I love them for it._

_Nadine and Zay were the first in our little group, the original seven, to get together. They were just fourteen at the time, and it was hard to predict where any of us would end up as time went on, but I think you could ask any of us and we would say we knew at least that these two were meant to carry on. It is almost too strange to think, sometimes, how the six of those seven have since paired up, how we could all have found that one person for us, right next to us. But now here we are, one couple married, another about to be married, and the other showing no sign of slowing down. And that little group of seven is so much bigger now. Before we know it, it will get so much bigger…_

_Nadine and Zay were the first of us to get together, the first of us to be married, and they might have been the first of us to have a child if not for the losses they have suffered. Now, here we are. You may not know Nadine and Zay, but you will find there are so many of us, near and far, ready and willing to tell you all about them, tell you how much they deserve to be parents. They await this chance, just as we await it for them._

_For my part, I like to imagine that this child is already out there somewhere, and they don't know it yet, but somewhere in Austin, Texas, their family is already there, just waiting to meet them, to hold them and love them. They'll have a staggering amount of aunts and uncles, born of friendship, ready to embrace them, and show them the world. They'll three sweet young aunts, ready to swarm in with so much love. They'll have a great great grandmother who makes the best cookies in the world. They'll have grandparents standing by so eager to hold their own babies' first baby. And they'll have a mother and father who have so much love built up in them, just waiting to give it to this child._

_As I'm sitting here, trying to think of how I'm supposed to close this letter, when so many stories are competing to be told, I keep thinking back to so many little things, tiny snippets of life that almost seem too insignificant to be called to, and still… I think of friends dancing at Chubbie's, of shared treats at the movie theater, and smores around a campfire. I think of airports, with sad farewells and giddy reunions. I think my own young brothers and sisters, eager for a visit from Uncle Zay and Aunt Nadine. I think looks of deep love in the middle of a first dance as husband and wife. I think of hopes dashed and hope returned. I know more than my share about how precious and fragile hope can be, how hard it can be to hold on to it or even believe in it at all. And they have it, now. They have it, and we're all here, all of us, this family we made, so many aunts and uncles, nesting our hands around theirs, to protect that hope and make it stronger._

_Thank you very much,_

_Maya Hart_

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	168. Their Choice of Music

_**A/N:** The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

June 16th 2020

_Chapter 168  
Their Choice of Music_

"I don't think he's going to let her go anytime soon," Lucas smiled, turning back to Maya, Nadine, and Isadora. The three of them were already looking on to where Zay sat on the ground, holding the hands of eighteen-month-old Ada Marie Minkus as she stood on her wobbly little legs and stared back at him. She giggled at everything he did, which only prompted him to do more.

"Well, we'll be in Austin for a couple of weeks, he will see her plenty of times," Isadora pointed out. The Minkus family would have been in town for the wedding alone, but then the band anniversary had become a thing, and scheduled as it was, not two weeks before the big day, they had turned their visit into a sort of family vacation. "I'll be happy not to be on a plane again for a while."

"Ada didn't like to fly?" Nadine sympathetically guessed.

"Oh, no, she loved it, she was having the time of her life. I think the altitudes just didn't favor me right now with the…" She stopped so very suddenly that it was impossible for them not to catch on to the expression and how it read as her having been on the verge of saying something she wasn't supposed to say.

"With the what?" Maya and Nadine both asked, almost in sync. Isadora looked back at them, doing an excellent impression of a gaping fish, struggling without words.

"Al… titude?" she almost squeaked.

"Try that again?" Maya's brow arched in disbelief. Their visiting friend and former bandmate mumbled something without meeting their eyes. "Speak up, Smackle," Maya tapped her knee.

"Okay, okay, I'm pregnant, are you happy?" Isadora finally blurted out, sitting up straight.

"What'd she say?" Zay called up from the ground as he whipped his head back to find the trio on the couch already huddled together and embracing their ability to hug.

"Of course we're happy, why wouldn't we be?" Maya asked Isadora, the tremor in her voice showing the heights of this happiness. At the return of the gaping fish, Nadine was the one to understand why she'd been trying to keep quiet on the subject.

"Hey, it's okay, really," she told her. "Better than okay, it's wonderful. How long have you known?" she asked, chuckling when she saw Zay on the ground, attempting to give Ada a delicate sort of high five over her being about to become a big sister. The girl didn't exactly comprehend the purpose of the exercise, but she found it hilarious anyway.

"Few weeks now," Isadora replied with a nod. "I'm due just after Valentine's Day."

Farkle had just been out at the rental car, getting Ada's things back into the car after their short visit before checking into the hotel for the night. When he had come back in to collect his wife and daughter, he was snatched up into the arms of his old friend, where he discovered the cat was out of the bag about Baby Minkus 2. Looking back at him now, Maya could hardly see her little Farkle friend in this grown man, father of one and soon two. It was bittersweet sometimes, to look at her friends, especially the ones who'd been with her the longest, and see how much they had all changed. It was a good change, wonderful, but it was still a change. The past was the past, and it hadn't all been good, but some of it had been legendary, and that was what Farkle was, and that was what Riley was…

"You're lucky you're already here or I would have hunted you down for not telling me sooner," Maya told him with a smirk.

"Would you have been able to control yourself the moment you saw us?" Farkle countered. Maya decided to let him have it. There was no way he wouldn't win his argument in the end.

"I'm going to go cuddle your firstborn before you leave," she sauntered off, allowing Lucas to step up and have his own moment.

"You figured it out, didn't you?" Farkle asked him, calling back their last conversation before the Minkus family had flown in.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Lucas shrugged this off, though his eyes said enough.

As difficult as it was for those four of them who now knew, the secret of the new baby on its way was kept through the days to follow. The next day, the band had gathered in the Hex, the better to run through the evening's show. There was already something electric about gathering all members past and present of TXNY, but to have them in the studio like this… It was power enough for the whole lane. Maya on guitar, Riley on keyboard, Kayla on drums, Rosa on bass and Isadora as well, Nadine with her violin and Willow at the ready with some of her array, ready for whatever…

Maya couldn't even stay and face forward, she had to turn and face toward the other six, to see them all as they sang and played, to immortalize it all in her head for future artistic endeavors. She looked at them as they did their part, women all. They had started this, a bunch of kids who'd found it amusing to stand on a 'stage' and sing together at the Babineaux family summer party. Some songs were written, and somehow they'd gotten traction. They'd started doing shows, they'd appeared on television, on the radio. Albums happened, and so many more songs… Their voices had found ears in more countries than they could know, and they had been imbued with the power to cause change, using it well. They had been offered fame on a platter and turned it aside in favor of this self-made power. The lineup had changed a couple of times, but here they stood now, halfway through their twenties, some married, some with children, most out of school and evolving into the careers they had worked for. TXNY stood, and it would keep standing, if they had any say in it.

"Hey," Nadine had stopped her, after practice had ended and the others started to head back out toward the house. When it was just the two of them, Maya shut the door and turned back to her friend.

"What's up?" she asked, just as Nadine caught her in a hug. Maya reciprocated it without question.

"Thank you so much," Nadine told her, and now she smiled, understanding. They had passed on the letters, from Maya, Lucas, and Sam, but also Katy, Shawn, Tom, and Melinda, to Zay and her the night before, as they'd gone home. The first two had been expected and received with thanks, the third had been a surprise, much appreciated. The additional stack had very nearly floored the prospective parents. Going from the look on Nadine's face now, she and Zay had read them all and been deeply touched.

"Hey, when have we ever done things halfway?" Maya laughed. "Damn, now I just thought about your whole pep talk about me being a teacher, is it too late for edits?" she joked, and now Nadine laughed along with her. "Don't start crying now, no one likes a puffy-faced superstar," Maya led her bandmate out of the Hex to rejoin the others.

There had been just a bit of crying two nights past, when the letters had been swapped between Maya, Lucas, and Sam, to ensure no mistakes had managed to evade them before they passed on the envelopes to their friends. For Sam, it meant making a few discoveries about his sister and her husband to be, while Maya and Lucas relived many a memory from years both recent and further in the past. It was difficult by the end of it to think that anyone would _not_ want to put a child in their care after reading all of that, but then it wasn't up to them, was it? All they could do was hope that they had done enough.

And now here they were, celebrating this wildly unexpected anniversary. Back in the day, the girls might have been satisfied to see their little project last the rest of the summer, a few short weeks until the start of the school year. They would never have believed a decade could go by and they'd still be at it.

Already, they had been treated with what felt like 'an abundance of feels.' There had been 'Shirt Day,' as Cecilia had told them about. Outside of the city, the state, the country, the whole continent, fans had been holding to the appointed day and sending in photos to show their own participation. _In_ the city, it hadn't taken long that a scheme had been organized between the bandmates, to go in search of these local fans who would be easily spotted, just to say hello. There had been many, many giddy girls and boys in Austin that day.

The closer they had been getting to today, the more their fan base had seemingly been working overtime to make them happy cry, with so many testimonies of how they had discovered the band, and how much they loved their music, and which songs were their favorites, and how they appreciated everything they did… And then all the videos, all the covers… There were just so many, and they were all still working their way through it all, determined as they were not to let any one of them fall unnoticed.

Being mindful of how widespread this love had always been, their show was to be livestreamed and later available on their site, for those who could not be there in person to see it. This wasn't just TXNY performing, this was TXNY expressing ten years of gratitude, for all the support they had received, support which had made it so that they were even here at all, that they hadn't just moved on to something else. For her part, Maya really would not have felt it to be right if they didn't make it happen this way. She had sort of benefited most of all, hadn't she? Yes, she was with the band, on her own terms, and she would continue to be, but she also had this contract, which would never have happened without the band. This contract would mean a freedom of sorts, the kind she might not have had on an art teacher's salary. She had not forgotten where she came from. This meant the world to her.

"Are you a singer or a kangaroo?" Lucas asked, when he went to find her backstage, before they went up, and found her casually jumping around.

"Too much energy, letting it out," she informed him.

"Okay, can you just hop over here then?" he extended his arm with a smile. Maya laughed, skittering over to him and locking her arms around his waist.

"Hey there," she smirked up at him. "Are you the bouncer?"

"No, I'm pretty sure that's you right now," he replied, with a proud sort look on his face, especially as she realized she'd walked right into the joke.

"Ha, ha, you're hilarious," she attempted to flatly reply but mostly fell victim to her own giggles.

"And you are such a weirdo," he declared as he held her close.

"Soon to be Mrs. Weirdo," she nodded. "Go on, say it."

"Twelve days," he happily complied. She mouthed the words back at him and he leaned in to kiss her.

"Now, you hold on to that thought, I'm going to go do a thing," Maya informed him, nodding off toward the stage entrance.

Soon, Lucas would be out in the audience, along with the rest of the friends and family gathered that evening. He was all too happy to rejoin the lineup of various boyfriends and husbands, with Dylan, Zay, Farkle, Will, and Lion. Maybe it was all the time they had spent writing those letters for Zay and Nadine, but something about being surrounded by all these people tonight, the friends they had made and kept along the years, felt particularly special.

On the stage, the seven strong roster of TXNY in its tenth year was received with all the energy they had been left to expect and then some.

"Well, she's down for the count," Willow later declared, smiling, as she looked on to the sleeping Isadora. They had returned to the house on the lane, after the show was over, because how else could they cap off the night but to hang out and have themselves a sleepover? The mom of three had worked to carefully get the sleeping one settled in, undisturbed. Maya suspected she was on to the secret of the new Minkus baby, as she'd be bound to pick up on a few things, though she didn't breathe a word. "Been a while since I did a show, I'm kind of tapped out, too."

_"With three of your own, that's no wonder,"_ Kayla smiled. They could hardly believe how much time had gone by, but then there would be the Obi kids, with Zola already four years old, ruling merrily over her brothers, and Sekani already two and a half and chatting up a storm, and little Liam who had turned one just last month.

"I'm just happy not to be constantly pregnant anymore at this point," Willow joked.

"I never get used to this feeling, you know?" Rosa hummed, lying back on her sleeping bag. "I'm exhausted, but I also feel like I could keep going for hours."

"We could watch a movie," Riley suggested, already halfway to her phone to seek out options. Rosa gave a dismissive noise at the suggestion, tapping her roommate on the leg so she'd stop. "Or sleep. Sleep is also good," Riley smiled, and Rosa nodded, tapping at her pillow to adjust it.

"Hey, Rosa," Nadine stretched out her foot to nudge her, sending their youngest member flailing and making the others laugh. "Who was that girl who came to see you after the show?" Rosa opened an eye. "Classmate, co-worker?"

"Huh? Oh, her… yeah…" Rosa slowly responded. Possibly, the exhaustion of the night was making it difficult for her to come up with an answer… Which was to say she didn't want to share the actual answer, which left her in need of a lie to cover up… It was too late now. "It's a long story and I am going to sleep now, good night, great show, bye," she waved her hand turned on to her side, leaving the others to share a look translating to 'if I didn't know any better, I'd say Shorty's in love.' Maya scooted over, tapping Rosa's shoulder.

"What's her name?" A few seconds went by.

"Jenna."

"Are you going to want that plus one after all?" A few seconds went by, and a few more after that.

"Maybe."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	169. Their Night With the Morning

June 17th 2020

_Chapter 169  
Their Night With the Morning_

Lucas woke to the morning of July 1st with kisses pressed to his fingers. Opening his eyes, he smiled, leaning to return the gesture with a kiss to his fiancée's shoulder… His fiancée today, and tomorrow… tomorrow… Maya turned on to her back now, looking at him with eyes full of giddy anticipation. Lucas responded by pulling her close all at once and launching an attack where he knew her to be ticklish. Her laughter filled the quiet room with sound and his heart with love.

"You are playing with fire, I know _your_ spots, too!" he managed to hear amidst the rolling giggles.

"I'll take my chances," he laughed back, just before she went and found the easiest way to get him to stop, which was to capture him into a kiss. Peace was regained, and in time they simply remained this way, holding to one another, forehead to forehead. The Hart-Lanes had arrived in Austin a couple days back, and Sam was out there spending time with them at the hotel, which left the house to the 'nearlyweds.'

"We need to make sure all the windows and doors are locked," Maya whispered.

"What for?" Lucas whispered back, rather than to ask why they were whispering.

"Well, I don't know if you're aware of this, might have completely slipped your mind, but we're kind of getting married tomorrow?"

"Oh, that would explain a few things, now that you mention it," he played along, getting a snort from her.

"And even though I don't necessarily hold to the superstition, I just know at some point today someone will come along and split us up until tomorrow. I would like to formally lodge a complaint, and I'm making my stand, right here and now. I don't want to go, and I don't want you to go either.

"You could just tell them that? Aren't they supposed to do whatever you want right now?" Her eyes widened with realization, mischief slipping on like a glove.

"Ah, yes, my superpowers have kicked in, I am The Bride," she intoned. "What will I do? What if I turn into a supervillain?"

"I don't know, but I'm picturing it in my head and I'm not hating it."

"I had a feeling you wouldn't," she smirked.

"Please, can I get a sketch of that?" he asked.

"Get me breakfast, and I will make that happen for you. You can take Evil Maya with you if we do end up spending the night apart."

"Liking this plan," he briefly kissed her before rolling out of bed. When he started grabbing clothes to get dressed, she asked where he was going. "We are getting married tomorrow, I am going to Ma Maggie's and bringing you back The Works."

"I knew I loved you for a reason," she hummed, sitting up.

Lucas soon drove off, putting in the order over the phone so that it would be ready by the time he arrived, the better to start back toward home as soon as possible. He returned and searched his way up to the attic to finally find his fiancée, sitting at her drawing desk, putting what appeared to be the finishing touches on her commission. Lucas perched his chin on her shoulder to have a look.

"She seems nice," he decided. Maya turned a look at him.

"She is _evil_," she reminded him, pointing to the image.

"Yeah, but she's you, I can't help seeing her good side."

"I'm sure that's what you're seeing," Maya laughed, pulling the page free and holding it out to him for a moment before yanking it away when he reached. "Food?"

"Downstairs," he promised. "Don't I smell like pancakes and bacon and all that?"

"Are you asking me to sniff you?" she teased.

"Bags of food," he gestured over his shoulder. "Three dogs."

"Here you are, sir, one evil version of yours truly. Let's go," she handed him the drawing and sped off toward the steps.

They broke into their meal, happily recounting events of recent days, as more and more of their extended families converged on Austin for the wedding. There were still a few more expected to arrive today, though they would not get to see them until the following day. By the blessed intervention of their wedding planner, the two of them were to be left alone today, to enjoy a quiet day before the chaos that would be the one afterward. Whatever remaining tasks were left to be checked off today would be handled by someone else. They had this day to themselves.

They had just finished eating when the doorbell rang.

"It's the kidnappers, hide!" Maya whispered dramatically.

"If they're going to make one of us go anywhere, it won't be until tonight," Lucas chuckled, rising to go see who it was.

"Yeah, well, I'm not taking any chances," Maya followed after him, even as the dogs had run along with curiosity.

Of all the people they might have expected on the other side of the door, they had not counted Mitch Sanderson from up the lane. But here he was, looking like an older, taller, male version of his daughter, Missy.

"Hey, sorry to bother you, I'm sure you two must be busy today, with tomorrow…"

"What's going on?" Lucas asked.

"Missy sent me to come and get you. She would have come herself, but she didn't want to leave Coraline right now. The puppies are coming."

Lucas turned to Maya. He _had_ told their young neighbor that he would be there, as much because she wanted him to be and because he wanted to be there, to be part of it. But this was meant to be his and Maya's day, to just be here and…

"I'll go get changed, we'll be there in a few minutes," she told Mitch, who nodded and started back toward his house.

"Are you sure?" Lucas asked her as he followed up the stairs.

"I know we're supposed to take this day to be all relaxed and stuff, but if we're being real, there is no way I will be able to just sit here all day and not think about the wedding. Bringing puppies into the world? That sounds like the perfect thing to do today."

"Well, when you put it like that."

Minutes later, as promised, they walked up to the Sanderson farm. Lucas had witnessed and assisted in a number of births like this in his time working at his aunt's clinic back in Houston. A couple of times, she had gone to the owners' houses directly, and she'd brought him along. They might have been some of his favorite days of working with her. Walking into the house, it only took one look at Coraline to know that the dog was indeed in labor.

"It's been going on for a while, I think the first one is coming soon," Missy reported when she saw they had arrived. The fifteen-year-old was sitting on the ground, tending to the restless looking Coraline. The dog kept looking to Missy, which explained why she had sent her father while she'd stayed behind. "My mom's at work, and my grandparents aren't here. Dad just came back as I was going to call you," she explained, the worry showing on her face how she might have been on her own to help her dog.

"This is probably going to take a while," Lucas reminded her, as he sat on the floor with her. Maya had gone to find Mitch, the better to be directed to some towels they might use.

"I know," Missy nodded. "I was there when Coraline was born," she told him. "Her mom belonged to a friend of my mom's." After a beat, she revealed that Coraline was the only pup of her litter to survive, which worried her now for what might happen to _these_ pups.

"We're not going to worry about that right now, okay?" Lucas shook his head, speaking in reassuring tones. "You, and me, and Maya, and your dad, we're going to help Coraline get through this."

"I was so worried it would happen tomorrow, when no one was with her," Missy told him, brushing at the dog's head when she lay down next to her.

"Well now you won't have to," Lucas smiled.

"Who's going to look after them tomorrow though?"

"I can call over to the stables, you just bring them out there with you. There will be someone there who can keep an eye on Coraline and the puppies. They're good people, they know what they're doing." And he was going to be working with them, in a couple years' time. He'd been going out there, both for the wedding prep and to familiarize himself with how things worked. He had been to the stables many times over the years of course, before and after his grandmother's passing, though only occasionally. Now, as he had been going more often, it had only continued to solidify his belief that this was where he was meant to go.

"That's okay, I can ask Kai if he'll watch them," Missy told him, and he tried not to smirk at the way her face lit up just a bit when she mentioned the boy's name.

"That's not a bad idea. Maybe you should call him, see if he'll come over and help, too."

"No, I… I'll just… He wouldn't want to see this, there's going to be gross stuff and…"

"This is still the guy who's crazy about zombies, yeah? Decomposing corpses, he's all good, newborn pups not so much?" Lucas teased. Missy still hesitated, but finally she told him where her phone was and he went to get it for her. She sent out a text, one hand on the phone, the other on Coraline's back. A few seconds later, as Maya returned with a stack of towels, Missy blinked.

"He's on his way," she looked back to Lucas.

"Who is?" Maya asked.

"Kai," Missy revealed. Lucas could just see the thought form in Maya's head, like she'd been about to make a joke and then she'd changed her mind, which led him to guess it went somewhere along the line of 'that's a weird activity for a date.' Missy and Kai were still very much on the friend level of their relationship. This was not to say that there weren't feelings running rampant, on his side as much as hers, from what both Maya and Lucas had been able to witness, but as was almost to be expected, they were as hopeless as any fifteen-year-olds. So, for now, maintaining that friendship was more important than making any clumsy attempts.

"Did you ask him about tomorrow, too?" Lucas asked.

"I did. He said he'd be happy to watch Coraline and the puppies. He'll take them back to his house tonight. Hopefully it's not very late by the time they can all go. Just for one day," she leaned to kiss the dog's head, like she didn't want her to worry that she'd be sent away.

"Do you know what's going to happen with the puppies, once they're older?" Maya inquired as she took a seat next to Lucas. Mitch Sanderson was still gathering a few other things they might need.

"Not yet. Depends how many there are, I guess," Missy told her, her worries flashing across her face.

"There'll be plenty of time for that later," Lucas nodded, moving forward to get a look at Coraline. She was always such a welcome sight, all those mornings he'd be out here helping the Sandersons. Now she was looking up to Lucas like 'yes, you're here for my babies, good.' He smiled, brushing at her back. This was not the day he and Maya had envisioned, but it was going to be a very good one nonetheless.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	170. Their Night With Anticipation

June 18th 2020

_Chapter 170  
Their Night With Anticipation_

"Woah, hey, here it comes," Lucas approached the dog, gloved hands at the ready as the first puppy came to be expelled. Missy stretched her neck to try and see without moving from her position near Coraline's head, while Maya stood by in her self-appointed task as 'fetcher of things.' Lucas suspected she was inwardly very amused to play nurse to 'Dockleberry.' She had a towel unfolded for whenever it would be needed. For a few seconds it felt like no one was breathing, just waiting.

"Is it alive?" Missy quietly asked, when she spotted part of the newborn as it came along.

"Looks that way," he breathed now, just carefully watching that everything was coming along as it was supposed to. "There you go, there's your first." As they looked on, the little thing was just there on the blankets where its mother lay, and Coraline's head was bowed to it as she tended to her pup like she'd always known exactly what to do. When they heard it give a squeak, wriggling about as it was licked with great intent, they all had a moment of quiet reassurance. So far, so good.

"This is seriously the best pre-wedding activity ever," Maya laughed and cried at the same time. "Who needs naked dudes when you've got this little wrinkly butt right here?" she asked in sweet cajoling tones. Lucas gave her a look.

"Naked dudes, huh?" he asked, trying not to laugh.

"Please, not in front of the baby," she shook her head at him, turning her attention back to the newborn puppy.

"Or me," Missy chimed in with a look like she might be traumatized, which independently made both Maya and Lucas think of Sam.

"Well, this one looks pretty good," Lucas told Maya and Missy as he looked at the puppy still being given a good cleaning. He tried not to intervene in any way unless he had to, giving time for Coraline to do what came naturally.

"It's so cute," Missy smiled, looking to her dog like she'd never been so proud of her. The day was still young, of course, and there would be plenty more opportunities for this pride to grow as the day went on. For now, they had one very alive, very alert puppy, and they had to wait for the next one.

As the minutes had ticked by, with all the attention put on to the one puppy they presently had, they were soon joined by Kai Avelino. The boy was either a solid friend or intensely enamored with the Sanderson girl, to volunteer himself and his family to look after a dog and her as yet unnumbered puppies on their first night in the world. Either way, he arrived with the look of one wholly motivated to do whatever was needed of him.

"Look, we got one already," Missy pointed to the pup presently laid over her legs, where Coraline could look upon it. The little one, who had been shown to be female, kept the room constantly ringing with the sound of its squeaky little cries.

"Wow," Kai smiled as he knelt to get a look. Lucas turned a look to Maya, who was just barely keeping from smirking. "My mother asked me to bring you some of these," Kai turned to them a few seconds later, forcing them to relax their faces again. He held out a plastic container which appeared to be filled with small donut balls. "She'd just finished making them when I told her I was coming here, they're still a bit warm. She said to wish you good luck for tomorrow."

"I remember these," Lucas smiled at once. "Your brother used to bring some on game days," he recalled, laughing now at the look on Maya's face. Between the puppies and the fried treats, this day continued to come through for them, like her powers as The Bride did not even require her to express any desires in order to be activated. "Your sister, too," Lucas added.

"That's why she was making them. Kamani and Keilani are flying in today," Kai explained.

As they waited for Coraline to have her next puppy, Missy told Kai about the start of the dog's labor, and then the arrival of the first puppy, which he was getting a look at without touch. She also told him about what would be required of him as he looked after the whole little family overnight and through the day to come. Kai listened with great intent, taking notes on his phone. He revealed how he had already been looking things up on the internet as his uncle drove him over and dropped him off.

"You're thinking about those donuts, aren't you?" Lucas asked Maya as he kept an eye on the dog. He had a feeling the second puppy was making its way down.

"I'm still so full from breakfast, but I'm looking at the box and my mouth is just like 'give food now,'" she mimed. He laughed, but he was right there with her. "I can literally just look at them and I remember the smell, and the taste, and it's making me want to pull the cover. But the second I do that, it's game over, they will be gone inside my stomach… and yours," she soon added, seeing the mock look of 'what about me?' on his face.

"So we should really put that box somewhere else is what you're saying."

"Well, first, you might want to keep an eye on that," Maya pointed to the dog. Lucas turned to look, along with the others, as Coraline appeared to be in the process of helping the second puppy come out. As descriptive as Missy had been about the whole thing, Kai looked completely mystified by what he saw.

"That's all normal, yeah?" he asked.

"Completely, yeah," Lucas assured him, keeping an eye on both mother and baby as they were parted from one another.

"Looks smaller than the last one," Missy craned her neck to see.

"Just a bit," Lucas agreed. "But looking good so far otherwise," he added as Coraline once again set herself to look after the puppy. He might have said that it was all coming along as textbook as they could want, but even without being particularly superstitious, he preferred not to tempt fate. Things were going well, they could all see it, so he didn't need to say a word. The new puppy showed to be just as thriving as its sister and was quickly shown to be another female.

"Two zero for the girls," Maya turned a grin to Missy, who looked on to the new addition with a wide smile.

"Hey, you know what I'm realizing right now?" Lucas asked, looking to Maya after he'd looked at the clock to write down what time the second pup had been born, just to keep track. "We're almost exactly twenty-four hours away now," he revealed. Maya looked at him, then to the grandfather clock in the corner, ticking away. He was right.

"Last day," she told herself, checking that the others were occupied before sneaking a kiss happily returned. "Thank goodness for puppies and donuts we can't eat or I would be all over the place."

"You and me both," he vowed, brazenly coming in for a second kiss. A cough forced them to remember where they were, and they innocently turned back to where Missy and Kai were trying not to look at them. "Sorry about that," Lucas struggled at looking genuinely apologetic.

"It's alright, I get it," Missy told him. "You guys must be excited about tomorrow."

"Is it that obvious?" Maya asked, feeling almost bashful, as though her cheeks might have gone pink. It wasn't as though she and Lucas hadn't been basking in their nearlywed status all morning.

"I don't know, I mean you guys are always like that, not just today," Missy pointed out, increasing the temperature in Maya's cheeks. "I was just wondering, since your wedding is coming up and all."

"Very excited, yes," Lucas went ahead and answered with a nod.

If they had wanted to go into more details, they could have gone so much deeper, but it would have easily gone over the young friends' heads.

They would have been celebrating their first anniversary by now, if all things went according to plan. They hadn't, of course, and that had been their choice. Today, they were able to see just how well worth the wait it would be. On the one hand, Sophie a year ago was a whole other beast than Sophie now. Not only was she primed and ready to hit the dance floor, but her physical therapy had evolved from rehabilitating to strengthening. After having been on complete leave for just about a year, she'd been back at the precinct, on desk duty, for the last few months. It was not what she wanted, but it was start, and she had to accept it. And now… now she'd been cleared to go back, to resume the path she'd been yanked from. She'd be going back in the weeks to come, and Maya and Lucas knew that, for as nervous as she was at the prospect, her wife and her mother were both equally concerned.

The other, more unexpected blessing brought on by their having delayed the wedding by a year was the inclusion of the Clutterbuckets. Her mother's side of the family would not have been present, not a single one, if they had gotten married a year ago as intended. Or maybe they would have, who was to say? Would she, as she contemplated this day which was to bring her and Lucas into unity, have considered seeking out leaves for the branches of her family tree kept bare all these years? She didn't know, would never know now, but that wasn't the important part. The important part was that they _had_ gotten in touch, and thanks to that they _had_ started to build a relationship. Now there were all these people coming into Austin, some of them already here, strangers up until not very long ago. Many of them looked like her, might be recognized as her family depending on where they went. They might see people walking around, wearing shirts with her band's art on it, whether or not they knew it as such.

And tomorrow, all these people would be gathered, at Sullivan Stables, and they would be present as she and Lucas exchanged vows, and rings, and became husband and wife.

Every time the words came up, in any way, it would be like a heightened version of what it had felt like, years ago, when they had started referring to one another as boyfriend and girlfriend. To evolve now into husband and wife, it was so much bigger. The first time around, all it had taken was the two of them starting to date, and looking at each other one day like 'hey, this thing between us, it works, so let's show the world.' These new titles did say the same thing, to a point. Of course _these _titles came with a ceremony, and rings, and official documents, and a very large, expensive party, and so many friends and family members around them, the likes of which they weren't likely to see again.

Really, how could 'excited' encompass the feeling? How could any one word? It was something that existed only as a feeling, one only the nearlyweds could experience, and that was possibly the thing that made it most special.

"I think there's another one coming," Kai spoke up, bringing them all back to reality. The first two puppies were now resting together in Missy's lap, squeaking away, while their mother looked from them once again, turning upon herself as the third puppy neared birth.

"So what do you think?" Maya asked the group as they looked on. "Another female, or our first brother pup?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	171. Their Night With Memories

_**A/N: **_**_Daisyangel,_**_ I'm sending you a PM in a minute :)_

* * *

June 19th 2020

_Chapter 171  
__Their Night With Memories_

Missy's grandparents returned home just as the room witnessed the arrival of the third puppy. They all stood in watch as Coraline tended to it, warmed by the confirmation that the puppy was looking well. With each new one that came along, it felt as though Coraline was growing more anxious to see that they would be healthy, alive.

"You got it, yeah, you did," Lucas told the mother, watching the puppy and waiting to move it with its sisters. She was so intent on this one that they feared for a moment she might have felt something was wrong with it, something the rest of them couldn't see. But when Lucas got to pick it up and have a look, he found nothing but an alert newborn, breathing well enough, behaving no differently than the others. "He's alright, see?" he held out the little male for his mother to see, and she sniffed and licked at him some more. They decided to leave him with her as they awaited the next one.

"Are you all getting hungry? We'll fix you up something to eat," Missy's grandmother declared, looking to the quartet sitting by for the birth. Joanne Sanderson had been a presence in Lucas' memories for about as long as he could remember. Very often, when he'd be visiting his grandparents out here, she would be at the house, or he would be taken there along with Pappy Joe and Nana Sus. When he had been out at the house, fixing it up for all those months, she would stop by from time to time, bringing refreshments, insisting they were free to drop in for lunch any time.

"Thanks, that'd be great," he told her, turning back to Maya. "Still digesting?" he smirked.

"You would think that watching all of this would cut my appetite even more than a full breakfast, but I think I'm just about ready for lunch now," Maya insisted, adding, "Especially from her."

As they waited, listening to the cries of the three newborn pups, they were aware of how time was already advancing, which would mean that, depending on how many puppies would be born today, and how much time went by between them, they could be here well into the evening.

"They're going to think we ran off and ditched them," Maya reached into her pocket for her phone. As expected, even though they were meant to be given the day off, there were a few messages waiting, the most recent taking on a comically confused tone as to why they were neither one of them answering calls or messages.

"Well they can't separate us now," Lucas pointed out, which made her smile.

"I'll just let Riley know where we are, she can calm the masses." A minute later, Riley replied and Maya took up her phone again. "The band's practicing for tomorrow," she told Lucas, her voice rising into laughter a moment later. He wondered what was funny, and she showed him her phone.

Along with the message, which they had to guess had been dictated to someone else, likely Dylan, was a picture, taken from someone sitting on the ground, several feet away from where the band practiced. In between the 'photographer' and the band was little Ada Minkus, standing and watching her mother and the rest of the band. Her face couldn't be seen, but there was a definite sense of curiosity and awe about her.

"I need to put this one on a wall somewhere or something," Maya hummed, looking at the picture again.

They were out at Zay and Nadine's house by the looks of it. They couldn't very well have practiced at the Hex, not today. Knowing that they were all out there right now, doing… whatever they would be doing tomorrow, for her, for Lucas, it settled in her chest like the embrace of many arms. Of course they would be up there, just as she and the others had been two years ago, when Nadine had been the one getting married. It was still just a bit weird for her not to be there, not to know, wasn't it?

"Is that another one there?" Missy pointed to something she could just see. Lucas and Maya both looked, and the way Lucas approached said it all. Unlike the previous, this one needed a little help for real. Kai held number three now, pulling him out of the way. "It's still stuck in its thing…" Missy looked on as Lucas went and carefully attended to the puppy under Coraline's watchful eyes. It wasn't more than half a minute, but it felt like so much longer to everyone as they watched. For Lucas, it brought back memories of some of those births he had witnessed, but almost more so of Peanut, so small and frail when he'd been found. Now he was grown and lively as ever, over with Rosa and Riley and Dylan, but in the beginning…

"There he goes…" Maya breathed, saying what they would all be thinking, as the fourth pup was set before its mother again, now moving and giving squeaky little cries. Coraline sniffed at once, seeing to the newest of her litter. Lucas sat back now, taking a few breaths of his own. "You alright there?" Maya asked him, smiling. It was hard not to, now that the small bit of concern had passed.

"Wasn't sure I had him for a second there," he admitted. Maya knew how much it would affect him, when he'd been present at a birth where some of the puppies didn't survive. Even though he knew it was something that happened, it still uneasily in him. So far, today, they were only notching in the win column, and he wanted to keep it that way.

After the room had calmed again, Joanne Sanderson had come along with lunch for everyone, recommending that they went ahead and ate up while they could, before the next pup came along. Missy and Kai carefully moved the trio from the girl's lap, bringing them close to their mother again, and to their new sister, bringing that additional warmth. The two friends started to discuss potential names as they ate their lunch.

"Hey, look who's at practice," Maya extended her phone to Lucas again as he came back from washing his hands and picked up his plate. There was the same picture as before, only she'd zoomed in on one part she hadn't noticed before. Just on the edge of the picture, sitting next to Farkle, was a short black girl watching the practice with him, and Dylan, and Zay, and who knew who else wasn't near enough to be captured in the photo.

"Is that Jenna?" Lucas asked. He had yet to meet the girl, though he had heard plenty in the last week and a half, as the 'mystery' trickled down from band level to common knowledge among the group.

"About ninety-nine percent sure, yeah," Maya smiled.

As much as she and the rest of the band had been seeing so much more of each other in the past year, after having been shaken just a bit loose in their first year back in Austin, it had managed to slip by completely unnoticed among any of them, even those who went to school with her, or lived with her, that Rosa had this new friend. It had been less noticed that this new friend was making her feel things she had never felt in her life. There had always been this sort of… indescribable awareness of who she was and what she did or did not want. It was like she'd always had the map of herself inside her, and she could navigate it with ease, but then words had started to appear, and she'd tried to stick some of them on to the map, found them to fit. There was little else for her to do, and then she'd carried on with her life, with her words. And then… Jenna had happened. She'd come along, and suddenly some of the words didn't seem as right as they used to, like they had been mistranslated.

Jenna did go to the same university as Rosa did, the same as Dylan, and Sam, but she did not share classes with any one of them. She worked in the library though, and while Rosa had been mildly aware of her in the first year – new translation: she had noticed her, and she continued to notice her whenever she went to the library to do research or study or work on an assignment – but it wasn't until the second year that they'd first spoken to one another. Rosa had been so focused on what she was doing that she hadn't realized they were about to close for the night, not until someone had tapped her on the shoulder and told her as much. When she'd turned around, there was that girl she'd seen a bunch of times – new translation: stared at just a few seconds more than regular whenever she saw her.

They'd quietly gotten caught up in conversation as Rosa had gathered her things and made her way out of the library. And the next time she'd been at the library, they'd said hello in passing, just as they did the time after that, and the time after that… It was always nice to see her – new translation: she looked forward to seeing her, maybe went to the library even though she would have been perfectly fine working from home – and the feeling appeared to be mutual. Hellos had turned to conversations, and conversations had become 'I'm about to go on my lunch break, you want to come?' This had gone on for several months, until March, before Rosa had finally been left to consider the very unforeseeable conclusion that she might actually like this girl, that she might have feelings for her that were above 'I want us to be friends forever' and below 'I want to get naked with you.' That line remained an immutable barrier. So what was there in between?

She had been trying to figure it all out for herself ever since she'd started to wonder, and she hadn't told anyone, no, of course she hadn't, wouldn't, not until she knew what this was, except… Well, there had been the show, and she'd invited Jenna, and afterward she'd come to find her, and they'd been seen, and so Rosa had unloaded the whole tale, making it very clear without saying as much that she wanted zero intervention from any of them. They respected her wishes on this, standing by until such a time as the rules would change. For now at least nothing _had_ changed. Much as she had considered inviting her to come along to the wedding tomorrow, she had finally changed her mind. It would have been too much, too soon. At least she'd opened the door enough that she'd invited her to this practice. That was a start.

"I think there's another one coming," Kai spoke up, shortly after the empty plates had been put aside, and the four of them moved in to quickly pull the puppies out of the way, one to each of them before settling them back on Missy's extended legs, pinning her to the spot. After the uncertainty of the last one, they were reasonably tense as they awaited the next new arrival. But when this one came it felt very much like how the first two had gone, not a problem at all. They allowed themselves that breath of relief, as Coraline went ahead and saw to her fifth, which would soon be revealed as the second male.

"Look at you," Lucas chuckled, watching the little one wiggle under his mother's tongue. "You were eager to get your turn, weren't you?" In the weeks to follow, whenever they would see the puppies, Lucas swore he could always pick out number five, always the most energetic one.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	172. Their Night With Icons

_**A/N: Hey guys!** Quick heads up that there is a new chapter of "The World Around" up (finally, after three months ;)) Looking to do more of these again!_

* * *

June 20th 2020

_Chapter 172  
Their Night With Icons_

"I remember when I'd go and visit the puppies at Ray's house, before we got to take them back to the house," Maya smiled, looking at the five puppies held between herself, Lucas, and Kai, as Missy had finally been convinced to go off to the bathroom. She'd insisted that she would be fine, even though they knew this was just her not wanting to leave Coraline's side, but this could only go so long, and then she'd had to go. After sitting on the floor for a few hours by then, it wouldn't hurt her to walk around for a bit either.

"Only three of them that time," Lucas remembered it, too. Ray's dog had birthed five, and the other two of the small litter had not made it, so Maya and her parents had taken the other three together. Ghost, Tuck, and Queen had all been loved in the Hunter Hart house for as long as they'd lived. When the last of them had passed on, it had felt like the closing of a chapter.

"Definitely not this loud," Maya agreed as she smiled at the pair she held, yammering on like the others in their puppy choir.

"I'm back, I'm back, did I miss anything?" Missy asked as she came back and crouched and sat by her dog once again.

"No, but I think the next one is on its way," Lucas passed number five over to her before getting a look at Coraline. "Yeah, there it comes, butt first."

"Hey, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do," Maya smirked, which made Kai laugh.

Puppy number six, the second male in a row, gave Maya and Lucas both the same vibe. After the very energetic – as energetic as one could be when they'd been born for all of thirty minutes – number five, his little brother came quiet. Not so quiet that he was silent or in any sort of difficulty, just peaceful as his mother went and cleaned him up. Lucas had turned to Maya, and the thought was there in their faces. Those two were giving serious Nellie and Gracie vibes. They both laughed, and Maya couldn't wait to tell her sisters all about it. She'd have to have a conversation with her parents first – and know what Missy's intentions were – to make sure she didn't accidentally make the twins want to bring their dog counterparts to live with them if they couldn't.

"How do you know when there's no more coming?" Kai asked, looking from Missy to Lucas and back.

"They did a scan, I counted eight, but there could be more… or less," Missy told him.

"Once we hit seven, we'll see where we are," Lucas added.

"I think she likes it when she hears talking," Missy told them, stroking Coraline's back as she lay there quietly, looking at the people sitting nearby. "What was it like with Ree Forster at the camp?" Missy asked Maya. She'd been meant to attend this year, but then when she'd found out Coraline was having puppies, and roughly when they would be born, she had decided not to go. As much as she'd looked forward to it, Coraline was and always would be her responsibility. It couldn't have come at a better time, her being out of school for the summer, enabled to look after the dog and her puppies.

"Oh, it was great," Maya was happy to fill her in. "We put videos and pictures on our pages, did you see those?"

"Not yet, it would have been weird, I think, seeing it and not being there," Missy shrugged.

"You really wanted to meet her, huh?" Lucas asked and Missy nodded.

The number of people who knew Ree and her husband would be at the wedding tomorrow was very small. Much as they were all trusting of their friends and families, the last thing they wanted was for word to spread and people to end up sweeping up to Sullivan Stables. It wasn't that they expected this to happen either, not for sure, but this was Maya and Lucas' day, their wedding, and they had waited long enough, wouldn't get a do-over. They could have maybe told Missy by now, but really it would be more amusing to see the look on her face the next morning, when she got to figure out she might not have gotten to see her at camp, but she would now very possibly get to talk to the singer one on one.

As far as the camp, now… Ree had been with them for three days, Monday through Wednesday, yesterday. In that case, it hadn't been a secret, like the wedding, not when the slate of star mentors had been announced some time ago. Siobhan had been essential in ensuring that their theater wouldn't turn into some media circus, and Maya was both thankful for the assist itself and for the knowledge she had gained from it. Even so, the air felt a tiny bit electric that first morning as they awaited Ree's arrival.

"When she showed up, my mother couldn't stop going on about how this was one of the reasons she'd been a fan all those years, because she was so down to Earth all the time. I came this close to locking her in her office. Like, she's met her before by now, a couple of times, and if she's supposed to be so down to Earth – which she is, she really is – then why was she acting like she was about to meet the Queen of England?" The others laughed along with her. As much or as little as they knew Katy, they could all imagine her face in that moment.

"You weren't so relaxed about it the first time," Lucas reminded her.

"Well, what do you expect, she's The Ree Forster," Maya intoned before bursting into laughter again and doing her best not to get so loud as to disturb the dogs. "I've gotten better about it."

"Yeah, you two are old friends now," Lucas smiled at her.

"Anyway, speaking of Her Majesty, some of the kids at the camp had somehow never heard her speak? They know her singing voice, fine, but they heard her speak that first day and they didn't even know she was English?"

"She is?" Kai blinked, looking awkwardly between the other three. The best reaction was easily Missy's, as she looked at him with the most 'oh, sweetie' sympathetic look.

"She was phenomenal as a mentor," Maya sighed, recalling those three days. "I was just standing or sitting around most of the time while she was talking to the kids, and I learned stuff, too."

Lucas was more than aware of this, and he had a new smile, thinking of the last three nights when she'd come home from camp. He was off school for the summer by now, of course, and working more hours at the bookstore in part thanks to the small promotion Maeve had gotten him, though he had taken three weeks off, the one before and the two following the wedding, so he got to be the first one home for once, switching from the usual. He'd be in the kitchen, working on dinner with Sam, and they'd heard the door, and dogs, and there she would be, walking into the kitchen as though on a cloud. Sam was more than happy to tease his sister about how goofy she was, going on and on about her day and what they had done with Ree and the campers. Maya was so happy that she took it right in stride, like Wonder Woman deflecting shots off her arm braces. Lucas could just tell she had been keeping a straight face the whole day, remained professional the whole time, but the moment she was back home, with him and her brother, she was finally at liberty to show what she had been feeling all day, and she didn't hold back.

"You should do more songs for her," Missy affirmed with a nod. "You guys really fit well together."

"Think so?" Maya beamed, more so as Missy nodded again, and Lucas put in his vote along with hers. "I mean, I definitely came out of those days very inspired…"

Here she was again, with secrets to keep from her young neighbor. The fact was that the prospect of a new collaboration between them was already on the table. Even though she had just put out her latest album back in December, Ree was already looking toward the next one. She didn't intend for it to come out for a while, really wanted to put the work in it to make it something distinct from everything she'd already done. It could take a year, could take two, who knew. The one thing she did know was that she wanted to make it a collection, an exploration, a meeting of two minds.

She wanted Maya to write the whole thing.

She'd told her this just the day before, as she was leaving from her last day at the camp. Maya had stood frozen to the spot, like she couldn't possibly have heard her correctly. The whole album? A whole one, her music and lyrics, Ree's voice, the whole thing? That was exactly what she meant. There would still be those details to figure out, but she'd already set things in motion as far as the label was concerned, and all she really needed was for Maya to say yes. They would work things out, schedule wise, minding the fact that she was starting at the high school in September. Ree was looking to make it so that she might come down and record at the Hex, a thought which went through Maya's brain and found all the little clusters which had yet to be blown and just pulverized them. Of course she was in, of course they would do this. When she'd arrived at the house last night, she'd just burst into happy tears all over the place.

The tale of Ree's time at the camp, as redacted as it was, was cut off by the sudden arrival of puppy number seven. Quite literally, Coraline gaze something like a sneeze, and when they looked down, there was a new puppy.

"Full of puppies _and_ surprises, aren't you?" Lucas laughed as they all watched the dog tend to the latest of her litter.

"You know, if she stopped here, there'd be seven, and we could call that one Sneezy," Missy grinned, more so as the others caught on to what she was getting at.

"There's Sleepy right there," Kai pointed number one, who was not quite asleep but definitely looked cozy as she lay just a bit curled up in Missy's lap, yapping along with her brothers and sisters.

"None of them look all that Grumpy to me," Lucas observed the pups, still barely making sense of this new world they'd come into.

"Give them time," Maya laughed. "This one here is Bashful though, and if that is not Happy, I don't know who is," she indicated number six and number five, the twins' counterparts.

"That would leave Doc, Dopey, and Grumpy…" Lucas looked to the remaining puppies. It was a bit of a stalemate at this point. "Might not be a good idea to get attached to the names, I mean… there's definitely another one or two left," he declared, having gotten a feel as Coraline lay there. She had to be getting tired, but there was still that look in her eyes. She knew she wasn't done either.

"Yeah, anyway, there's only one Doc right here," Maya gave him a smile. "I call him Dockleberry," she whispered to Missy and Kai, who started to laugh at once.

"See, why'd you have to go and tell them that?" Lucas tried and failed to sound annoyed. Maya raised her chin, innocence and mischief rolled into one.

"I'm The Bride, I can if I want to." Lucas considered this and finally nodded. Fair enough.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	173. Their Night With Friends

June 21st 2020

_Chapter 173  
Their Night With Friends_

Getting the feeling that it would be a while before the next puppy came along, Lucas and Maya had gone ahead and stepped outside for some fresh air. He sat down on the steps, letting out a breath. She let out a chuckle as she sat next to him, just further back enough so that she could clamp her hands on his shoulders and give them a squeeze.

"Almost there," she reminded him. "Just think, tomorrow the wedding, and in a few days we are flying out of here for a bit of _lune de miel_ action." Lucas couldn't help but smirk, turning his head to catch the look on her face.

"That's definitely something to look forward to," he agreed as she nodded along. "You, filling all those sketchbooks. Me, providing you with all the pastries you want…"

"Us, walking off those pastries through the city," she added with a laugh.

"See, we're all set."

They were still laughing for the fact that several of their friends and family had gifted Maya with a fresh new sketchbook, for her to use while they were off on their honeymoon. She was now the proud owner of ten new books, which did not even count the one Lucas had gotten for her, or the one she'd gotten for herself… A dozen sketchbooks, enough to dedicate one to each of their full days out in France, arrival and departure days aside. Whether or not this would happen, whether she would actually pack a dozen sketchbooks along for the ride, she couldn't say just yet, but she would have to decide soon enough. They were flying off three days after the wedding, allowing them to stick around for the 4th of July and Haley's third birthday party.

"I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight," Maya breathed, leaning her head to the back of Lucas' shoulder. "Too much stuff…"

"But if you don't sleep, you'll be dead on your feet tomorrow, and you'll miss everything," Lucas pointed out, getting hold of her hand, pressing it between both of his.

"I think I could run on pure adrenaline," she confidently declared. "Then when it's all over, I will be free to crash and sleep all of Saturday."

"I remember you trying that once before," he laughed. "That did not work, and I had to carry you home. You are just going to have to sleep tonight."

"How?" she asked in a pitiful tone.

"I will help you," he promised.

"How?" she asked again, this time intrigued and playful.

"I could read to you from one of my textbooks. One of the big ones with all the technical talk," he suggested.

"It does make me sleepy when I help you review," Maya reflected for a moment before making a noise he took to mean 'pass.'

"How about I just hold you real close until you fall asleep, maybe rub your back… tell you a story…" She smiled.

"Now we're talking."

A few seconds later, Kai appeared at the door, telling them another puppy was coming. They headed back into the house and to where Coraline had been settled these past several hours. The seven existing puppies, good and dry by now, remained cosily lined up along Missy's legs, though some of them tried to climb over and under, leaving the girl to gently set them back again. Meanwhile, their mother was busy looking to the newest addition, which had come along in the time Kai had gone to get the others.

"How does it look?" Lucas asked.

"Good, I think," Missy reported. Number five nearly slipped off her leg and was caught at once. For what they could see, she was right. The puppy was being cleaned up as they looked on, and it absolutely looked alive and thriving.

"Looks like another female," he declared.

"Four to four, we need a tie breaker," Maya announced in a muted announcer's voice.

"Pretty sure we have one of those coming down, but it might be a while," Lucas told her as he sat back down on the ground.

Missy's grandmother came around again, asking her guests if they would be staying for dinner. The question had caught them off guard, but then they'd looked at the time and… yeah, it was getting closer to that time, would be even more so, possibly, by the time they were through with the birth. So, they all accepted.

"She would never let us all eat in here like this if it wasn't for the puppies," Missy told Kai and Maya, even as Lucas gave a knowing chuckle.

"You know, when my parents were newlyweds, they used to come out here every once in a while. The way my mother talks about your grandma, it's like she's the queen of hostesses." Missy nodded at this to show that yes, she did know this very much.

"Are you saying she's like the original Melinda?" Maya's eyebrow arched at this, taken with new intrigue.

"Not nearly as intense, but yes," Lucas confirmed.

"Wow…" Maya could only blink in awe at this, just as her phone vibrated in her pocket. She'd set it silent so not to startle the dogs, and on the whole it had remained as it was, no vibrations, which she figured was thanks to this being hers and Lucas' day to relax… mostly. When she saw that she was getting a call from Sophie, she was left conflicted. What if there was something wrong for tomorrow.

She showed her phone to Lucas, who thought the same and quietly signed for her to take it. She quickly stood up from the ground and moved out of the room before answering.

"What's wrong?" she asked at once.

"Nothing, nothing's wrong," Sophie promised at once, laughing. "I just wanted to check in and tell you everything was going well, I figured you'd want to hear it."

"Oh… Good, thanks," Maya calmed down at once.

"So, what are you two doing today?"

"Nothing much, you know, birthing some puppies."

"You're doing what now?" Sophie asked, the confusion echoing out until Maya could practically see her face in her mind.

"Missy's dog is having her puppies, we're out here to help out," she explained with a laugh.

"Oh, Coraline?" Sophie sounded excited now.

"Yeah," Maya nodded. "Got eight so far, four boys and four girls, we're waiting on the ninth, probably the last. According to Dockleberry back there, that's more than usual for her breed. And all alive and doing well so far," she went on reporting, pausing after a moment to give a light knock to the wooden steps where she sat. So maybe she could be a _little_ superstitious sometimes.

"You're taking lots of pictures, yeah?" Sophie pleaded.

"I am, yeah," Maya smiled. "Trying to keep track of who's who, pretty easy so far, the spots and patches on them are distinct enough." She didn't know if there was a specific term for that, but Sophie would understand.

"Good, send them all. Are you all going to be there much longer?"

"Hard to say, all depends on Coraline, and we're not about to rush her."

"No, of course not," Sophie agreed. Maya squinted for a moment, silently rising and moving to stand at the window. From here, they could see their house, way in the distance, and right now she spotted a familiar car.

"You're at the house!" she 'accused' in a whisper. "I can see you, Ginger, you're…" She gasped, pulled back to the morning's speculations. "Kidnappers!" she whispered. "Conspiring to separate me from my beloved," she declared in her best twang.

"It is one night, and it's tradition," Sophie pointed out, and Maya tried not to laugh, watching her way off in the distance, looking like she was trying to find where she was watching from.

"You do realize that this 'tradition' was, I'm assuming, to guard against any actions between the bride and groom which, you should know as we lived together for four years, have already been… performed. I'm already going to have trouble falling asleep tonight and I was promised cuddles from a handsome future vet who spent all day being very sweet with some tiny, tiny puppies."

"You make some excellent points, you do, but we were set on a mission, and that's just how it is. I don't have arms like him, but I will help you get to sleep if that's what you need. The deal is that one of two things happens: Chiara and I take you to my Mom's, or Asher and Ray take Lucas to the Garcias', you take your pick. Personally, I'd go for option one, we can go swimming, that'll relax you, might help you fall asleep."

"I'm not getting out of this, am I?" Maya sighed.

"Nope."

"So you guys are all out there now?"

"Obviously, since we don't know who's staying and who's going away. I really want to see the puppies now, but it might not be a good idea to crowd everyone right now, yeah?"

"Probably. But I will send pictures, and I'm sure they'll be okay with you guys visiting in the next few days and weeks. Speaking of which, I should get back, next one might have come by now. You guys go ahead and let yourselves in, we'll be back as soon as we can. Raid the fridge if you're hungry."

"Will do!"

Getting back to the others, Maya was relieved to find that she hadn't missed anything. They were still waiting on any new puppy to come along. In the meantime, the existing eight had been brought back to Coraline so that they might try and feed, which they were doing now, a bunch of tiny bodies suckling at their mother.

Maya relayed what she'd gotten from her call with Sophie, from the fact that their Houston contingent was back at the house, to their choice of kidnappers and kidnapped.

"What do you want to do?" Lucas asked her.

"Trick question," she pointed at him with a smirk. "I don't know, I mean if I go, swimming really might be the best way to make sure I fall asleep. Not that I couldn't go out to the lake, but late night swimming feels better if it's in an actual pool."

"Then you should go," he agreed. "It's only one night, and after that, well…"

"No more after that," Maya smiled back, sitting on the ground with him. "Fine, fine," she relented. She took a picture of the pups feeding, adding it to the many she'd already taken, discreetly, respectfully, before sending the lot over to Sophie.

They were served dinner by Joanne Sanderson in due time, and they were still working through their plates when Coraline turned about in such a way as to alert them another puppy was on its way. Lucas passed his plate to Maya, already reaching for it, before turning his attention to the dog. In next to no time, the ninth and last – as they would soon confirm – puppy came free of its mother. They all looked on as it was attended to. For all their fears, they had yet to lose any of the pups, and they really wanted to keep that record going with this one. Maya poured all her hopes, her 'powers' as the bride into Coraline seeing all nine of her puppies alive and thriving. The ninth looked just as good as the others, and the tie was broken with the female pups winning it out by one, five against four.

"You did so good, mama," Missy kissed her dog's head, laughing at the look on her face, so proud and happy, like she was saying 'look at all these fluffy things I made, aren't they awesome?' Maya and Lucas shared a look of their own. It really was the best way they could have spent this last day before their wedding.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	174. Their Night With Knowledge

June 22nd 2020

_Chapter 174  
Their Night With Knowledge_

Missy's mother had returned from work to find her daughter, husband, and in-laws sat out on the porch with their neighbors from up the lane and her daughter's boy friend, each at various stages of consuming the pie they had been served.

"Mom!" Missy had bolted up excitedly as she walked up from her car. "Coraline had the puppies!"

"She did?" Lilah Sanderson smiled, for the news as much as her daughter's excitement.

"Yeah, she started not long after you left this morning. She had nine puppies. Nine! And they're all okay, and they're really cute, come on," she led her into the house. Lilah greeted Maya, Lucas, and Kai in passing as she was pulled along, much to her husband's amusement.

"She's been going on and on about how she can't wait until September, now that you're going to be her teacher," he turned to Maya once they'd disappeared through the door.

"It's kind of weird sometimes," Maya smiled at this. "I know her, and I know she goes there, but it hasn't sunk in yet that she's going to be in my classroom… Hasn't even sunk in that I'm going to _have_ a classroom, especially one I used to go to as a student…" How many hours had she spent in that room, during class or not? Her teacher would just let her come in and work on some piece or another, her teacher… who she was now replacing. Dylan had been getting a kick out of declaring that 'the student now becomes the master.'

She'd met with Mrs. Yang, just last week. She'd called the house one evening, saying that Lindsay Alcott had gotten in touch with her. She'd told the former teacher about her replacement, and as she told Maya over the phone, she could not be happier with the choice. She hadn't gone into details as to why she'd left her post so abruptly, after all those years, though she assured Maya that it had nothing to do with the school or anyone in it. They were lucky to have this fresh new teacher to carry on the torch for the arts. When they'd gotten together, Mrs. Yang had given her a box full of papers separated by grades, containing notes, and works, from those students she had taught and who would now be passed on to Maya's care.

"Don't look at them yet," she had suggested. "You should get to know them for yourself in the beginning. That probably sounds ominous," she'd reflected after a beat, shaking her head with a chuckle. "I simply think it best that you make your own opinions. Then, after three, four weeks, you can get to know them as I know them. Good kids, most of them, and the rest of them… well, they have potential. It's up to you now to help them find it."

It had been so tempting to open the box and look through the files, but she had resisted it. Mrs. Yang was right, she _should_ get to know them first. Assumptions could be correct at times, but they could also be entirely misleading. So, she'd stored the box up on her closet shelf and left it there, to be opened again closer to October.

What she had to look forward to, after the wedding, after the honeymoon, sometime in August, was the opportunity to go into the school, into her classroom, to go ahead and prepare the space before the start of the year. She was possibly much too excited at the prospect, but how could she not be? This would be her room, for who knew how many years to come, where she would welcome her students, get to know them, to teach them, to watch them grow and evolve.

"I always liked art class," Kai commented, with a smile suggesting he was looking forward to it even more now that she would be their teacher. Both he and Missy were starting in the 9th grade this year, which would mean that they would be new to the school, too, although she had that added advantage in that she'd previously been a student there. It wouldn't really matter, not to the students anyway. To some of them she would be 'fresh meat,' until she showed them where they actually stood.

"Well, that makes two of us," Maya smiled back at the boy, showing in her case that she was looking forward to have him as one of her students.

When Missy and her mother came back out to the porch, the girl was still going on about the birth of number four, the one puppy who had truly given them reason to worry for a moment. Lilah received the tale of her daughter's brief anguish and turned a look of some gratitude toward their neighbor. Much like Walt and Joanne Sanderson, who had been a presence for being friends of his grandparents, Lucas had grown up knowing Mitch and Lilah. Although for a while he hadn't seen much of them, between Pappy Joe moving in with them back when Lucas lived at home, and then being off in Houston for four years, he had lost touch with them until he and Maya had moved out here. Missy had been just a tiny kid back then, and suddenly here she was, their zombie ballerina.

He most vividly remembered coming out here, couldn't have been more than five or six. Mitch couldn't have been more than eighteen, and whenever Lucas' grandparents would take him up to the farm, he would just trail along after the Sanderson boy, who would let him assist with whatever work he was doing that day. Lucas always loved it the best whenever they'd be tending to the animals. He remembered when Mitch and Lilah had been dating, and he had been there the day they were married. Now, tomorrow, the two of them would be sitting among family and friends to see _him_ get married.

This was really one of the places where his dream of becoming a vet had started, wasn't it? Sullivan Stables was one, and the Sanderson farm was the other. It was almost too perfect that he was here today and then tomorrow, the ranch… He wasn't going to be assisting in any births tomorrow, but he would be out there, where so much family history had taken place, and he and Maya would go and add their own chapter.

"We really shouldn't keep you, I'm sure you have so much to do before tomorrow," Joanne told the nearlyweds.

"Oh, it's alright," Lucas promised her. "She's not eager to go I think," he tipped his head to Maya, who confirmed as much with a shake of the head.

"Our friends are back at the house, waiting to take me away for the night," she revealed, which made Missy's parents and grandparents smile or laugh knowingly.

"Why?" Missy asked, leaving both Maya and Lucas unsure of how to respond. She was fifteen, it wasn't like she wouldn't understand, but being right there with her family, it felt weird to answer.

"It's bad luck to see the bride before the wedding," her grandmother told her with a smirk. "We did the same thing the night before we were married, your grandfather and I, and so did your mom and dad," she went on, pointing toward her son and her daughter-in-law, who suddenly became very interested in their lemonade. There were too many eyes on them now to be able to pretend all too long.

"It's been seventeen years, alright?" Mitch took the bullet for the both of them. "I'd say we've been very lucky, haven't we?" he laughed. Under more pressing looks, the story was finally shared, after nearly two decades kept in the dark, between Mitch and Lilah.

The night before their wedding, as Joanne Sanderson told it, the bride and groom were separated, spending the night at their respective parents' homes. Only after a while, after finding themselves unable to fall asleep, a call had happened. Specifically, Mitch had been reaching for his phone when Lilah's call came in. In no time, he had snuck out of the house, driving off to her parents' house, where he was let in and the two of them had a peaceful night's sleep before Mitch woke up very early and returned back to the farm and his own bed. Ten seconds more and he would have been busted, but he hadn't, and so the secret had held.

"Any chance we get that on paper and it holds?" Maya grinned, as the Sandersons continued to look surprised at this tale.

"You want to try that with my mother?" Lucas asked her, making her sigh at once. Melinda may have learned from Joanne Sanderson, but she had absolutely outpaced the master.

"Alright, fair enough. Maybe we should start heading back… After we go see the puppies again," she added, leading the way into the house at an eager pace. Lucas followed gladly, along with Missy and Kai.

They had erected something of a barrier around the area where Coraline and the puppies were set up, in case any of those nine 'wrinkly butts' got it in them to wander off in any way. The little family was still taking it easy, as far as they saw, and they almost felt bad to think they'd all have to be taken off somewhere else for the night and the day to come, but there really was no other way without any of them sacrificing something. Besides, Kai was happy to do it, and Missy trusted him.

"I'll ask my aunt to drop by your place on her way in tomorrow, if that's alright," Lucas told Kai. "She can get a look at them and make sure everything's fine."

"Yeah, okay," Kai agreed. Lucas would have been back to see the puppies himself, but then he really couldn't be late, couldn't set anything back. They had been talking about the wedding on and off throughout the day, and across the last few weeks, but somehow this was the exact moment where it all fell into place, felt most real. He was getting married in the morning. His heart was drumming, telling him Maya wouldn't be the only one having trouble settling down tonight.

"If you come up with any names, text me?" Maya asked Missy as they hugged goodnight.

"I've been trying to think of groups of nine," Missy nodded. "So far I only thought of planets, and that might be weird for some of them. Like who would name a puppy Earth? And there's the whole Pluto thing, and… whichever one would get called Uranus…" she mumbled, like she didn't want Kai to hear.

"You'll think of something," Maya laughed. "Please don't call them that," she added in a whisper, which made the girl laugh. Her future student… "Well, you named their mother Coraline, maybe you can get some more names from that book, or other books of his," she suggested, watching Missy's face light up with the possibility.

"I'll look into it."

"Kai can probably help you, yeah?" Maya added, still whispering, and she walked off to say goodbye to the rest of the Sandersons, while Lucas finally came back from seeing the puppies. He was given a hug from their young neighbor as well.

"Thank you for today. I'm sorry you had to come out here instead of staying home."

"It was my pleasure," Lucas promised her, smiling. "You did us a favor, believe me. We're going to remember today a lot more than if we'd just been back there on our own. We'll get to tell the story of when Coraline had her puppies the day before we got married." Missy looked very glad to hear this, like she'd inadvertently given them a gift, through little to no action of her own.

"See you tomorrow," she told Lucas as he went and rejoined Maya and they started back for home.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	175. Their Night With Midnight

_**A/N: **__Hey guys! So, when I was planning for this year, I had to count in that we'd have an extra day due to leap year. Usually, I have 51 week blocks of 7 days, and then the 52nd week has 8 days with double sized chapters. Leap year could not have happened at a better time, as it means we get two super sized weeks, one at the end of the year like usual, and then another one, starting tomorrow for the wedding! :D It will also mean that the week blocks, after this and for the rest of the year will run from Thursdays to Wednesdays (instead of Wednesdays to Tuesdays), and also the chapters of We Three Hearts will go up on Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays... after today. That also means:_

_The new chapter of We Three Hearts is now available! :)_

* * *

June 23rd 2020

_Chapter 175  
Their Night With Midnight_

The walk from their house to the Sanderson farm and vice versa, at a regular pace, took all of three minutes. When they left the farm that evening, knowing what awaited them at the other end, Maya and Lucas decided collectively to just… take their time. There was no rush, was there? It was a beautiful night, the sun just beginning to set. It wasn't too hot, the breeze was good, and they had each other's hand in theirs. Why would they want this moment to end before it had to?

"Donut?" Maya asked, holding up the plastic container. He looked at the box, then at the house in the distance, and back at her.

"Yeah, okay," he replied, in a tone that said 'these are our donuts, let's eat them before we get over there.' Maya cracked the box open, happy to comply. They each took one of the little fried balls and did a half sort of 'cheers' before biting in. They had been a bit warm when Kai handed them over, now they were cold, but they did not mind at all. They were as delicious as they remembered them being back when Kai's older brother and sister would bring them to share with their respective basketball teams.

"I don't think we'll be able to do like Missy's parents did on the night before _their_ wedding, but I need you to do something," Maya told Lucas as they ate and slowly walked.

"Name it."

"Write to me when we hit midnight?" she asked, which made him smile.

"I can do that, yeah," he agreed at once. "Probably would have done it even if you hadn't asked."

"Probably?"

"Definitely."

"Same." They both grabbed another donut and munched along. "What do you think we would have done? If there had been no puppies… or donuts… If we had stayed home all day…"

"Well," Lucas considered this for a few moments, taking a third donut when she held up the box to him. "Before the doorbell rang, we were having breakfast, and we were discussing Evil Maya…"

"Almost forgot about her," Maya laughed.

"I didn't," Lucas smirked, which got him a shoulder bump and nearly made him drop his half-eaten donut ball fall from his hand.

"So you're saying we would have talked about her some more."

"We could have made up a whole world for her. Lackeys, an arch-nemesis…"

"Always need one of those," Maya agreed.

"Come up with a few catchphrases, a tragic backstory to explain how she became evil…"

"Poor Evil Maya…"

"It would have turned into a whole comic book," Lucas laughed.

"We'd need Sam for that, he's the expert," Maya reminded him.

"Right, so maybe we would have stopped there." She gave him a look like 'what about after that?' He had to think again, which made several more of the donuts disappear between them. "Well, you would have probably teased me for a while, knowing how bad I want to see your dress."

"I can still do that," Maya's eyes widened at the possibility.

"No, no," he swung his arm around her, pulling her closer in step with him and making her laugh. "No, please," he leaned to kiss the top of her head as they went. "We're nearly there, I can take it."

"I don't think you can," the challenged, looking up at him.

There was a sharp whistle from up ahead, followed by a great bit of dog barking, and they looked toward the house to see their friends standing outside and watching their approach.

"Enough with the snail's pace already!" Asher shouted. "Let's go!"

"Knock it off!" Maya shouted back before bursting out laughing. "Here, last ones," she told Lucas, and they each took two donuts, emptying out the box.

"Oh, they've released the hounds…" Lucas nodded ahead, and they walked as Trix, Lou, and Archer all came dashing up the lane toward them. After having been surrounded by Coraline and her ever growing litter all day, they were incredibly happy to be reunited with their own dogs again, a feeling they guessed was mutual, going by the way their trio hauled their way to the two of them. Maya and Lucas both crouched to catch the dogs as they gained on them. In no time, they were having the remnants of Mrs. Avelino's donuts licked from their faces.

"Okay, okay, that's fair, take it easy," Maya giggled. "Missed you guys, too. What are they going to do when we're gone for two weeks?" she wondered aloud.

"They'll be with Coraline and the puppies back there, they'll be fine," Lucas assured her.

Maya, Lucas, and the dogs now trotting along at their feet finally reached the mailbox and turned up the path to the house, where Sophie, Chiara, Asher, and Ray waited for them.

"What were you eating?" Chiara asked.

"Donuts that Kai brought," Lucas replied, which made Sophie and Asher react about the same as he and Maya had done upon receiving the box. They had been on those teams with Keilani and Kamani, they knew what these donutes tasted like.

"No sharing?" Sophie asked, attempting to sound pitiful and coming off ravenous instead.

"They were a wedding present," Maya informed her, happy to toss her bride powers around while she could. It worked, to some degree at least.

"Well now you go up and pack your bag, Miss Bride, come on, off you go," Sophie shooed her toward the door.

At least she'd had time to think about all the things she would need to bring or want to bring, in the time since she'd decided she would be the one to go away for the night, so making a bag wasn't so difficult. Her mother had the dress by now, she'd picked it up from where it had been hidden at the theater all this time and texted to confirm it had been brought back, secure and undisturbed. Now she just needed… everything else.

"I'm having very intense emotions at the thought of what will happen the next time I see you." Maya smiled, turning from where she'd been packing her bag to find Lucas leaning against the door frame to their room. "Maybe the whole night apart thing had other uses than good luck and… virtue…"

"I'm starting to come around to that, too," Maya nodded. "Hey, one thing though?" she asked, and he nodded, walking toward her. "As much as I've loved having it, as much as I've gotten used to the scratching, maybe for tomorrow…"

"Bye bye beard?" Lucas guessed, laughing.

"If that's alright with you," she grinned.

"Consider it done," he promised. Truth be told, he'd been thinking the same thing, too.

"Okay, well while it's still there, let me just…" she reached up her hands, cupping his face and that neatly maintained beard he'd been rocking now for near on a year. Much as it made sense to remove it, she really would miss it now that she'd gotten used to it like this.

What started out as just touching his face soon turned to a kiss, one innocent one, and then another, and then one that drew on. By the time Chiara came to check on them and insisted for them to stop, they were tangled up on the bed, still fully clothed but easily on the verge of changing that if no one had shown up in the next minute.

"Hey, it's an emotional day, alright?" Maya breathed, as Lucas was decidedly nudged out of the room by their Italian friend and she was pointed back to her half packed bag.

Meanwhile, Lucas made his way back downstairs, absently scratching at his beard. Sophie looked at him as he went by, like she knew exactly what her wife had interrupted upstairs. Luckily, he was saved from any interrogation.

"So nine puppies, huh?" Asher asked, as he and Ray picked up after the group's lazy dinner around the coffee table.

"Yeah, would have expected maybe five or six, but she got nine, all of them alive. Did you show them the pictures?" Lucas turned back to Sophie.

"Of course I did," she nodded, sounding like she was giving him a pass, just this once. "We all came this close to heading up to the farm with you a bunch of times."

"If they're not going to keep them all, we've been talking about dogs for once we move in to the house," Ray revealed.

"I don't think Missy's made up her mind yet," Lucas told him. Knowing her, it would be a difficult thing to see even one of those puppies go elsewhere, and to top it off, she would dread the thought of parting the brothers and sisters, even though it would be complicated to expect anyone to take nine dogs at once. She might not even want to part with a single one either, not when it meant taking them from their mother. Whatever choice she made, if it involved parting with any of the dogs, it would hit her hard, that was just who she was…

"Alright, alright, let's get this show on the road," Maya declared as she came down the stairs, bag over her shoulder and Chiara on her heels. "Can I at least say good night?"

"If you take too long, I'm getting the hose," Sophie 'glared' at her and Maya 'gasped.' As her friendly kidnappers took her bag and headed to their car, Maya turned back to Lucas, paused, looked to Asher and Ray. After a moment the guys walked off into the kitchen to give them privacy.

"This is the weirdest feeling," Lucas smiled, putting his arms around his fiancée.

"I know what you mean. You haven't explained it but I know," Maya closed the embrace, leaning her head to his chest, her ear over his heart.

"I'm sleeping on the couch tonight," he told her.

"What for?"

"You're not going to be in our bed tonight, so why should I? I'll sleep on the couch, and that way the next time either of us is in that bed…"

"You make an excellent point," Maya smiled, looking back up at him. He kissed her, lightly this time, tender. This was it. She was going away now, and the next time they saw each other… He would be standing up there, waiting for her, and she would come along, in her infamous dress, and they would say their vows, and they would be married. "I love you so much. Every day it's like you or the universe finds another way to remind me how much. Today it was a lot of tiny puppies."

"That's definitely not an every day event," he concurred, making her laugh as he smiled down at her, took in the whole of that bright face of hers and feeling like his heart might never know rest. Her hand was right there, right over his heart, she had to be feeling it beating. He pressed his hand over hers. "I love you so much," he echoed her words, with his own meaning behind them. "And I can't wait to see you again." It was stronger than either of them, they kissed again, let it linger about as long as they felt they could before anyone had the chance to force them apart.

"Close your eyes," Maya told him. "That way, you won't see me walk away. You'll just see me walk toward you." He smiled, doing as he was told. He felt her arms release, and he had to do the same. He felt in both those releases a desire to just keep hanging on instead. But then they were no longer touching, and he heard her steps, heard them grow lesser, and lesser. He heard the car door, heard the car drive away, listened until he couldn't hear it anymore, and he opened his eyes again.

"You guys are really over the top sometimes, you know that?" Asher's voice broke the silence and Lucas startled, turning to him.

"Can't help it sometimes, can we?" he shrugged. "I remember a lot of days of you telling me how much you missed _him_ when he was in New York and you were still here," Lucas added, pointing to Ray, who turned a grin to his fiancé. They were getting married just next month, in August.

"This I gotta hear," Ray told Asher, who gave a mildly accusing look to Lucas for selling him out.

"You walked into that one, dude," Lucas shook his head and laughed, while Ray played up his curiosity, capturing Asher and demanding to hear those poor, poor laments of some seven years prior.

Over at the Zvolensky house, Maya arrived with Sophie and Chiara to find that they had the place to themselves. Diana Zvolensky was away on business and she couldn't make it to the wedding, though she'd apologized by promising a few added perks on their French honeymoon. She'd already seen to it that their flight was upgraded to first class.

As had been suggested earlier, the trio had gone and changed into their swimsuits, heading down to the indoor pool in the basement where they happily splashed away for a while. Maya recounted the day's adventures, and Sophie and Chiara dodged any questions regarding the wedding preparations. She was meant to be relaxing, not thinking about the wedding, which would definitely keep her awake.

"I am glad we did not wait when we were getting married," Chiara reflected, watching from the edge of the pool as Maya lazily floated along on her back, staring at the ceiling. "I would have gone mad." Sophie's laughter echoed off the walls. "Then again, I would have liked the anticipation, too."

"It's a little early for a vow renewal, but someday, I just might propose to you again, make you wait a year or two," Sophie told her.

"I can't wait for two years, Sofia…" Chiara replied at once, sending a jet of water her way with her foot, which quickly resulted in her being pulled back into the pool.

Soon, it was nearing midnight, and while the primary reason for her finally retreating to her room was that she needed to be up early in the morning, Maya also knew there would be a message waiting for her any minute now. Changed into her PJs, with her long hair still damp and running down her back in waves, she heard the chime and picked up her phone at once. The clock said 0:00. July 2nd 2027.

_Lucas: Zero days. We're counting upward from now on._

Maya could not contain her smile. Climbing into bed, she exchanged a few messages with her husband to be, before the swimming and the coziness of the bed and the sheets did their work and she drifted off to sleep, dreaming of watercolors and pastries and the man she loved.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	176. Their Joy in Heartbeats

June 24th 2020

_Chapter 176  
Their Joy in Heartbeats_

The sun was just starting to gain on the sky when Maya started to open her eyes. For a moment, she didn't know where she was, and then she remembered she was at the Zvolensky house, but why…

Oh… yes… This was the day. _The_ day, _their _day…

She reached to the night stand by her side, picking up the thing she'd found in her bag the night before, as she'd dug out her PJs for the night. If she had to guess, Lucas had slipped it in there last night, as they were about to say goodnight, right before it had been taken off to the car. She hadn't even seen him do it, but then she'd pulled her shirt from the bag and something had thumped to the bottom. She'd dug her hand in and even as her fingers had touched it, she knew what it was and it made her smile.

Maya had given him this pocket watch, their second Christmas in Austin, ten years ago. It had meant so much for him to have it, but it also meant a lot to her, after they had started a tradition of sorts. Whenever she was going through something stressful, for whatever reason, and he couldn't be with her in person, he would lend her the watch to hold on to, as though he was really there with her after all. When she would give it back to him, they would be together again, and all would be well.

She held it in her palm now, lying back in that ridiculously comfortable bed in one of the guest rooms of Sophie's mother's house. Lucas wasn't here with her this morning, naturally. He'd be back home, sleeping on the couch as he'd told her he would. If he wasn't awake already, which she suspected wasn't the case, he would have to be soon. His preparations for the day may not have been nearly as extensive as her own, but they would still need doing. He wouldn't have this watch to look at, to think of her. _Well, he'll have Evil Maya._

The thought made her chuckle, and it felt like this reaction was the spark to light the flame, to properly ignite the blaze. She was getting married today! She could not have predicted how much this knowledge would leave her in a giddy state. It was one day, with a lot of running around, fancy dress, a big party… At the end of the day, it would still be the two of them, they wouldn't suddenly go and grow wings from their backs, or get magical powers. They would be married, and maybe that was only the two of them telling each other what they already knew, and yet…

And yet for this day to have finally come, to know what was about to happen in a matter of hours, her heart just would not sit still. It was doing somersaults in her chest, great trampoline leaps, and all the judges were giving top scores. She wanted to laugh, loudly, wanted to jump around for real. It wasn't an unfamiliar feeling now. She had been very fortunate of late, with her music, with her job at the school, but this was just different, how could it not?

She was marrying this man who had been making her life entirely better, every day of her life since she was thirteen. She loved him and he had loved her back for near on the whole of the time they had known one another. This was no secret, to one another or to the people who would be in attendance today, nor was it a secret they planned to spend the rest of their lives together, to make a family together.

But they would declare it out loud today, with all their people there, and then they would celebrate, because as much as they would have done all those things no matter what, they had earned it. They had found one another early on in life, and they had fallen for one another, finding a love they had nurtured and been nurtured by for all these years, something they could just as easily never have had. Come November 1st, they would mark their tenth anniversary as a couple. Had they been older, this anniversary would easily have happened several years into their marriage. To finally be at this point now, to get to stand together and say the words, exchange rings… It felt like something a long time coming.

Just as she was starting to sit up, there was a knock at the door, quiet enough to suggest the knocker wanted to see if she was awake.

"I will only grand admittance to a giant cup of coffee!" she called out, and a moment later the door opened, ushering in Sophie and Chiara, the latter holding… "Alright, it's not giant, but I'll take it," Maya chuckled. As Chiara brought the cup to her, Sophie cut ahead, climbing on to the bed to happily tackle hug her bride friend. Maya laughed, welcoming the embrace. To see her now, no one would have guessed how close they'd come to lose her, nearly a year and a half ago, unless you spotted any of the scars, of which she had a handful. Those didn't matter nearly as much as getting to see her run and jump around like she once did, or happily dashing up on a bed to show giddiness for a friend.

"So, sleep alright?" Sophie asked, sitting up now. Maya did as much, the better to take her cup and make space for Chiara to join them.

"Yeah, big time. Can I take this bed back with me?" she laughed.

"If only it fit in your bag," Sophie smirked.

"Now that you are awake, we will start breakfast," Chiara told Maya. "The others will be here in a little while."

"How much is a little while? Am I going to have time to eat or is this going to be one of those times where I have to just…" she mimed shovelling her food into her mouth as fast as she could.

"We have to leave no later than one hour from now, so if you go and shower now, we will take care of breakfast and you will be able to take your time… a little bit," Chiara promised, pinching her fingers together.

"Great, I'll just take this in there with me then," Maya got out of bed, heading to the bathroom with her coffee.

As promised, by the time Maya came down, showered and dressed for 'leg one' of the day, there was breakfast on the table, calling to her. Sitting with her friends, she learned that part of the agreement for their part in the 'kidnapping' of either bride or groom was that no one would come along and try to rush either of them out the door this morning. Maya was very thankful for this.

"How are you feeling?" Sophie asked, smiling.

"Like I have restless leg syndrome all of a sudden," Maya laughed, looking under the table to where her feet kept tip-tapping at the floor. "Like I literally have superpowers and they're just waiting to be let out." Chiara incited her to breathe, all the while smiling as knowingly as her wife did. "Right, that," Maya agreed. "How is it that we can get through being apart all day, most days, with school, and work, and right now waiting a few hours feels like _forever_?"

"It's like if someone tells you not to touch something for a while, suddenly it becomes irresistible," Sophie suggested.

"Well, he _is_ that," Maya agreed, making the others laugh.

"Want to see some pictures?" Chiara asked her.

"Are you patronizing me?" Maya squinted. "Also where are these pictures?" Just as Chiara took out her phone, happy to dig up some shots she might not have seen from the rehearsal dinner, there was the sound of the doorbell.

"I'll get it!" Sophie ran off. Maya caught the smile on Chiara's face as she watched her go, and she felt its significance reflected with ease. They would playfully tease Sophie, calling her a puppy for how she missed no chance to go running around. She returned before long, with their first two arrivals behind her.

"Hi!" Riley made a beeline to go and put her arms around her best friend, even as Maya was reaching for her. It was hard not to feel especially excited now that she was here. Her maid of honor… There really could not have been anyone else, could there? Riley had been with her since long before she had ever gotten to a place in her life where she might think it'd be nice to find a guy and get married. Now here she was, and it felt like no one else could know quite how she felt like Riley would.

"Got any more of those eggs? Some of us didn't get to eat," Rosa asked Chiara before turning a look to Riley.

"You took too long," Riley told her roommate and bandmate.

"Wouldn't even let me grab anything," Rosa frowned. Maya struggled not to laugh. She could just picture Riley had been up and hurrying everyone back at the apartment, the better to get going as soon as possible and clock in on her maid of honor 'duties.'

"Scrambled with chives," Chiara patted Rosa's back before moving to make her eggs. Riley made a noise like she was about to ask for some, too. "Over easy, I remember," Chiara assured her without further prompt. Sophie went to help by putting bread in the toaster.

"Tell us about the puppies," Riley turned back to Maya after thanking their hosts.

"Missy texted not too long ago, said she heard from Kai and everyone made it through the night and he's looking forward to spending the day with them."

"Swear if it wasn't that the landlord already keeps going how he did us a favor to let us have Peanut…" Rosa sighed the sigh of someone eagerly willing to take on one of those puppies.

Maya looked to Riley at this, realizing neither she nor Dylan have gotten around to telling Rosa what they'd told Lucas and her at the rehearsal dinner, about how they were looking to buy a house. If they did this, if they moved out of the apartment, Rosa would likely have to move, too, unless she found new roommates to cover their share of the rent, the bills… Riley silently telegraphed what Maya interpreted as 'please can we not do this today?' On any other day, she might have called her on this, but, well… it _was_ her wedding day. The last thing she needed was squabbling between her friends, though she had a feeling it would find a way to come out sooner or later.

"How's the 'Nut doing?" she asked instead. It didn't feel like it could have been almost four and a half years since the tiny foundling had come into their lives. To see him now, running around, you wouldn't know he'd nearly died, frozen and starved, until he'd been found and brought to Dr. Hillard's clinic.

"We left with a bunch of bags between us, how do you think he was doing?" Rosa asked with a sigh of sympathy breathed away to the dog who had become hers when Maya and Lucas had moved off with Trix and Lou. They could have easily brought Peanut along, too, but he'd just belonged with Rosa, and so he'd gone. "Mrs. Hill said she'd check on him while we were away," Rosa explained, speaking of the trio's neighbor from across the hall.

"Eggs, toast, now eat," Chiara told Riley and Rosa as she set plates in front of them. Maya covered her smirk as she went on with her own plate.

X

Even as Maya had awakened at the Zvolensky house, Lucas opened his eyes to find a trio of eager pups standing by the couch, as though they were all wondering what he was doing down here and, now that he was awake, they would finally get some answers.

"Morning," Lucas yawned, reaching out to pet each one in turn.

As he did this, his barely awakened brain caught up with him. Morning… It was morning, on July 2nd… He was getting married today, within hours…

"You're all getting the good treats today," he whispered to the dogs, who happily barked, whether they understood or not.

He had offered his and Maya's room to Asher and Ray last night. He didn't feel right having the both of them share Sam's single bed, but they had taken it anyway, under the excuse that it would have felt like they were doing something they weren't supposed to if they took the big bed, even though they couldn't say exactly why. Either way, they bunked in Sam's room – with his blessing – and that was that. So far, neither of them had come downstairs from what Lucas could tell. He was so used to waking up to sounds or smells from below, telling him that his brother was in the kitchen, and now the near silence felt too big, especially without his little spoon there by his side.

After quietly moving upstairs to change, Lucas took the dogs out for a quick walk up and down the lane. They'd spend the day home on their own, so it was the least he could do.

It had already been two years since he'd proposed, two years since the night of Zay and Nadine's wedding, when he'd taken Maya up here and revealed the work which had been done, right before getting down on one knee and popping his question. It didn't seem nearly possible, and it made him wonder how quickly the next two years would be gone, too. He didn't think about it too long though. The future would have its own time, and right now every last minute, every last second, was to be devoted to here, now, as he was about to embark on this day where he would marry the woman he had loved since she was 'the new girl.'

He still thought about all the what ifs. He thought about what might have been going on by now if they had been married a year ago, when they were first supposed to be getting married. They'd be celebrating their first wedding anniversary by now, they might have had a baby by now… This made him think of another what if, of their 'maybe baby' of Halloween a few years back. If it had turned out to be positive, that child would have been four years old already. That life would have been even more different than the one brought by getting married one year ago.

None of those thoughts mattered nearly as much as the reality he had been granted. Today, at long last, he and Maya would be married. He had the second of his grandmother Marianne's rings to place on her finger, and he had his vows… He had thought long and hard whether he'd go for something more 'on the spot, off the top of my head' or whether he'd instead opt to write them down, possibly learn them by heart. Even though Maya constantly told him he always knew what to say, he wasn't so confident, at least in this case. He just really didn't want to mess this up, to somehow blank or trip over his words…

He'd written some vows down last year, started to at least, if only to try and put together what was swirling through his head. And then Sophie had been hurt, and they'd pushed back the wedding, and his initial draft had been hidden away for no one to find. He'd pulled that paper out a while back, to see what he'd said then and whether it still worked now. It did, for the most part, though he'd ended up scrapping it. He had written those words a year ago. He wanted to start over, to focus on this new date, with one more year under their belt… So much had happened in that one year, and though some of what he'd write the second time around would inevitably resemble his first attempt in places, this was really the way to go. After working on it for a while, he'd come to the conclusion that maybe he _should_ try and go at it without a script. It couldn't be so hard. All he had to do was look at Maya, and the words always came.

"Where do you think you're going, Friar? Better not be skipping town!" a shout startled him, right along with a car honk. The dogs started to bark at this, while Lucas laughed, finding it was his best man, driving up the lane with Farkle and Dylan in the car, too.

"You guys are up early," Lucas told them while working to redirect the dogs back toward the house.

"Yeah, our friends are getting married today!" Dylan 'reminded' him, after opening the backseat window next to him.

"What do you know," Lucas chuckled.

The car continued rolling slow enough to keep up with him, all the way back to the house, where the guys got out of the car even as Asher and Ray appeared on the porch, both looking like they'd been spooked into thinking they'd up and lost the groom.

"You guys act like I'm not the most eager about today," Lucas shook his head at all of them.

"Better safe than sorry, man," Ray told him.

"Yeah, don't think we wouldn't have had a few choice words if you walked out on our Maya," Asher wagged his finger at him in his most 'parental' tone.

"Just words, huh?" Lucas tapped him on the shoulder.

His walk with the dogs had gotten him even more ready for breakfast, and he was happy to share it with some of his friends, especially as it would allow him this companionship as a means to distract him from the anticipation in his heart… to some minimal degree at least. No matter what they'd do, there would still be that bit of restless activity in his chest, taking him through this morning and to the point where he'd see her walking down the aisle… and even then.

It was not the first time he had envied her ability to capture moments the way she did, drawing, painting… He had watched her many times over the years, when the emotions in her became so strong that they seemed to flow into her hands, on to a page, on to canvas. And when it would all have come from her, there it would be, for them to see, to practically feel what she had been feeling.

If he could draw right now, if he could put to paper the emotions he felt, as he was hours from marrying his one and only… He had never known any other love than hers, and to some this might have felt strange, but to him it felt… lucky, perfect. They had found each other before they could even really know what that kind of love felt like. They had felt it from the start, they could tell as much, in hindsight, even though they couldn't see it at the time. It had nothing to do with infatuation, or silly teenage crushes, no. From the day she had come into his life, she had been essential to it, she had been the part of him he had been missing. She had opened up this part of his heart like it had been hers all along, just waiting for her arrival. And today… Today was their moment to celebrate it all.

"So, no pressure here, but I have to ask," Asher started, as the six of them sat on the porch with their plates, having breakfast. "Married, married," he pointed his fork to Farkle and Zay in turn, "Getting married today, and very soon," he continued, pointing to Lucas and then to Ray and himself, before his fork turned in the direction of his best friend. "And then you… What's going on there?" Dylan looked halfway cornered, but also unconcerned.

"Like you said, there's two weddings this summer," he replied. "Riley should get her own moment," he nodded. "When the time is right, that's when it'll happen, not before."

"Sounds good," Lucas smiled, offering his support of this idea, as did the rest of gathered group.

Asher's question did serve to highlight the fact that so many of them were now either married or soon to be married. It really felt as though it had all happened so fast sometimes, even though it really hadn't. Farkle and Isadora had been the first of all of them, much to their surprise, but that was already five and a half years ago, closer to six. Now they had Ada, and another baby on the way… Sophie and Chiara had taken them all by surprise with their New Year's Eve wedding, and they would be celebrating their fourth anniversary at the turn of this year. And then Zay and Nadine, that was just two years ago, and now it was his and Maya's turn, as it would be Ray and Asher's in a month…

This was the best scenario they could have hoped for. It was almost to be expected for friends to drift apart as they got through school and went and paired off, got married, but they had held on. The next challenge would be to see what happened as more of them went and had kids. If they could stick together through that, to see their families grow together… Oh, there went his heart again. The future felt just so within his grasp now, with the wedding just hours away.

He hoped Maya had found the watch by now. That had been a last minute idea, really. He'd had his hand in his pocket as he waited for her to finish packing, and it was right there, the idea not far behind. All he'd needed was a moment, without her noticing, and they were golden.

After breakfast, he had gone up to shower and get ready to head out for the day. Before he could head back to his room to do that, there was one more thing he needed to do.

"Look at you, baby face, I almost forgot what you looked like under there," Zay was the first to see him come down the stairs a short time later. Lucas laughed as the guys gave their own varied exaggerated reactions to his newly clean shaven face.

"Alright, alright, calm down," he told them. What he wouldn't have given for Maya's reaction right about now. She would be feeling at his face, expressing deep approval of this turn, proclaiming that it was well within her right to examine his newly bared face to her heart's content. He could just see the smirk she'd have on _her_ face. He didn't know if it would be breaking the 'rule' of not seeing each other if he sent her a picture, but then maybe it was better that she didn't see yet. This way, when she'd come walking up, he'd get the surprise of her dress, and she'd get to have one of her own, with the return of his beardless face.

"We should get going," Farkle pointed out, though he mostly said this in a whisper, near Zay, so The Best Man would get to be the one to say to the others.

"Okay, alright, time to go," he clapped his hands together, motioning toward the door. "Things to do, people to see, let's not keep the bride waiting!"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	177. Their Joy in Dresses & Suits

June 25th 2020

_Chapter 177  
Their Joy in Dresses & Suits_

"You shaved your beard?" Thomas Friar asked his son with a smile as he and his friends walked into the barbershop to find and a few of the others had already arrived. "You shaved before coming here," he restated.

"Had a promise to keep," Lucas shrugged. His father embraced him briefly, pulling back to look at him with just a bit of a tremor in his face, looking at his son and knowing he was about to get married. Lucas couldn't say just what was going through his mind, to look at this grown man he'd seen grow from a crying baby placed in his arms, but in his eyes it felt like a lot, like the whole of his world.

"How are you feeling?"

"Like I don't know how to stand? I don't know how to explain it, just like… I'm sitting on the bench, waiting to be called in?" Lucas told him, breathing out. His father laughed. "Was it like that for you, too?"

"The day I married your mother was one of two times in my life I can recall turning into a nervous eater," Thomas revealed. "Not for my not wanting something but wanting it so much I didn't know what else to do with myself. I think you can guess what the other time was."

"Wow…" Lucas tried not to laugh. "How's Mom doing?" he had to wonder now.

"Well, I woke up this morning and she was in the den, looking at your baby pictures, so, you know…"

"Okay…" Lucas now imagined what this would look like for Maya, once his mother made her way to her, because of course she would be there, seeing to the one who would officially be her daughter-in-law before long. It hadn't taken rings and vows to make Maya into a daughter for the Friars, no. She had been treated as such before she and Lucas had been engaged, since before they'd even really dated.

He'd been putting off getting his hair cut the last couple of weeks, figuring it would be better for him to have it freshly done for today. Sitting in the chair, much as he vaguely listened to the conversations around him, he couldn't stop thinking about Maya, wherever she was at the moment. He couldn't tell anymore whether the frenzy he felt was his own or an echo of what she had to be thinking and feeling at the moment. Maybe it was both of them. Either way, he just wanted to be out there already, with her, and he knew there was no way she was relaxed, no way she wasn't climbing the walls at least a little bit.

X

She regretted having asked the question about as soon as the words had left her mouth. It hadn't seemed like such a bad idea to call on opinions as to how she might get her hair styled. Truth be told, she already had a solid idea in her head, had actually spent an hour or two with someone at the theater testing potential options with her until they'd landed on something she was fully satisfied to have joined to the rest of her ensemble for the day. She had pictures on her phone and everything, ready to be shown to the girl at the salon to have reproduced. And then she'd gone and asked 'what do you guys think, up or down?' and the floodgates had opened. Next thing she knew, there were voices talking over each other, and hands… hands reaching to pull her hair this way and that as she sat in front of the mirror, and she almost had to hold to the chair's arms to keep from getting pulled along with it. She would not have patience for this very long, but she didn't want to raise her voice. This was not what she wanted for today.

She was saved in the end by a mouse. Gracie had come and stood in front of her, and so in front of the whole of the opinionated bunch. Maya smirked when she raised her hand, as though she was in class and demanding the right to speak. She gave her arm a bit of a wave, too, for good measure, and finally the voices started to fade back into silence.

"What is it, honey?" Katy asked, tipping her head to Gracie.

"You're pulling her hair," she pointed out. "And you're very loud," she added after a moment. Maya seriously wanted to give her a hundred hugs. "You need to let her talk." Looking into the mirror, Maya saw several faces reacting to the fact that they had just been schooled by a seven-year-old girl, and it was beautiful. They all backed away, some moving off to get their hair done, others their nails… Maya turned back to her sister and motioned her forward until she could wrap her arms around her and kiss her cheek.

"Do you know how much I love you, Mouse-Mouse?" she whispered at her ear, pulling back to find her smiling. Maya brushed her chocolate brown hair behind her ears, looking into that little face she loved very, very much.

She could not believe that the twins were turning eight next month. They had been newborn babes in her arms a moment ago, and she'd stubbed her toe running up from the basement when they'd started crying at night. And now… now they were fully realized humans. Alright, they were still children, and they would remain that way for as long as possible, but they would speak to her sometimes and she would stop like… wow… they were bordering on eloquent sometimes.

They were both readers, and thanks to Lucas' intervention on one visit to the bookstore they had developed a habit of picking two books, each reading one of them and then swapping, which would save Shawn and Katy from having to buy two copies of every book. Nellie continued to have gymnastics class, and Gracie continued with ballet, both having dropped the pretense of carrying on with the other's chosen discipline. They still loved tossing the basketball around with their big sister, and they were getting better at handling it. Gracie had carried on her refusal to eat meat, brought on by the turkey incident of last Thanksgiving, and Shawn had continued to show his solidarity, learning along with his daughter the finer points of being a vegan. As of yet, the rest of the household was still on the fence.

"I love you, too… Superstar…" Gracie whispered back at her, like she'd wanted to match her to a nickname of her own and now she wanted to see what her sister thought of it.

Maya laughed, hugging her again. Maybe she could get through the next few hours.

"Alright," she sighed, looking back to her little sister. "Here, what do you think of this?" She showed Gracie the photos from the theater and her sister considered them with great concentration.

"Hold on," she gave the phone back and ran off to where Nellie was inspecting all the bottles of nail polish. The two girls spoke in hushed tones, and when Nellie gave a nod they both ran off to find their mother. Katy escorted them both out of the salon and Maya could only wonder what this was about. They returned a minute later, as she had shown the photos to Riley, Nadine, and her future mother-in-law. Nellie had a small square box in her hands. It had been wrapped in pink and gold flowered paper, topped with a white bow. The twins approached the chair as one, and they spoke as one.

"For you," they smiled. It was light enough as to seem empty.

"Don't shake it," Nellie warned.

"Okay," Maya laughed. "It's not alive, is it?" she asked. The twins shook their heads. "Good, just checking," she told them as she carefully unwrapped the box, opening it to find it held a pair of paper flowers. The surprise and the awe on her face was in no way exaggerated. "You made these?" she asked her sisters, who nodded in unison.

"We wanted to make crowns, like you did, the other time," Nellie explained, and Maya smiled, recalling them all being in the park, the day of Nadine and Zay's wedding. "But it was hard, and we only got one good one each."

"You could put them in your hair," Gracie stated, revealing her idea. Maya had a feeling she'd cry a few times today, and here was the first one that got her.

"That is a fantastic idea."

X

Arriving at the ranch, Lucas felt very much like he'd stepped into some combination of a romantic comedy and a spy thriller. He was being brought on to the premises with what felt like an exaggerated amount of work put into ensuring that he would not cross paths with Maya or see her in any way before the time came. So as much as he would be drawn to look at the set-up for the ceremony, or see who of their guests had arrived and was hanging around, he would very quickly find his view obscured, as one or another of his co-passengers would take a look ahead of him. After a while he might have started doing it just to make them jump into action.

As it was part of the ranch's purposes to host weddings and other events, they had places for brides and grooms to ready themselves, and this had to be where Maya would end up today. Lucas however was bound for a different location. He was taken directly to his grandmother's former home, now the home of Juliet Stapleton. She had insisted on it, saying that it only felt right that he should be here right now.

Going upstairs to get changed, various groomsmen and family members hanging about, Lucas felt a renewed drum to his heart. One step closer now… The wedding, the ceremony itself, was set to begin ninety minutes from now, which felt both very close and very far away still. His clothes were all laid out, and he went ahead and changed, turning from normal, everyday Lucas into The Groom. This would be what Maya saw when she finally came down the aisle. He had briefly toyed with the idea of wearing a hat, the better to tip it at her, but then half the fun was in not having an actual hat and tipping it anyway. So, no hat. He might have worn his pocket watch, the one she had given him, but then she was the one who had it. She _should_ have it, in this moment.

There was his heart again… She'd be here, somewhere, she'd have to be by now, and that notion did not leave him unaffected.

When someone knocked at the door, some small part of his brain decided it might have been her. But when he said to enter, the door opened to reveal Shawn Hunter.

"Hey, is everything alright?" he asked, his mind jumping immediately to the thought that something had happened to delay the wedding.

"Yeah, yeah, everything's great," Shawn assured him. "I just wanted to come and check in with you, see how you were doing. I'm going to guess 'nervous?'"

"Yeah," Lucas admitted, and just as quickly, "Not because I don't want to get married, the opposite of that."

"Hey, relax, alright?" Shawn smiled. "Am I giving off that much of an overprotective dad vibe that you're still jumpy around me?"

"No?" Lucas replied, and the fact that his voice had raised this into a question left him to wonder if maybe it was actually true.

"Not a bad skill to have, with four girls," Shawn shrugged, "But there's really nothing to worry about for you anymore, okay? Just take a breath already." Lucas took a breath. "Good," Shawn nodded, casually looking him over, checking for anything that might need fixing.

There was something instantly fatherly about the whole thing, and to Lucas it really felt like the first time where the two of them shared something like this. Their relationship had evolved a lot over the years, no doubt to it. Like Shawn had said, there had definitely been this jumpiness to him in the beginning. He and Maya hadn't even been dating yet and, come to think of it, neither were Shawn and Katy, but from very early on there had been this unspoken awareness in the air. Shawn had quickly become _like_ a father to Maya, before becoming her father outright, and Lucas… well, he'd loved her whether he knew to say it or not, so without there being any sort of 'official' status to any of them, Lucas had gone and identified Shawn as 'person who will rip me a new one if I ever hurt her.'

And of course he _had_ hurt her, the one time, even though it had been an accident, even though control had been beyond his grasp due to circumstances none of them would be aware of, not for months. Before that revelation, he had been left to see exactly who Shawn Hunter would become if anyone ever hurt any of his girls, any of his kids for that matter. The Shawn from back then, the one who wouldn't let him anywhere near his house, much less his daughter, would have likely refused to enable any kind of union between the two of them.

But then the truth had come out, and with it he had been welcome in the Hunter Hart house once again. Seven years ago… The twins had been babies at the time, just a few months old. It didn't feel like it could have been that long ago.

Shawn had always treated him like he was part of the family, from that moment on, but today, this moment between the two of them, he very much felt like a son, tended to by his father. Maybe that was why he was here, right now. Maybe he just wanted to show that this was where they stood, the two of them.

"You know, ever since we were here for the rehearsal the other day, Nellie hasn't stopped talking about how she wants to ride horses now," Shawn revealed as he stepped back now, looking Lucas over one more time with a nod that said 'everything looks good.'

"And what do you guys think?" Lucas asked, before expressing any opinions.

"Katy's still not sure if it's a good idea, she thinks she'll be too young."

"She'll be eight soon, Juliet takes kids on from that age," Lucas provided.

"Yeah, I looked it up," Shawn nodded. "As a rule, we give them a few weeks before making any decisions. Sometimes that's all it takes for the idea to make its way back out of their heads again. If she still wants it by the fall though, I guess we'll look into it."

"My grandmother prided herself in having the very best instructors here, and Juliet is the same, so Nellie would be in great hands."

"Guess we'll see," Shawn gave him a nod as he moved to leave the room. Lucas thought he saw a smile on his face as he went, and he had to wonder if maybe there had been more of a motive for this visit, other than passing on this fatherly feeling. Maybe he'd figured that having a talk, brief as it was, would work to calm whatever nerves he might have felt at the moment. Going by the way he felt now… he might have been on to something.

X

"I want to see the horses," Nellie leaned to the open car window as far as she could go, buckled in as she was.

"I don't think they're outside today," Maya pointed out with a smile to her little sister as she leaned back into her seat with a disappointed look. "But I'm sure we can go and see them at some point," she added to bring her out of her momentary funk.

"Can we?"

"Well, maybe not me, once I get changed, but I'm sure somebody else can take you, if you can be a bit patient, yeah? I need my flower girls first," she met Nellie's gaze and the girl smiled now, looking to the back of her big sister's head, where the two paper flowers had been fashioned into pinned accents amid Maya's braided crown. _Flowers from my flower girls…_

It had been almost two years now that Maya had first started to design her wedding dress. Naturally, it had been taken from sketches to reality over a year ago, back when she and Lucas had been meant to be walking down the aisle the previous summer. And then it had been left to sit in a closet for all these months, which had hardly been ideal, but now here they were, and she was finally about to put it on 'for real,' for its intended purpose.

She had worried over time that it might not have been right anymore, that her tastes would have changed, or that, left with all this extra time, she would be drawn to make changes, fussing over something which had been just perfect. A lot of those worries had been quelled when she'd put it on to show some of her Clutterbucket family a few months back, but now this was the big day, and she tried so hard not to go down the path of slipping the dress on and, so soon before the wedding, finding that she didn't like something in the dress anymore. There was no time, they couldn't change it…

"I still can't believe you made this," Nadine declared as she and Riley had stepped into the room to help her into the dress. "I mean, you drew it…"

"I can't believe it either sometimes," Maya smiled, humbled by the looks of awe on her friends' faces. It wasn't as though they hadn't seen it before. They'd seen it on her, when she'd made her impromptu sort of fashion show before Halloween, but they looked at it now like it was the first time again. Their amazement nudged some of those renewed concerns away.

She had never combined the hair and the dress together. It had been suggested to her, when they'd worked out her hairdo, seeing as the dress was here in the building already, but Maya had refused. She didn't want to go for the 'whole look' until today, the better to reserve the full effect. Now here they were, and as she stepped into the dress she had the brief temptation to shut her eyes as Riley and Nadine helped her get it on, and closed. Instead, she watched as it went from a mass of fabric around her feet to something that fit her like a glove. Her eyes got to sting like she'd soon be glad she hadn't done her makeup yet.

"Wow…" Riley was all smiles as she and Nadine stood on either side of her now, the two of them in their bridesmaids' dresses, It was all coming together…

When they heard a knock at the door, all three of them turned around, the bridesmaids instinctively stepping in front of their bride, which amused Maya, especially as the visitor was revealed to be her brother.

"Can I come in?" Sam asked.

"Give us a minute?" Maya asked her friends. Nadine gestured to her face. "Yeah, there's time, I'm not laying on inches of the stuff. I'll make it quick, I promise." So, they went to let Sam into the room, while Maya carefully lifted up her skirts to slip her feet into the shoes waiting just in front of her.

"Wow…" She turned, finding Sam stood in the open doorway.

"That's a popular word today," Maya smiled. "You're looking pretty wow yourself, Sammy boy." As he shut the door and walked up to her, he looked like a man on a mission, and she soon understood why.

"I wanted to make sure I didn't wait until it was too late," he explained, reaching inside his jacket and producing an envelope he now held out to her.

Before she'd even seen the writing on the front, she knew what it would be, and she took a breath. _To Maya, on your wedding day. _She'd had a feeling this letter existed, somewhere, among a whole host of others their father must have written, to mark any number of events he would miss in his children's lives, but to receive it now, she felt as though her heart had been made heavy, not in a bad way but just… heavy…

"He wanted me to give it to you before the actual wedding," Sam explained, and Maya nodded as she walked to sit down. "I'll just go back and see…"

"No, no, come here, stay with me," Maya reached out her hand. Sam moved up and joined her on the bench. He looked momentarily just as nervous as she did while she carefully tore the envelope open, minding fresh made nails. Pulling the paper from inside, it was just as it had been a few months ago, when she'd opened the letter written to her in honor of her twenty-fifth birthday, an unmistakable scent somehow captured in the space of the sealed letter, like a piece of the one who'd composed it, like… a memory bomb.

Maya held her brother's hand as she read their father's words, as she felt relieved not to have done her makeup yet. She sometimes wondered what it would have been like, if the two of them had not mended as they'd done before he'd died. How would she have felt today, if he hadn't been here because of reasons other than the fact that he was dead and gone? Would she have been sad? Satisfied? She had a father, she had Shawn, and he would be here today, to walk her down the aisle, but how much would it have weighed on her that the one who'd made her wouldn't be a part of this day?

That scenario had never come to pass, so they would never know, and that was more than alright with her, though of course she would have preferred for him to be alive. Instead she had the actual reality, the one where Kermit Hart had passed away knowing that his firstborn daughter was with him, in every way that she could be, and that the loss of him, painful as it was, would be a part of her as was her right for being his daughter. And he had known he wouldn't be here for this day, so he had put the words to paper, the ones he could, not knowing when she would become engaged, or how her wedding would be delayed as it had been… Four years already…

At the very bottom of the letter, he had added in post scriptum a single request for this day. Had he lived to see this day, he would have expected no less than to have her be walked down the aisle by the man who had been there for her in ways he'd never been, and that was as it should be. But he wanted her to know that it would have meant the world to get to have this moment with her.

She would have done it, if he had been here… In her mind, when she pictured this moment, she couldn't help but imagine herself walking up there with Shawn on one side and Kermit on the other. She knew it could never be, but she saw it, she saw…

"What?" Sam asked, when he saw a small smile rise on his sister's face.

"Hey, Sammy, can you do something for me? For him?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	178. Their Joy in Vows

June 26th 2020

_Chapter 178  
Their Joy in Vows_

"Ready to go?"

Lucas turned to see Zay had returned from going to check and see whether the guests were all seated, to see if the time had come for him to head out there. This was it… _Breathe_.

"Yeah," Lucas replied, after taking one last look in the mirror. "Yeah," he nodded, taking a couple more deep breaths. His heart was not settling. The way it was going, it felt as though it had grown very intent on dragging him out there if he wouldn't go on his own.

They were headed into what was said to be a scorcher of a fourth of July weekend, but the heat had not come yet. The sun wasn't too intense, the breeze was nice… he could hear birds in the sky, and voices as they made their way to where the guests had been gathered, the chairs set up on either side of the aisle created to lead the bride and groom to stand underneath the tall and impressive tree where, many moons ago, Thomas Friar and Melinda Sullivan had been engaged. String lights in the branches turned the place into something kind of magical, and that was just what they needed for this moment.

"How long before…" Lucas turned to Zay, who in turn looked across the space to where he spotted Nadine. She held up her hand.

"Three minutes," Zay told Lucas, who felt like another log had been tossed on to the flame in his chest. "Hey, man, relax," Zay clapped his shoulder.

"No, I know, I'm fine, I just need it to be three minutes from now already."

He didn't have to worry on that front. He had plenty of people there to make the time go by, just for being seen. The number of guests was definitely something to hold his attention. It was one thing to see a number on paper, but to actually have them all sitting there in one place… There were most of the bridesmaids and groomsmen standing at the back, like a wall to block his view up to the very last moment. It bordered on ridiculous, just how many of them there were, but that vast number in and of itself felt important. They were friends, brothers, sisters, cousins… They had come into their lives at one point or another and had been essential to both Maya and him. They had earned their place here on this day, and there were still others who might have been there with them.

Already, they had one more than they might have done if they'd been married a year ago. Willow had been meant to sit out bridesmaid duty, having just given birth to son Liam not two months before their intended wedding date. Now, the boy was a year old and had been left home with his grandparents. Now they were just short a couple people. Riley would be with Maya, Nadine was just folding herself into the line after telling something to Sophie, who went and headed toward wherever Nadine had just come from… and on the other side, they were only missing Sam… Lucas wasn't sure where he'd gotten off to.

"What's going on?" Lucas wondered, frowning, as Sophie returned a moment later and went to speak to Cecilia among the bridesmaids.

"No idea," Zay told him. "Want me to go see?" Before he had the time to go, Cecilia had switched positions in the line, moving to the end, while Sophie had gone to the side of the groomsmen, speaking to Farkle and Asher, who'd been standing with a gap in between, and then the gap was made the close, the line moving along one space over, closing what had been meant to be Sam's spot. When this was done, even as Maya's mother and stepparents could be seen coming up to take their seats, Sophie had returned to the other side, catching Lucas and Zay's eyes and giving them thumbs up followed by a single finger. _All good, one minute._

_"Where's Sam?"_ Lucas signed out to Sophie.

_"On his way, don't worry about it,"_ Sophie smiled as she signed back and went to stand between Chiara and Rosa.

"Hey, man, isn't that Ree Forster?" Zay quietly tapped Lucas' arm. "Right there, behind the Weaver Kings girls?"

Lucas barely acknowledged the question. He let out a breath, eyes turning to where his parents sat, next to his grandparents. His mother, as was to be expected, was barely keeping it together and already had tissues at the ready. When she saw him looking at her, she motioned for him to come toward her and he quickly went. She stood from her chair, embracing him without a word. Lucas returned the gesture, happily expressing his sentiments with the press of arms and little more. As she pulled back and sat again, Pappy Joe took the chance to tap his grandson's arm, smiling up at him. Lucas tipped his head to him before hurrying back to position.

"Feeling good?" Mr. Matthews asked as he came up to stand under the tree, facing the gathered guests in wait of the bride's entrance.

"Buzzing," Lucas nodded.

"Just remember to…"

"Breathe, I know. I'm doing my best," he smiled, standing to attention now when he heard the strike of music. She was coming… It was starting…

Just minutes before, even as the groom was left to deal with the infinity of three whole minutes, the bride was left to the same sort of conundrum.

She had finally been able to trade one hiding place for another, as she moved in wait of the moment where she'd emerge for her walk to the altar. She could barely stand still anymore, and it was hard to decide if this was comical or unnerving. Riley was there with her, doing her very best to ease those feelings, to calm her enough to go on her way. Sam was giving last minute reminders to the flower girls and ring bearers Wyatt and MJ. All that was left now, before she would go out there were her parents. She'd wanted to see them, just before, which felt like bait to make herself cry, but it didn't stop her wanting it. None of them had seen her yet, not like this.

When the door opened behind her, she turned around, and there they were, a quartet of awed faces. As was to be expected, each of their reactions reflected much of the length and the depth of their relationships. James Lane had become her stepfather through no bond of blood whatsoever, but it had not stopped him from seeing her as a daughter, and it hadn't stopped Maya from seeing him as a parent. Abigail had had space in her heart for her first husband's first child even before she'd known her, and it had only grown with the years. Maya could not imagine not having her stepmother in her life any more than she could think of not being close to her father anymore.

And then Shawn… He would say that she'd been his surprise, that she'd just sort of happened to him, turned him into a father without his expecting it, and she could just feel it, whenever he would look at her with so much emotion as to believe he had been there with her from day one. Today, seeing her as he was about to walk her down the aisle, he looked like he'd had the wind knocked out of him.

Her mother… oh, her mother… Katy looked like she'd known before walking in here that she'd be crying as soon as she saw her daughter standing there, and she'd been right. She'd come forward now, her hands landing on Maya's arms, her shoulders, her cheeks… How many roads had the two of them travelled side by side, from the first time she'd held her baby girl in her arms in New York, to this day in Texas?

"Cutting it close for touch ups," Maya laughed, voice trembling under the weight of tears, and Katy laughed back, inspecting her face.

"You're alright, you're good," she nodded. "Everyone's ready, just waiting for you."

"Did you see Lucas? How's he doing out there?"

"About the same as you're doing," Katy revealed with a smirk, which helped Maya pull herself together again.

"Figured," she chuckled.

"We should go and find our seats," Abigail came up to quickly hug her stepdaughter, her face marked with a few tears of her own. When she turned to look at Sam, still standing there instead of being among the groomsmen, the door opened again and admitted Sophie.

"We are missing a… you, we are missing you," she motioned for Sam to follow her.

"No, he's staying here," Maya told her and her parents. "I want him to go, with me and Dad," she turned a look to Shawn. "For Kermit." As surprised as they were, for all of a second or two, there was no argument of any kind. Both Abigail and Katy looked touched by the small tribute to the man who had been such a large part of both their lives, regardless of how it had all ended. James, having never met his stepchildren's father, admired this nonetheless, while Shawn turned a nod to his partner in giving her away.

"Right, on it," wedding planner Sophie had dashed back out.

"And that's about to be our cue, we should really go now," Katy breathed, hugging her daughter once more, as Abigail and James both did the same and followed her, leaving only the kids, and Sam, and Riley, and Shawn, and Maya.

"Is it too late to take a lap around the building?" she asked her father.

"You say the word and I'll cover for you," Shawn promised, which made her smirk, especially as she could see how he was barely holding himself from crying.

"Come on, Hunter, keep it together," she nodded at him.

"Not a chance, sorry," he laughed, wiping at his eyes. "This whole father of the bride thing is a lot."

"You just hold on to my arm when we go out there, you'll be fine," she counseled, feeling herself taken with the need for deep breathing.

"Come on, Hart, keep it together," he echoed her words now, catching the new tears trying to ruin her makeup. Maya wrapped her arms around him, and he hugged her back, until the sound of music from outside told them it was time to get in position. No more waiting…

"Okay, so it's me, and then the rings, the flowers, and you three," Riley stepped to the doors, as the kids fell into place and Sam moved to stand on his big sister's free side, looping his arm with her. He gave her a smile that was so like their father's. Maya leaned over to kiss his cheek, just as the doors opened and they moved out.

She was coming… It was starting…

Lucas could just barely see movement in the distance, as the two walls of bridesmaids and groomsmen had come to meet in the middle. There, the first of each line, Willow and Lion, linked arms and began down the aisle, soon followed by the next pair, and the one after that, and the one after that… As they came along the aisle, the two walls were shrinking, and shrinking away, and as they reached the front, turning a smile to the anxious groom, they moved to stand on either side again. One here, one there, one here, one there… There was hardly time for him to note that Cecilia came unaccompanied, behind Nadine and Dylan, because behind her… behind her, and little brothers and little sisters with rings and flowers…

The anticipation had been almost too much, and looking back on it later on, she would tell herself it was probably a good idea for her to have people there to walk with her on either side, or else she might have lost the ability to walk on the jelly standing in for her legs. But then… But then she saw him. She had had days before, days so long as to make her feel like she had been gone for ages, days when she was bursting with the need to see him and tell him something good that had happened. No matter the reason, there had been days where the very sight of him felt like someone had reset the counters, and she was falling in love with him all over again.

When Maya saw Lucas standing up there that day, in his new suit, hair cut, beard gone, she felt everything her thirteen-year-old heart had not known she was feeling, she felt all those increments from almost as many years, all those times where she'd been left thinking 'just when I thought I couldn't love you more,' hitting all at once. It was impossible for her to keep it together here and now, but that was alright; his eyes were as brimmed with tears as her own. Coupled to his smile, it inspired new strength in her legs, to take her up to where she might rejoin him.

When Lucas saw Maya there behind her sisters and their sweeping tosses of the petals in their baskets, surrounded by Shawn on one side and Sam on the other… He only had eyes for her. Oh how they had both teased one another over the fact that he wanted to see the dress, and she wanted him to see the dress, and now here she was, in the infamous dress, and…

He didn't know whether it was the combination of the dress and the hair and how much she seemed to be lit from within, if it was that, and the location, and the people, and the music, and the décor, all of it together… All he knew was that he saw her, the woman who had claimed his heart all those years ago, and he could feel it like he'd never felt it before. He loved her so much he could barely contain it, but then everything in him felt as though it was devoted to expand and make space to hold every bit of it. His eyes stung with tears, and he let them come. He had never felt so alive.

Riley had gone and stood at the end of the line of bridesmaids, next to Cecilia. The ring bearers were directed by their respective mothers to go stand where they had to stand, and then the flower girls along with them. Stopping at the top of the aisle, Sam hugged his sister and went to stand in the space left open next to Zay. Shawn hugged his daughter, pressed a kiss to her temple, and moved to sit next to his wife, breathing deep as Katy took his hand with a smile as tearful as his own.

Just as Shawn had let her go, Maya had turned her eyes to her fiancé, his hand extended to her. When she rested her own hand in his, Lucas felt something nestled in her palm and his smile found new depths as he realized it was his pocket watch. He clasped her hand, and the object remained in their joined grasp so long as their hands stayed together. She was back with him now, she was returning it to him.

After spending just over half a day purposefully apart, to be back with one another now, together and for _this_ reason, it seemed impossible for either of them to stop feeling childishly giddy, as though their happiness kept bouncing off of the other's.

"Hey," he silently greeted her.

"Hi," she did the same, before looking to the side, to Mr. Matthews as they stood before him, waiting to be married.

It seemed almost funny, now that the two of them were weeks away from being co-workers. But before he'd been that, he had been a teacher to both of them, with a wide reaching influence in their journeys, and even before that, before either the Matthews or Hart families had relocated to Texas, he had been… still a teacher, briefly, but more than that, whether she'd understood it that way just yet or not, he had been the first person to come into her life after Kermit had left to hold to the position of a father figure. Never mind the fact that he and Mrs. Matthews had helped her mother buy their house, enabling them to live the life they'd had after moving to Austin, he had been someone she had needed, after her father had gone away the way he'd done.

So, when she and Lucas had been considering who might stand as the one to marry them, it had been almost too simple a leap. Of course, of course it would be him. The night they'd asked him, they had been eating over at the Hunter Hart house, the two of them and the Matthews as guests. The look on his face was only rivaled by the one on Shawn's face, at having his best friend be the one to officiate his daughter's wedding. Maya had put down a wager-less bet with Lucas as to whether the reverse might come to pass, the day Riley was the one at the altar.

"Come on, Matthews, one of us needs to keep it together," Maya whispered at him, as he looked caught up in his own whirlwind of nostalgia, looking at the both of them.

"Sorry, you're right," he whispered back. "Where were we?" he joked.

"Think real hard," Maya smiled.

"Ah, yes," he tipped his head before clearing his throat and addressing the whole of the gathered guests. "You'll have to indulge me, it's not every day you get the privilege of bringing together two people you've watched grow up from a young age as I'm about to do. I've known the bride since she was a… very adventurous six-year-old," he looked to Maya, and it was easy to tell which of the guests were aware of what he was referencing by how they quietly laughed. "She and my daughter, Riley, were inseparable from the start, even when she and her mother left New York and came here to Austin twelve years ago. Now, we ended up coming out here ourselves a year later, but we kept up with Maya and her mother in that year. How was it going, how was their new home, what was the city like, how was Maya doing in school, did she make friends? Well, it didn't take long that we started to hear about how she'd made fast friends with a group of kids at school."

Unbidden, three groomsmen and one bridesmaid hooted aloud, making the bride and groom – and much of the guests – laugh out loud.

"Detention, all of you," Cory pointed to both lines, and the interested parties played coy. "Where was I?" he turned back to the guests. "Maya's new friends, yes, well behaved, all of them." Maya and Lucas nodded to each other. _Sure, let's go with that._ "There was one name we kept hearing, again and again, this boy called Lucas." Looking to one another, holding hands, they felt transported to those early days, and it made them smile. "Here was this boy who, sight unseen, had been elevated into something out of a story. And as much as we got to know him as a much needed friend in a time of change, we finally met him, a year after Maya had met him, and we found there was much more to this story. It wasn't just that she'd found him when she needed him. He'd found _her_ when he needed her, too."

Lucas took a deep breath, his thumb absently grazing the back of Maya's hand. For her part, she had to briefly bow her head to collect herself and look at him again. They could hardly hear what was being said about them for a little while, could only really be aware of one another, until Cory, who seemed to catch on to this, had discreetly touched both of their arms, calling for them to say their vows. A brief look between them made so that Lucas went first.

"I started out thinking I needed to write something down, that I would stand up here and possibly freeze, not knowing what to say to you. Now I'm here, looking at you, and I realize how silly that was. I look at you and it's all so clear to me. I love you. I have loved you from the very beginning, and you know that. There's almost nothing I could say here that you don't already know. I've always been able to be so open with you, in ways I could never be with anyone else. You and I, we've been going for so long that none of it had any meaning that we could understand, and that never made it any less real, or important. I wouldn't be half the man I am today if you weren't here with me. You let me into your heart, and when you did, I… I found this whole other way of looking at the world, full of colors, and sounds, and so much life, so much… appreciation for things I might have taken for granted.

"We were lucky, you and I. We found each other when we did, and that made it so we got to grow together, and our love got to do the same. I have known in my heart that you were the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, the one I wanted to make a family with, for more years than I can say. And it's never been something scary, or too big. It was just the truth, and it was something to strive for. Now we're here, and as much as it's felt like we've always been headed here, to know that we actually made it, I… I just feel like I don't know what I did to deserve the honor of calling you my wife, but I promise to keep doing it, whatever comes our way, for as long as there's life in me."

"Great, now I have to talk," she spoke quietly under her breath, voice quaking under tears. Lucas smiled, lifting his hand even as it remained gripped in hers, so he might carefully brush away some of the droplets escaping her eyes. "I got this," she breathed, nodding, and he lowered their hands, squeezing hers for courage.

"You're good?" he asked anyway, and she nodded, lifting her voice now so she might be heard beyond the small circle of him and her and their former teacher.

"When I came to Texas, it felt like I didn't know who I was anymore. I had left everything that made me _me_ back in New York. It was like I was lost at sea, spinning and spinning, and I couldn't find a way to stop, to get my feet back on the ground. And then I met you, first day of school. I saw you, and somewhere in me it felt like… a light, off in the distance. There was land, and all I had to do was hold on tight and I'd get there. When I was with you, I just felt safe. I didn't know how to put it into words, and I didn't need to. All I knew was that you being in my life made it better, whether it was tossing a basketball around, or walking to school together, or just sitting on the steps outside our school, not even talking, just being in the same place, at the same time.

"I found my hope because of you. It's not something that's easy to say, to admit to yourself or to anyone else that the idea of hoping for anything to turn out well felt like a trap you'd set in your own way. But then you were there, my wonderful Huckleberry friend, my best friend in Texas, and you showed me, without trying, without doing anything except to just be yourself. I used to think I was fearless, that it was a good thing. You made me braver, and that was better. You made me hopeful. I look at the future and what it might be like, and I don't shy away from it. I know some of it will be great, and some of it will be hard, but either way I know I won't shy away from giving it everything I've got. I want to see what comes next for us, whether it's tomorrow, or a year from now, or fifty. Make it a hundred while we're at it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	179. Their Joy in Breathing

June 27th 2020

_Chapter 179  
Their Joy in Breathing_

Lucas very casually slipped the pocket watch into his pocket, as Mr. Matthews motioned to MJ Hunter and Wyatt Hart-Lane and the boys stepped forward with the rings. There was electricity in the air, as he found himself holding his grandmother's ring and was asked if he, Lucas Thomas Friar, would take Maya Penelope Hart to be his wife. The question came from his left, but the answer could only be given forward, eye to eye with the one who'd already claimed his heart long ago, rings or no rings.

"I do," he declared, and the words held so much more than their brevity could show. Slipping the ring on her finger, joining it to the one he'd given her two years ago, he looked back up to her and received a silent indication to breathe, which made him laugh.

Looking back on the moment later on, it would be easier to see just how surreal it all was. For now, Maya reached over and took the second ring, this one offered out by Wyatt, and she had to rein in her amusement at seeing how proud both of her little brothers here were, just so proud to be involved. She nodded for them to go back where they'd been standing earlier, and they went at once, while she turned back to her very, very soon to be husband. When Mr. Matthews asked if she, Maya Penelope Hart, would take Lucas Thomas Friar to be her husband, she had to resist the urge to make her response more outwardly expressive and instead, like Lucas had done, bring all of it to exist in a brief but loaded…

"I do." Once she'd said the words, she'd just smirked in such a proudly happy way, before setting the ring on _his_ finger and looking back up to him, her hand in his and his hand in hers. They were right there, and all that was left now was for Mr. Matthews to say _his_ words.

"It is now with a full heart that, with the power given on to me and the request of these two standing before me, I can proclaim this man and this woman to be husband and wife. You may now kiss one another," he bowed his head to them as their faces grew unable to do anything but smile.

"Well it's about time," Lucas quietly whispered what was easily the expression in Maya's eyes, as they both stepped forward and their hands released at once, hers moving to rejoin around his neck, while his met around her waist, and in the cacophony of cheers around them, they lost all awareness of the world beyond each other and shared their first kiss as a married couple.

Standing there for those several beats they allowed themselves, after all this anticipation they'd had built up in them, it felt like a dance, like they'd been lifted off their feet, or maybe that was just her…

Maya received her bouquet back from Riley, receiving a quick but heartfelt half hug from her best friend at the same time, and then she was walking back up the aisle, hand in hand with Lucas, as the twins led the way, tossing what remained of their flowers with wild abandon and stepping aside to allow the newlyweds through, back toward the former residence of Marianne Sullivan. There was some time before they would be expected anywhere, for photos, for the reception, and right now they were overdue with a bit of peace, to just exist in this reality… After two years of engagement, they had finally crossed into this next part of their lives, into marriage. That one was going to take a moment to stop feeling like fireworks in their heads.

Lucas shut the door behind them and turned to find his wife sitting on the steps leading up to the second floor like she'd just needed to settle down for a moment, to let the world stop spinning. His wife… The thought had come so easily.

"This is so much skirt…" she reflected, attempting to straighten it all up a bit as she leaned to the riser at her back. Looking back up, she carefully scooted over, an invitation for him to join her which he accepted at once. "Well if it isn't my husband," she grinned, even more so as he responded to this by cupping her cheek and kissing her once again. He was reading her mind, as far as she was concerned. Heightened emotions or not, she couldn't help wanting to kiss him right now, again and again.

"Can't believe it finally happened," Lucas breathed, resting his forehead to hers as his hand found hers and lightly held to it.

"We have done our waiting. No more of that," she reminded him.

"No more of that," he agreed, and for a few seconds they just sat there, enjoying the quiet, the stillness. "I love your dress by the way," Lucas finally spoke, which made Maya laugh, lifting her head back up, leaning back into the step.

"Not bad, huh?" she asked, flexing her knee to make the skirt move.

"Can I get a three-sixty view?" Lucas requested, and she moved to stand at once, with a slight assist from him.

She stood back so he could get a good look at her, slowly turning around so he could see the front, the back, the sides, everything. He might not have been an expert in fashion, especially in wedding dresses, unless sitting in on some of those dress shows when Maya – and sometimes Maya and her mother – would watch them, for research, counted. But for all that, he had to say he knew enough that he would easily have assumed this dress had come from a fancy shop. Maya and the people at the theater had really gone above and beyond on this one. Either that, or the combination of the dress and the one wearing it skewed his judgment, but who was to say?

"Very not bad at all," he gave her a nod and she beamed.

"So, here's what I'm thinking, we can just go ahead and do this again every year or two, then I get to break it out again," she joked, moving back to him, where he could he put his arms around her from where he sat. "Not the whole thing with the guests and the party and all that, just you and me, like this here," she gestured between the two of them.

"That's a good plan," Lucas nodded, chuckling, before she went and leaned in for another kiss.

"And then you do all of this, too," Maya brushed at his shoulders, at his clean shaven face… "Almost forgot what this felt like without all the extra scratchy bits."

"Yeah, I think I did, too. Personally, I think I could do with being beardless for a while."

"Won't hear me complaining."

Every time silence was able to slip in and hold them in its grasp for a few seconds, it felt like they shifted from the levity of just being together and talking to this feeling in them that was just… Oh my goodness, we are married, we are really, really married… It was kind of wonderful, on the whole. Overwhelming in a good way…

"Is it weird that I really can't wait to see the videos right now?" Lucas asked.

"No, I really want to see them, too!" Maya replied, like she'd only been waiting on the chance to release that giddiness she'd been experiencing.

"We were there, I remember it, but there was just so much going on, and I was kind of…"

"Enthralled?" Maya suggested, with a sweeping gesture to herself.

"Big time enthralled," Lucas agreed. "If you drew me back there, you'd have to give me just the most cartoonish heart eyes, and then the other one here, that just beats out of my chest," he pointed to himself before closing his hold around her again as she just laughed.

"That is a good visual."

"We were so caught up in the moment, I want to see it again."

"And again, and again," Maya echoed. "Thank you for the watch, by the way."

"Something borrowed," Lucas smiled.

"I have enough of those four things, if they're supposed to be for luck, we are going to be very fortunate in this marriage," she pointed out.

"Good," he nodded, just as he remembered something. "Hey, come with me," he stood, starting up the stairs. She gave a curious noise like 'what are you up to now?' "I could go and come back, but I really don't feel like being apart from you right now… even for thirty seconds to go and come back."

"Can't argue with that logic," Maya followed. "Although if you have to go to the bathroom, I am staying in the hall," she teased.

They ended up back in what was a guest room now, though once upon a time it had been the bedroom of a teenage Melinda Sullivan. This was where Lucas had gotten dressed earlier, and from one of his bags he pulled a box, which he opened to reveal a veritable wealth of GiGi Babineaux cookies. When Maya saw these, the immediate reaction was as priceless as he'd expected it to be, though her scanning of the room puzzled him.

"What are you doing?" he asked, especially as she picked up his t-shirt from the folded pile of his morning clothes and unfolded it.

"I don't want to get crumbs on this," she indicated her dress. "But I definitely want cookies, barely had any lunch because someone said 'what if you can't close your dress if you eat too much?'"

"Was it my mom?" Lucas asked, prematurely apologetic.

"No, no, _she_ was trying to feed me," Maya told him as she tried to arrange the t-shirt like some kind of catching bib. "When I was getting ready, I asked Riley to go grab me something, and she came back and told me how she ran into your mom and some of my mom's cousins on the way. Then I just kind of went and let myself get stuck in between, but it's fine. Right now I just need to eat something to hold me over until dinner if I don't want to pass out."

"So, trouble makers made trouble," Lucas nodded and offered out the box. Zay had given it to him earlier, saying his great grandmother had insisted on him having it, as opportunities to eat might become few and far in between, and as usual she had been right.

"Yeah," Maya rolled her eyes before biting a chunk off the first cookie she got her hands on. She looked so happy to be eating the thing, and it reminded Lucas of their walk home from the Sanderson farm, with Mrs. Avelino's donuts. How had that been less than a day ago? "So, how did it go last night, sleep alright?" Maya asked as she ate. She'd barely finished one cookie that she'd picked up a second. He soon joined her.

"About as well as I figured I would," he told her. "Took a while to actually fall asleep, but I was good until morning after that. Your evil counterpart visited me in my dreams."

"Oh, did she?" Maya smirked. She was careful as she sat on the edge of the bed, holding to her 'bib,' where a number of crumbs had already rolled. Lucas sat next to her. "Was she nice?"

"Well no, not really…"

"It's really such a shame, you know? Bad influences happen to the best of us."

"She would probably have brought you cake or something like that earlier," Lucas suggested, and Maya was newly conflicted. "What about you?"

"I got serious mattress envy, that thing should be called the defeater of sleeplessness. I mean, sure, the swimming did some of the work, but you've slept at Sophie's mom's before, you know what it's like."

"Oh, yeah," he easily agreed.

"We could get a pool someday," Maya suggested. Lucas imagined this for a moment.

"We could…" he nodded, smiling.

"I could watch you clean it…" Maya trailed on.

"There it is," his nod dipped.

"What, my husband's hot, what can I do?" she casually shrugged, throwing on a smile.

"Well, when you put it like that…"

"I do, I really do," Maya promised, leaning in to kiss him. The words easily pulled them back to the day, as though there was any chance of either of them forgetting, dressed as they were.

"I like the flowers," he pointed to the back of her head as she turned it to 'aim' at the shirt and took another bite.

"A gift from Nellie and Gracie," Maya smiled, turning her head again so he might get a better look.

"Made you cry, didn't they?"

"A lot of things made me cry today," she looked back at him. "If Rosa didn't keep insisting I drink water all morning I might have ended up dehydrated. Just fountains," she mimed at her eyes, then at his face a moment later. "Should have seen your face before…"

"I was a mess, huh?" Lucas laughed.

"Only a little," Maya assured him.

"Right," he nodded, nudging her foot. "Nice shoes. Didn't see those before."

"I wasn't trying to make you look at my feet earlier, was I?" she gave him a look, resting her head against his shoulder as she raised her foot and turned it about.

"Fair enough," he agreed, pressing a light kiss to the top of her head.

"How long do we get to stay here, just us?"

"They'll come for us at some point, I guess. There's no rush."

"Good," Maya hummed, taking another cookie. "I like this right now."

"Bride power," he whispered and she giggled.

"Bride power," she echoed. "Bride is thirsty now with all these cookies."

With the remainder of their sweet stash stowed away in a handkerchief, folded neatly and set inside the secret pocket Maya had had built into her dress, they made their way back down the stairs. The way they went, it felt like they expected someone to show up at any second and make them leave their break from the chaos of being at their own wedding. Sure, all their friends and family were here, and they were anxious to see them, to talk to them… most of them… But after what had felt like a marathon from the moment they'd gotten up this morning, just to get to the point where they stood under that tree, it was good to just get this beat on their own. They were recharging, and they were catching their breaths, and… well, they'd just gotten married, _that_ was huge and breathtaking in and of itself.

"There's iced tea," Lucas stated.

"Water will do," Maya promised, gesturing to her dress. "Oh, that reminds me," she started to pull at something at the back.

"What are you doing?" Lucas had to ask.

"If I can just get this right, you'll see that I am…" In a moment, the train of her dress had come away, taking with it a couple inches from the front, too, and a layer of the skirt on the whole. "Reception mode activated," she informed him, taking a twirl. "Ideal for dancing and overall merriment."

"Nicely done," he chuckled, taking in the adjustment. Of course she would have thought of this. "So Sam walking you down the aisle with your father…"

"He came to see me while I was getting changed, had a letter from our father," Maya explained with a nod. She'd had to give it back to him to hold on to until after the wedding and the reception, but she remembered it well. "After I read it, I couldn't stop thinking how, if he'd still been alive, I would have wanted him there like that. And he couldn't be, so how could I pass up a solution when it was right there next to me. It felt right."

"He looked so happy to do it, too," Lucas smiled.

"He did, didn't he?" Maya breathed, recalling the look on his face as he'd gone to stand in his spot. This in turn made her think of her father, Shawn, as he had let her go and gone to sit, and even before, as they'd started on their way out. She thought of her mother, too, of Abigail and James, of Riley, Nadine, Sophie, Mr. Matthews… All those faces she had seen before the walk, on her way up… her sisters, her brothers… all those people, there for Lucas and for her… "There are so many people here," her train of thoughts moved into speech. "Are we sure we invited them all? We could have wedding crashers," she whispered.

"They would have had to get past Sophie," Lucas pointed out, which was more than fair.

"I think it will never cease to amaze me that there could be… so many." It always came back to the old days, didn't it, the days when just having her mother was something. But now she had family, so much family. They may not all have been bound to her in blood, but many of them actually were, and _that_ was the unexpected part. All these years ago, she couldn't have imagined having both of her grandmothers in her life, and one of her grandfathers, even a great grandmother… And there were aunts and uncles, and cousins, and of course her brothers and sisters… so many of those.

"We do make friends easily," Lucas agreed. "I can tell some of them to go away if there's too many. But then my mother would scold me for my lack of manners," he added, knowing she would laugh.

"Wouldn't want that," she shook her head. "So I have seven parents now, that's… that's a lot more," she stated. "Birth, step, in-law… And you've got them, too."

"And siblings, too," Lucas nodded. They'd already been that, for a long while. It had always warmed his heart to see the way they all responded to him, saw him for who he was to their big sister and automatically made the leap. If they were hers, then that made them his, too. That had been the unofficial rule, but today it had become official. From the Hunters to every last Hart-Lane, he had gone from being an only child to the proud and happy beholder of four younger brothers and a whopping seven younger sisters, ranging from seventeen years on down to just over a month old.

"Oh, yes," Maya confirmed with a look of reminiscing in her eyes, which he took to be her thinking of the rehearsal dinner.

It had been a much smaller affair, with only those of their guests who were from Austin, or Houston, or those who had already flown in due to previous band engagements _or_ to surprise their stepdaughter/big sister and her fiancé.

At one point, Lucas had volunteered himself to look after baby Maisie, so that her parents might have a chance to go and mingle a while. It had been in great part for the exact purpose he had given, though he would have been lying if he said it had nothing to do with the fact that, with so much talk of babies these days, with Zay and Nadine, with Maeve, and with Maya and him just sort of… not trying but not doing anything to impede either… So, yeah, there was the baby, and he'd wanted to hold her.

She'd been asleep the whole time, but that was fine. She would just sort of… he couldn't describe the sound in any other way except that it was like a light little honk. It was ridiculously adorable and would have broken any grouch.

When he'd spotted a solo Haley Hunter walking along like she was looking for someone, he'd been caught between calling out to her and helping her and also ensuring that the baby in his arms didn't wake up. He had whispered, hoping she would hear, and she had. The girl, just days shy of turning three, had come running up to him. He held a finger to his lips and she had understood it was time to stay quiet.

"Are you looking for your mom and dad?" he'd whispered and gotten a shake of the head. "No? who are you looking for then?"

"You," she'd replied, teetering on heels and toes.

"Yeah?" It had made him smile, and before he could ask why she'd been looking for him, the little blonde had run off again, returning a moment later in the arms of Cara Hart-Lane, herself accompanied by Sam, Teddy, Eliza, Emma, Wyatt, Nellie, Gracie, and MJ.

It was fascinating at times to look at all the Hunters and the Harts in the same place. They all had something of Maya in them, even if they had all only received these parts from one or the other of the birth parents they shared, but then when you put them all together, if you also knew Maya, it suddenly became difficult to distinguish them as separate families. To the kids themselves, it was always just amusing, if they were mistaken for being blood relatives. They always pretended as though they were. It was the one and only occasion where they might differentiate themselves from their Lane siblings.

"Don't wake the baby," Haley pointed to Maisie.

"We won't," Teddy promised her.

"Hey, guys," Lucas had greeted the boys and girls, clearly wondering what had brought them all to him just now. "Is everything alright?"

"Yeah," Sam had replied, nodding at him as though to say 'this is a good thing, you'll see.'

"We have something for you," Nellie whispered, looking to baby Maisie almost as much as Lucas, as she ensured that the girl remained asleep.

"You do?" Lucas had asked, and both Nellie and Gracie had nodded in response, as though they'd both been the one questioned. MJ Hunter had come forth, the bearer of the wrapped box, which he held out with a bright smile that might have been brought on by the act or by the star strewn wrapping paper. "Wow, thank you so much," Lucas had told him, finding himself caught unable to do anything so long as he had the baby in his arms.

"You can open it later," Eliza told him.

"Might be better," Emma agreed.

So, he'd waited, and he'd opened it once he and Maya had gone back home. He'd unwrapped and opened the box as Maya had dashed up to grab something from the attic after she'd had an idea. She'd returned and found him looking over a stack of notes and drawings, which had been sitting on top of a wooden statuette of a man and a dog. It had been carved by Dora, he'd known, as he recognized her handiwork, and he was just about certain Sam had drawn it for her. On the underside of the base, they had found an engraving.

_To our brother,  
__for his wedding.  
__07.02.2027_

It had been sitting on his desk ever since, on top of the box which still held the notes and drawings, one from each of his new siblings save for Maisie. He could not look at the statuette without feeling a rush of emotion, of pride and happiness.

"Feeling better now?" Lucas asked Maya, as she set her empty glass on the kitchen island. "Not going to drop from hunger and dehydration?"

"Probably not?" she estimated, which made him laugh. "You might just want to stay close to me in case I do, Dockleberry," she hummed, moving to embrace him. He closed his arms around her, kissed her forehead.

"Sounds like reasonable medical advice."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	180. Their Joy in Colors & Lights

June 28th 2020

_Chapter 180  
Their Joy in Colors & Lights_

"Hey there, bridesmaids," Maya smiled as she and Lucas had just barely emerged from Juliet's house to find themselves accosted by Eliza and Emma. The girls came running along toward the newlyweds like they'd just been waiting on the chance to give a proper greeting. They'd seen each other before the wedding, but only very briefly or from a distance, and as patient as they'd been able to make themselves they had been just so very eager to come up close and hug the pair of them, and look at them…

"I _love_ your dress," Emma declared, with the enthusiasm of her budding fashion lover's heart. She'd been trying her hand at sketching, at creating her own pieces, and as they were 'twins by marriage,' she and Eliza had taken to scouring for materials over the weekends, the latter offering herself up as a willing mannequin.

"I will introduce you to the costume department ladies who made it with me, yeah?" Maya told her little sister, and the fourteen-year-old gave an excited nod.

"Thank you!"

"Sophie said she was going to come and get you to take pictures in ten minutes," Eliza reported.

"She did, huh?" Lucas turned a look to Maya. "So, what should we do with all this free time?" he wondered. The girls started to speak all at once, and though the words trampled over one another, the ones that floated to the surface sounded a lot like 'Ree Forster.' It had been fairly expected that the singer's presence would settle like a buzz over the gathered guests. It didn't take away from this being the bride and groom's day in the slightest. If anything, it added a new layer of excitement which complimented the event. "Okay, let's try that again and only one of you talks at a time?" Lucas tried not to smirk. The girls looked to one another, and Eliza was elected to speak.

"We saw Ree Forster back there," she pointed.

"I'm sure you did," Maya nodded. "I did invite her."

"You didn't tell us she was coming," Emma stated.

"We call _that_ a surprise," Maya told her. "And look at you… surprised!"

"Can we talk to her?" Eliza asked, almost reverently.

"She's a human being, Lizard. A very nice human being, who will be very happy to meet you both. Just, you know, try and act like the human being _you_ are… I think… and you'll be fine. You go up to her and say 'hi, we're Maya's sisters,' and you'll see what happens. Alright?" Their response was to dash off again without a word.

"_Are_ they human? Are you sure?" Lucas joked.

"Now that you mention it…" Maya played along. "So, we have… we have…" she reached into her pocket – her second pocket, not the cookie pocket – and retrieved her phone to look at the time. If she'd had a pocket big enough, she might have taken her proper camera, to get shots from the day, from her point of view, but she didn't, so the phone camera would more than do the job. "I'd say we have a good eight minutes before we get summoned for a bit of posing and smiling. What _will_ we do with ourselves?"

"Might be hard for us to sneak around all inconspicuous, what with you looking like this," Lucas pointed out. It only felt more so as he'd helped her get the train layer back on before they left the house. Much as she would take it off for the reception, she'd need it back on for the photos.

"I should have gotten myself a dark cloak made, with a hood and everything, you know?"

"Because _that_ would have really blended in," Lucas laughed.

"Good point. Maybe a cowboy hat instead?" she smiled up at him and got a kiss for it.

"Whatever you want to do right now, if you want to stay covert until we have to go out there, we can do that, or if you want to go and say hi to people…"

"What do _you_ want to do?" Maya asked him, casually fixing his collar, his bow tie. This one had been a gift from his godfather, his mother's brother, Michael.

"I wouldn't mind having you all to myself for a little while longer," Lucas admitted.

"Then we better get moving before anyone sees me and my very discreet outfit," Maya took him by the hand and led him around the house. "There, perfect," she nodded as she spotted a bench for them to sit. "Seven minutes and, knowing Sophie, it _will_ be seven minutes, not eight, not six."

"Because why be late when you can be on time," he recalled her saying this once or twice. Maya laughed, just as quickly attempting to stifle the sound as she looked back the way they came.

When Sophie came up to the house – seven minutes later – she was directed to find the bride and groom in their hiding place via a text.

"Come along, Friars!" she called out when she spotted them.

"We still haven't figured that part out, have we?" Lucas thought aloud as they went.

"We've been busy. But we'll figure something out. I know you'll say that whatever I want you'll be okay with, but we went through all that a while ago, remember? Your opinion matters to me, too."

"How about we talk it out on the plane? We'll have a few hours ahead of us…" he suggested.

"Deal," Maya agreed at once, and it was settled.

As they walked along, following Sophie, they could see that the chairs had been taken away, their occupants spread out here and there… And there was Shawn, camera in hand, getting a few shots with the people he already had on hand.

"What are you going to do when you have to get in the shot there? I know how much you hate timers," Maya told her father as they approached. "You didn't bring a selfie stick, did you?" she gasped.

"Oh, we're funny, are we?" Shawn turned to her. He had the tiniest reaction again at seeing her in 'bride mode,' and she resisted the urge to call him on it. "It's alright, I trained myself a couple of stand-in photographers," he nodded over to where August Matthews and Henry Hillard stood, very dapper in their suits. Maya gave something like a mock hurt look. "Hey, you'll always be my favorite student," Shawn told her, and she could just see the memories playing in his mind, of days when he would be in dropping by for a visit because he was 'on assignment' when he really just wanted to see her mother and her. He'd put that camera in her hands, and show her what to do. Those were some of her favorite memories with him, maybe the very favorites.

"Where do you want us?"

The amount of combinations for these photos felt endless, but not nearly in any way that felt like they had to force themselves to look happy when Shawn's camera would capture the shots. For a lot of them, it was the first time they had a chance to stop and say hello and congratulations to Maya and Lucas, just as it was the newlyweds' first chance to thank them for being here. There would be time enough for conversation at the reception.

"I'm starting to think we might need a checklist to make sure we'll have talked to everyone today," Lucas breathed as the revolving door of groupings gave way to just the two of them.

"Like wedding guest bingo," Maya nodded. "Maybe Sophie can hook us up."

The guests had been directed to go toward the proper reception area, little by little, until finally it came down to the trio of the bride, the groom, and the photographer/father of the bride. After being helped out of her train layer once again, Maya wanted to see the pictures already, but Shawn told her to wait until he could get them developed.

"They are perfect, trust me, and it's not time for you to go all nitpicky."

"I'm not nitpicky," she protested, turning to Lucas.

"Do you want me to be on your side or do you want me to be honest?" he smiled at her, giving her hand an affectionate squeeze.

Lucas remembered a number of events having taken place here over the years, and he had such a distinct memory of those large tents, and the floor, and the lights, the flowers, the table settings… He remembered helping set some of those along with the staff when he was little. Today though, knowing it was for him and Maya, it felt entirely surreal. This was all for them, and it was just beautiful. Sophie had done a really outstanding job.

"Oh, boy," Maya breathed, next to him, and he found her fighting another wave of 'wedding induced weepiness.' "It's tables and chairs, what is wrong with me?" she just about scolded herself under her breath, as Shawn went along to see if they could go ahead or if they had to wait and be announced.

"It _is_ just emotions, yeah?" Lucas quietly asked, because he had to.

"Oh, yeah, yeah, I swear," she chuckled, which did help to some degree to rein in those happy tears. "Now you get to have your very own stage entrance," she realized excitedly as they heard Zay on the microphone, calling the guests to attention so they might greet the arrival of the newlyweds.

"I'll try not to embarrass either of us," he smiled, guaranteeing that Maya would be walking into that tent with remnants of laughter.

As they had gone and taken their seats at the head of the table of honor, facing out on the various tables dotting the tent space, it felt like a reverse of when they had been at the altar. Where they had once had their backs to all their guests, now they were facing them all, and it really was impressive to see how many of them there were. Sure, a small number of them were plus ones, but on the whole these were friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, one world famous singer…

"I can still the seating chart in my head," Maya whispered to Lucas, who buried his laugh behind his hand to the best of his ability. "A bunch of tiny pin flags like a battle plan. I'm sure Sophie will be glad she doesn't have to rearrange that thing anymore."

"You did give her a tall order when you added all your mom's side of the family."

"Oh, I was sure she'd quit on us," Maya laughed.

Dinner was still a half-hour away at this point. It might have been set to start later, but with the amount of children in attending it had been decided among the bride and groom and their planner that they would start service earlier than they might have done otherwise. The time would have easily passed along with everyone talking amongst themselves, but before long Sam was spotted, rising from the long table, a few seats over from his big sister and weaving through the table to get to the stage and the microphone sitting in front of the unoccupied instruments.

"Hello? Hey, everyone," he held his hand up in a short wave as they started to look at him. He looked just a bit uncomfortable being up there, and it was easy to see why, even though he secretly had a solid singing voice of his own, he worked so hard not to have anyone find out and try to get him into a position like this. "For those of you who don't know me, my name is Samuel Hart-Lane. I'm Maya's brother," he introduced himself, and peering across the tables toward the couple at the tall-backed chairs, he smiled. "And now I'm also Lucas' brother."

Maya stole a look to Lucas at her side, finding him with a smile just like her own as they looked on their Sam, braving what had to be buckets of butterflies storming in his stomach.

"I'm realizing right now, it's kind of funny, the first thing Maya ever asked me was if I wanted to step on a stage," he blinked, indicating where he now stood. At the long table, Maya laughed, remembering. "I met my sister when I was ten years old. The first eight years of my life, I was the big brother, there was no one else before me. And then one day I saw a video on the internet, and there was a girl singing. I didn't know who she was, but there was something about her that felt familiar."

Maya and Lucas both knew the next part, how he had shown this video to his parents, thinking little of it. But then, later on, he'd overheard them talking, and he'd discovered there was a reason this girl felt familiar… She was family, his big sister by his father but not his mother.

"For the next couple of years, I just got to know her from a distance, and I thought she was the coolest big sister a kid could ask for, even if she didn't know who I was. And then I met her, and I found out I'd been right. We were both artists, and that was the first thing we really bonded over. I'd liked to draw, but I didn't really take it seriously, no one did. But there was this thing that made me happy, and it made her happy, too. We didn't grow up together, and we've both regretted that. Maya, she could have not wanted to know me, to have me in her life, but when I met her I realized that was never going to happen. That wasn't who she was. She met me, and she reached out immediately."

_The day after, but there were circumstances…_

"When I met Lucas, he was kind of like that, too. He didn't have any reason to, at least that's what I figured. Sure, he was dating my sister, but I was just this kid who lived across the country. But we got along from the start, and after a while I understood he wasn't just being nice to me because of her, or because he was a nice guy. It was as easy for him to become my brother than it was for Maya to be my sister even if we hadn't grown up together. What that tells me is that we were always meant to have each other, to be a family."

They would always end up laughing, whenever Sam would introduce the two of them to people he knew. Maya was his sister, Lucas was his brother, but Maya was engaged to Lucas… So, the titles tended to flip flop, and Sam and Lucas would only be referred to as brothers half the time. Right here, his brother and his sister were both very touched.

"That's kind of how I see the two of them, too. They didn't grow up together either, and if things had happened differently they might not have met. But if you ask me, I'd say they were always meant to have one another, too. If you know them as individuals, you know wonderful they can be in their own rights. When they come together though, when they combine the power they have in them, well, it's just next level and they become… like superheroes. It's really corny to say it, but that's what they are to me. They're always there when I need them, and they make me want to do better. If that doesn't fit the bill, then I don't know what does. So, here's to you, Maya, Lucas… Oh, I was supposed to have a… Thanks," he crouched to take the glass Cara had jogged up to give him. He lifted it up, causing a wave of glasses to join his across the tent. "Here's to you, here's to the future."

Under the cheers of the gathered guests, Sam had left the stage with a breath of relief, now that he wasn't up there anymore. He'd made his way back to his seat, stalled momentarily by his mother, who stood to hug him and briefly talk to him, her and James both. When he came back around the table, Cecilia was giving him thumbs up and grinning, even as Maya and Lucas were both on their feet, waiting for him. She got hold of him first, giving him a good, strong embrace which he returned. They held to one another for a good fifteen seconds before Maya pulled back, looking to her little brother… It used to be she had to look down to meet his eyes, and now to look up at him…

"I don't even have the words anymore," she laughed through her tears.

"I do what I can," he smiled, and she could tell he was just barely keeping himself from crying, too.

"Hey, come here," Lucas reached his arm out when Sam had parted from his sister's hold. The boy moved around and into a new hug. "I really liked what you said up there, and I know how much you wanted to get down from there, so I really appreciate it."

"My legs felt like jelly the whole time," Sam admitted, as though they couldn't have guessed it already.

"Here," Maya appeared again when the brothers stepped apart. She held out the bundled handkerchief from her pocket. "You and your jelly legs earned them. Just, you know, maybe keep them for after dinner," she smiled.

He would not have had time to dig in to even one GiGi cookie anyway, as the wait staff started to come with the first course just a minute after he'd gotten to return to his chair, next to Cecilia.

"Do you think if I asked them to just bring all the courses as soon as I finish one they would do it?" Maya joked… half-joked… Those cookies back at the house were getting to be a bit of a distant memory in her stomach.

"Well, you know, with great bride power…" Lucas 'reminded her,' earning a squint.

A minute later, they observed a curious sight. Haley Hunter, who sat at the kids' table not too far from the long table along with her brother and sisters and the Hart-Lanes, stood up and turned to approach their table. Her little hands were joined around something they couldn't make out, and she looked like she was considering her options for a moment before lifting up the table cloth and crawling underneath.

"Hey, hey…" Maya lifted the cloth on her side of the table, finding the almost three-year-old staring back at her with a smile. "What are you doing under there? Watch your head," she guided her out until she stood there, between her big sister and her new husband. "What's that you… oh," she laughed, as her little sister offered out a bread roll. "For me?"

"Yeah!" Haley beamed.

"They're my favorite, thank you," Maya laughed, hugging her.

"Hey, what about me?" Lucas played hurt, but when the girl looked ready to dive back under the table to get him one, he made like he'd been joking by pulling her into a hug of his own which made her laugh. "Let's get you back, okay? Ready?" Hoisted over the table, she was deposited in the waiting arms of Hank Hillard, who'd come up at a nod from his nephew and carried the Hunter girl back to her seat.

"You realize she's going to want to do that again at _least_ seven times tonight, right?" Maya laughed, watching Haley, who was already looking back at them like she was thinking of going.

"Oh, I know she will," Lucas promised, his smile suggesting he was ready to swing his tiny sister-in-law over that table as many times as she wanted him to.

"And in a dozen years, you can embarrass her in front of her friends with the story," Maya suggested.

"I wouldn't do that to her…" Lucas slowly shook his head, letting a couple seconds go by. "First time she brings a crush home though…" Maya just managed to stall her glass as she'd been about to take a sip, laughing as she looked back to him.

As the meal progressed, it felt like a constant cycle of joyful emotions. There would be the occasional striking of knives on glasses, calling for attention and another toast, or in other times for a kiss between the newlyweds… Haley came back three times, each time with bread for her sister, which they came to refer to as the roll toll, and each time she was guided under the table, offered her roll, and immediately turned to Lucas with her arms up in the air. She was lifted in a rush of giggles and set back on her feet by Hank to then run back to her table. When the main course plates were taken away, Nellie and Gracie hid the half-empty basket under the table so it would not be taken away.

Teddy took it one step further, hurrying from table to table and collecting all the leftover rolls to then add them to the hidden basket. As they would hear it, this was equal parts enabling Haley and ensuring that the rolls would not be thrown away. Under Cara's counsel, Haley had just taken the whole basket, with brother MJ's help, over to the long table. This would be advance payment, good for the whole night.

"You, sir, have a serious case of baby fever," Maya whispered at Lucas' ear, after the basket delivery had earned two turns one after the other. He smiled, but she could tell he was seeing it, too.

"Imagine that…"

"I mean, it's really sweet and I'm digging it," she confessed. He looked at her after getting hold of his butter knife, giving his glasses the careful hits they both knew would soon be picked up across the room. "That's cheating," she grinned, leaning in for the kiss. "But I'll take it anyway."

Given a bit of a breather before the cake would come along, Lucas had been summoned to the kids' table by his little sister-in-law's call for 'Lucky.'

"He totally considered climbing under table, didn't he?" Nadine leaned forward from where she sat, a few places over from the newly vacated seat.

"Big time," Maya agreed, smiling as she watched her husband, crouching next to Haley's chair, where the small girl seemed to be in the middle of telling Lucas some very animated story.

"Look at him, goes and takes another of my girls," Shawn 'scoffed,' two seats over from Maya's.

"Don't worry, you'll get that one back by story time tonight," Katy patted his knee with a laugh, looking on to Haley the storyteller.

At last, the cake came along. It had been designed and created by Ellie Beale, back in Houston, at the bakery where Sophie used to work. It easily brought back memories of their time living out there, when they were all in college, especially the infamous Halloween of the leg and arm cakes. This one was definitely not made to scare or gross out anyone. It was beautiful, impressive, and entirely reminiscent of the couple it had been made for.

"Do we have to cut into it?" Lucas asked, in genuine awe as they saw it for the first time.

"Say the word and I'll make everyone leave, then it's you and me and two forks," Maya replied, equally taken by the creation.

Much as they could have stared all night, they had gone and made that first cut together, and soon the pieces began to be distributed. The cake had been a combined effort in the end, as Ellie was joined at the bakery by Isabel Garcia, the better to create a much, much larger version of her infamous honey cake, forever a favorite of the couple of the day, bringing many more sweet memories back to them with every bite.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	181. Their Joy in Dancing

June 29th 2020

_Chapter 181  
Their Joy in Dancing_

"Am I hearing this right that you designed your dress?"

Maya turned around to find a beaming Ree Forster standing behind her. She barely had time to nod that the woman was reaching out to embrace her, pulling back to kiss her on one cheek and the other. It was the first chance they had gotten to really talk all day, though Maya had of course seen her, here and there since she'd come out from her hiding spot to walk down the aisle. Somehow, she had gone from being just a bit startled the first time, to now just seeing this as reality. Of course Ree was here… They were colleagues. She might go so far as to think they were friends. _That_ felt like something too massive to even consider, but then sooner or later she'd have to stop and recognize that it might be true. Here she was, telling her sisters that Ree Forster was a human being like all of them and she couldn't even follow her own rules. Well, she was starting now. She was a friend, a… very revered friend treated with the utmost respect.

"Now, ready to go out there?" Ree asked.

Maya looked to the stage, to where the rest of the band was getting ready to go on, to play her through her first few dances. It wasn't until now that she noticed they looked just a bit giddier than she would have expected them to be. What was so exciting about going on to perform what they had clearly been practicing the day before while Maya and Lucas had been at the Sanderson farm with the puppies? And then it clicked…

She didn't know when it had happened, because not one of them had known Ree would be here today until… well, today. As good as their fangirls were, they wouldn't have known. The last time, their show, Maya had figured out in time that it was no coincidence Kayla had pieced together the chance that Ree would be in town that night. The singer had gone and put out the word, knowing it was likely to get back to them and they might put two and two together. This time, she was entirely incognito up until she showed up here. Even then, her guests had been very respectful, hadn't swarmed her, and for this Maya was thankful.

Ree Forster was about to take the stage, with TXNY backing her up, to accompany the newlyweds' first dance.

"Yeah, just missing one tall husband," Maya turned, even as Lucas walked up to them. "Oh, there he is," she smiled, seeing his puzzled 'did I walk into the middle of a joke?' face.

"Right then, best get my stage face on," Ree pressed her hands together, taking a good centering breath before moving to join the band. As they watched her talk quietly with the six of them up there, Maya and Lucas were hit with a very similar thought.

"You know, she kind of reminds me of you when you're about to go up," Lucas said it aloud. Maya smiled back at him.

"Yeah, it's almost like she's one of us. I used to look at the liner on her old albums all the time, still know all those pictures enough to draw them from memory. She was a teenager in the beginning, clearly she's aged since then, but… I look at her, and that's still her. She's still that girl in there." _That's what I want to be…_ The thought kept her smile stoked, even as Ree finally turned and came to stand at the microphone.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ree Forster," she introduced herself, as though anyone – except maybe a handful of people in the Clutterbucket crew – wouldn't already know. She hadn't even needed to call them to attention. The moment she'd stepped up on that stage, the eyes had started to turn and stay on her. "Tonight, I have the privilege of joining the ladies of TXNY," she indicated the band at her back, "And we all of us together are about to bring out a pair of very special people on their first dance as husband and wife. You know them, you love them, now help me welcome the newlyweds," she invited the guests, in a welcoming tone, when she could have just as easily roused them into a rock frenzy with the same words.

Under the cheers of their gathered guests, Lucas turned to Maya, holding his hand to her and receiving hers with a matched smile. They walked out on to the dance floor, and she just had to look him in the eye to know he was about to give her a twirl, knowing without her having to say it that she had been very eager to get to make that skirt spin. It did not disappoint. She finished her rotation even as the music started, and she landed back in his arms. And they were just dancing.

Picking their first song had been easy. Eight grade… spring time… the school dance… They hadn't been together yet, though they would be by the following fall. They had danced the night away inside the gym, hopping and laughing, and then they had gone out for some air. They'd sat a while, listening to the distant music floating out from inside the school. After a while, a new song had started, slower, and he had asked her for another dance. They'd had that song together, standing out there, and it had been one of those moments where, given just the slightest nudge, they might have started out together right then and there. To this day, ten years on, they could not hear so much as the title without being taken back to that moment. So, of course it would be their first dance. It _had_ been their first dance, their first romantic-without-knowing-it dance.

It would have been so easy for them to slip into their usual back and forth, coming so easily as it always did, but they did not say a word through the whole of the song. They were too caught up in one another, once again left to remember, as though anything about their location and their attire could let them forget, that they were now married. It wasn't just that they remembered it, of course. It was the knowledge of it, of everything it meant, the culmination of twelve years of friendship, and love, of growth and support, the two of them out in the world, inseparable. And it was the look out to the future ahead of them, as though the doors had been unlocked with this moment. It had always been there, yes, and it wasn't a couple of rings that would have changed it, but here they were, and they had made their vows to one another, like they had always been looking to the future, but now they were looking at it and they were grasping one another's hand as they marched into it. Standing here, it was as good as saying 'I will be there,' loud enough for all to hear.

The song, the dance, ended as it had begun, with a twirl and a return, and the butterflies were not the kind that sat heavy in the stomach but rather fluttered about the heart, kept it feeling like it would take flight as well.

"Wasn't sure I had that timed out right," Lucas grinned after Maya had stretched up and kissed him.

"You, Dancing Shoes Friar? I wasn't concerned," she told him, making him laugh. "That was very good," she complimented, and he tipped his head to her, invisible hat and all. "Oh look, it's the comedy husband."

"You never get tired of saying that, huh?" he smiled, like every time she said it his heart would leap. She shook her head; she did not get tired at all. "My wife is such a weirdo," he shook his head, kissing her once more. "I kind of don't want to let you go right now."

"That makes two of us. Don't worry, we'll find our way back. This might be our night, but that just means we're really popular and everyone wants to dance with us," she smirked, holding to his arms to lift herself up and whisper at his ear. When she stepped back, she chuckled at the look on his face. "Just to make sure," she coyly shrugged, just as she could see Shawn on the sidelines. She smiled at him and he stepped on to the dance floor to join her, while Lucas moved to find his mother.

"Hey, Mom," he held his hand out to her. "Can I borrow you for a dance?" Melinda Friar set her hand in her son's, looking like she had some heart butterflies of her own, following her baby boy on to the dance floor on his wedding day.

"It feels like I was just here a minute ago, dancing with your father for the first time, our own day," she told Lucas, and he smiled. "And I look at you now… You're so much like him," Melinda went on, her voice adding so much meaning to this statement, telling him how proud it made her.

"I like to think I'm a lot like the both of you," Lucas told his mother as they danced, just as quickly knowing he'd just made her start to tear up again. It would not have taken very much to get her started today. It was the truth though. It was easy for people to say he was a lot like his father, because of the way he looked, and because most people saw his mother and immediately saw her more… exuberant traits. If they knew her the way he knew her, they would see that, as good of a man as his father was, Lucas had gotten the bulk of his own brand of kind and nurturing nature from his mother, and for this he was eternally grateful.

As mother and son danced here, there danced father and daughter, as Shawn had come along on the dance floor, looking very much like he was finding his own emotional trigger under assault. Maya could not even begin to express how much this man had meant to her, in all the years he'd been part of their lives. She had become his daughter with great ease, like she'd always just fit this space in his heart which had remained unoccupied, unused until she came along. He never had to tell her that she mattered to him equally as much as her Hunter siblings, whether or not they shared DNA. She could always see it in his eyes, and she saw it now as he stood before her, a nervous father taking his daughter's hand and leading her into a dance as she stood a newly married woman.

"You're a lot more serious than the first time we ever danced you and I," Maya recalled as they came into a hold and moved along to the band's music, to Ree's voice. Shawn looked like he couldn't remember for a moment, and then it came back to him and he laughed. It hadn't been any special occasion except that she'd been watching a movie when he'd come over on one of his many visits, and she'd been singing along, hamming it up with the best of them and, amused by the whole display, he'd just started this weird little dance that sent her rolling with giggles. Rather than to have her laugh 'at him,' he'd pulled her from the couch so she'd show him what _she_ had. It was the kind of silly moment neither of them would have seen coming, and yet it had been one more signal of their growing connection as an eventual father and daughter.

"It's the clothes, definitely the clothes," he assured her. "And these shoes. They're serious dancing shoes," he informed her, and she managed to get a look down at his feet.

"Very serious, of course, yes," she nodded, turning her head back up with a laugh. "Don't I look very serious, too?"

"I was going to go with beautiful, but hey, to each their own," he told her, and she could have rolled her eyes at him if her face didn't look so just plain happy as it did.

"I'm just saying, I'm not getting tired of this whole… crying Olympics thing we've got going," Maya informed him, and he laughed.

"Is that right?"

"It is," she nodded. He looked at her like he was going to challenge this notion, but in the end he just kept looking at her, smiling as they danced.

"I could get used to this," he finally told her. "Maybe we should take lessons together," he suggested, in that way he had where she wasn't entirely sure if he was joking or not.

"Hey, all you'd have to do would be to show up at Stage Ready some time. We have some great teachers."

"That's what I've been hearing," Shawn nodded. "I might just take you up on that." Maybe he was serious, maybe he wasn't… But he made her laugh, and that was real enough.

As the two pairs on the dance floor began to be joined by others, Maya and Lucas found themselves with new partners with barely a moment in between the previous and the next. As they found themselves parted from their father and mother respectively, they were quickly matched once again with a father and a mother, this time one another's. Shawn Hunter had stepped back and there stood Thomas Friar, ready to take his daughter-in-law for a turn. The two men exchanged a nod before Lucas' father offered a hand to his bride. Maya gladly took it.

"You know, I don't think I ever told you how glad I was to have you and Mrs. Friar there all this time," Maya told him, caught for a moment just as Thomas was in recalling that she was now a Mrs. Friar herself, even if the name thing remained as yet undecided.

"Were you now?" Thomas smiled, looking very much like his son.

"Very much," Maya nodded. "I always felt so welcome in your home, and that meant a lot to me, especially when I'd just gotten here and I was kind of… off balance. It was like a second home… and the two of you, you took me in."

"Well," Thomas breathed in. His emotions manifested differently than his son's might have done, but they were there nonetheless and she could see them very well, like she had cheat codes. It meant so much to him, what she was telling him here. "We might not have had the chance to raise a daughter of our own, but we did pretty good when you came along, I think. I wouldn't trade a single day… except maybe that one," he added after a beat, and Maya agreed with a silent nod. "Now, about this Mr. Friar business…" he gave a smile, and she matched it gladly.

"It's like I told Lucas earlier. I suddenly find myself with seven parents. Pretty good deal, huh?"

"Happy to be counted," Thomas Friar nodded.

Not so far away, Lucas was leading his mother-in-law in their own dance. Katy had always treated him well, and if she ever turned him away, it was never for any reason Lucas himself wouldn't have backed up himself. Even when she _had_ turned him away though, he'd always gotten the sense that she was doing it because she had to and not because she wanted to. In hindsight, he could see how much she understood of the bond between her daughter and the boy she'd met at school. She would always choose the path of patience over condemnation, and in the end she would generally be proven correct. When there had been the ski trip incident and Maya had been so deeply upset with them for not saying they were leaving, she had refused him admittance, and after the accident and the ban, well…

Now that they knew more of her story, her past, how she'd run away from home as a teenager, Lucas could piece together how she might have done her best to show herself to be on her daughter's side, to keep her from doing the same thing she'd done, especially after the time she nearly had… with him, with Zay.

After those two incidents though, it was like she's accepted, once and for all, that the two of them were both on Maya's team in the same way: forever and always, through thick and thin. And she needed nothing more from him than that. The fact that he had become part of her family, in so many ways, well that was what made it even better.

"I have trouble believing how long it's been sometimes," Katy shook her head in wonder. "I still remember the first time you all came over for the first time." Lucas laughed.

"You wanted Zay to be an actor," he recalled.

"I stand by that, he could be great," Katy laughed along with him.

"To me, it feels more like I have trouble believing we weren't all together from the beginning." There were still more years in the 'before Maya' column than the 'since Maya' one, but they almost felt like a dream, not as real in some places.

"I'm going to have a grumpy one on my hands tonight," Katy told him, turning to look over where Shawn was showing himself the master juggler that he was, holding little Haley in one arm, balancing MJ on his back, and dancing to the very best of his abilities with the twins, releasing his hold on his son's leg now and then to twirl either Nellie or Gracie. Haley wasn't giving this much attention, instead using this vantage point to look for her Lucky friend.

"I think I owe her a dance," Lucas smiled. The night may not have been long enough for the amount of dances he had ahead of him. And oh how many more he wanted to share with his wife… But first… As he and Katy completed their turn, Ree had ceded the microphone back to the band, and Rosa had taken up the vocals. Reaching the outskirts of the dance floor, Lucas came to his father-in-law's side, that he may address the girl who had briefly looked ready to doze off on her father's shoulder until she'd spotted her mother and her new brother, and then her head was back up and following his advance. "Miss Hunter," he tipped his head to Haley. "May I?"

"Have her back before midnight?" Shawn teased.

"I'll do my best," Lucas smiled, lifting the eager girl into his arms and taking her off for a twirl.

As Lucas was off with her little sister, Maya was called on for a new dance, this time from the imposing figure of her grandfather. Tanner Clutterbucket may have looked like the bearded version of his older brother Walter, but put in his best suit he still looked very distinct from the businessman. Far from looking out of place, he was just very… distinguished. Maybe it was that he wasn't most likely to be found in this kind of attire.

"Would you like to…" he asked, his shyness in complete contrast to his stature but on the whole leaving him as someone endearing despite his stoic tendencies.

"Very much so," Maya smiled up at him, taking the hand offered to her. Hers looked like a small child's compared to his, but it didn't matter to either of them. For a guy that tall and quiet, he moved a lot better than she might have expected. He wasn't much of a talker, especially in a situation like this, but even without words Maya only needed to look into his eyes to know how happy it made him to be here with her.

As he relinquished the Hunter girl in the care of her five-year-old brother, who tried to imitate the tall people's dancing with her, Lucas turned to find possibly his second most anticipated dance partner after his wife. One of the promises they had made themselves in delaying the wedding by a year was that, at this reception they would get to do what they would not have been able to do one year ago. To look at her, Lucas knew it meant as much to Sophie as it did to him, likely even more so, that the two of them would go out there and have themselves a dance.

"Feels weird to say it, but this definitely takes me back," Sophie laughed, after Lucas had given her a spin. "That whole ballroom block," she recalled, and Lucas instantly reset his frame, stoking her laughter.

"We were totally the best ones in that one," he affirmed with confidence.

"Oh, yeah," Sophie echoed the feeling. "Zay though…" she trailed on, and he had to bite back his own laughter, thinking of him in that sort of contraption their teacher had brought in to make him hold himself the right way. "He looked so mad the whole time…"

"It's not right, it's just not right," Lucas recalled his best man's words, imitating him as best he could, which was very well, going by Sophie's reaction. After a beat of silent dancing, it was easy for the two of them to just look at each other with the memory of the promise they'd made, not a promise kept. It wasn't just the promise itself, of course, but also the recovery she had undergone to even get here.

"It still makes me feel just so… You put this all off for a year, because of me…"

"_For_ you. And we would do it again," Lucas vowed. "And hey, you came through very well with all this," he looked around.

"I think I might retire with my own success," Sophie nodded. "All this planning, it's a lot of work."

"You get to go down a legend," Lucas smirked, especially at the happy look of triumph on his friend's face.

As happy as they both were to dance with friends and family members, when Maya and Lucas found their way back to one another, they reached for the other's hand in a decisive sort of 'our turn now' gesture, and Lucas gently pulled her into his arms again as the music kicked up around them.

"Missed you," Maya looked up, and Lucas expressed this reciprocated feeling with a kiss at her forehead.

"Better stay with me a while then," he suggested, and she smiled, resting her head to his shoulder as they swayed.

"That's the plan," she breathed. If she closed her eyes, it was as though they were the only ones here, almost like they were back at his grandmother's old house, recharging from the whirlwind of the day. They stayed like this, in their sort of cocoon, for the remainder of the song, until the next one made Maya look back up. "I almost fell asleep there," she admitted, which made Lucas smile. "I can't help it, I missed you last night."

"Hey, you don't have to convince me," he promised.

"No more couches for you," she laughed. He tipped his head. "Alright, no more couches unless I'm there, too."

"Good," he smiled, stealing a look over to the stage. "You know what we need right now?"

"Big, bouncing around music?" Maya suggested, and Lucas nodded at once. "Yeah, come on. I did _not_ build that removable layer into my dress for nothing," she laughed, as they went to put in their request to the band. Sooner or later, they'd have to switch things up, to get their own turn on the dance floor. It was time to kick it up a notch or five.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	182. Their Joy in Friends and Family

June 30th 2020

_Chapter 182  
Their Joy in Friends & Family_

"Well, hello there, cousin Harry!" Maya 'gasped' as the boy was passed into her arms.

At all of three months and some dust, it would have been easy to decide to leave him with a sitter, even if this would have been complicated with the family being very out of town. But it was completely more appreciated by his cousin the bride to get some quality time with young Harry Olsen. His mother, Charlie, had looked just a bit uncertain about putting her baby anywhere near her niece's dress, what with the odds of any amount of stains that might happen, but Maya decided she would take her chances for a minute at the least. He had recently woken up and been changed, after being taken on a walk around Sullivan Stables while the music had been going on strong.

"I never get tired of baby formal wear," she informed her cousin in a wide-eyed whisper which managed to hold his captivated attention. "It is my great weakness right now, you could pretty much ask me for anything right now and I'd give it you. How about it, huh?" The baby just kept looking at her. "Right, no, that's a great idea, tell me more." Harry yawned. "Cool, cool, yeah," she laughed.

"You know, he probably thinks you're me," Charlie grinned, looking on.

"Oh, I know, it was the same with the twins, and MJ, and Haley," Maya counted off, never tearing her eyes from the boy in her arms. "Made me a very successful babysitter."

"You might want to hand him back, he's making his 'I'm about to poop' face," Charlie reached out, and Maya passed her cousin back. "I just changed you, honestly," Charlie sighed, excusing herself.

Watching them go, Maya found herself faced up against what could only be referred to as her own case of baby fever. She'd called Lucas on it earlier, with his whole routine with her little sister, but who was she kidding? She had it as bad as he did, she was _there_, as ready as she'd ever be. And if she hadn't gotten that offer from the principal, if she hadn't been hired at the school for the coming fall, she would have been full steam ahead when Lucas had brought it up a few weeks back.

But it was like she'd told him. Ideally, she preferred the chance to put in a year at the school before she had to throw maternity leave in the mix. They were both careful, for the time being, to keep it from happening, but they also knew that accidents happened, so if one did, well… they'd call it a fortunate one and go forward. Whichever way it went in the end, they'd both just have to manage this case of baby fever in what way they could until then.

"Maya!" She looked up and beamed as she saw…

"Miss Shayla Blake, as I live and breathe," she drawled, opening out her arms to receive the happy embrace of her friend and protégée out of Houston. At fourteen, Shae felt at once like the very same eleven-year-old Maya had first encountered at the music store and a completely different young girl at the same time. In three years' time, she'd just grown, in every sense of the word.

"I talked to Ree Forster!" Shae told her, with much the same giddiness Maya had been seeing as some of her siblings had given her, and Missy Sanderson, and a number of friends and relatives…There was no telling how she would have reacted, kind and down to Earth as she was, but from what they had both seen and heard, each encounter had been met with open enthusiasm on the singer's part.

"Yeah? How'd it go?" Maya asked, getting up so the two of them might head back into the tent, arm in arm.

"Great! She knew who I was!" Shae whispered, and it was a wonder she hadn't passed out already.

"Did she?" Maya laughed.

"She heard my song on the Christmas album," Shae nodded. That had been the first year they'd known one another, Maya's last in Houston… She could still recall when they had done the recording, in the basement. Much as she loved the Hex and would never give it up, she still missed those days sometimes. It was widely accepted that their period in Houston had really taken them to another level. "She said she loved my voice and it reminded her of her daughter's."

"Yeah, you did kind of sound like her back then," Maya realized. She'd met Ree's daughter, Christina, twice now, the first time, very briefly, back in December, the day of the concert, and then again over the three days Ree had spent at camp. The ten-year-old was like a miniature version of her mother, and this went from her appearance on down to her voice. She'd come on stage and helped her mother with demonstrations over her sessions. Maya had not known she would be bringing her along, and she had told Ree to bring her to the wedding if she'd like, but it was decided in the end that she'd be better off spending the day with her grandmother, who'd travelled along with them.

"She wanted to know about how you and I met, and I told her about my videos of your songs, and I told her how I'd done some of her songs, and she asked me to show her, and I did, and she listened to them and she loved them!"

"Is no one breathing today, take a breath, Shayla!" Maya laughed, putting her arm around the girl's shoulders and jostling her a bit.

"I just didn't expect any of this," Shae breathed.

"Again, _sur-prise_…" Maya flicked her hand as she said the word.

"Shae!" someone called, and they looked up. Missy Sanderson was waving back at them from across the dance floor. Maya had told Sophie to seat the two girls at the same table, following a hunch that they would get along, being not quite a year apart, and this plan had quickly come to fruition.

"Talk later," Shae gave Maya a quick hug before running after her new friend.

"Hey, sure, no problem, everyone just… Okay," Maya called after her before having to admit it was pointless, as the girls were already gone and out of sight.

Just seconds later, the bench vibrated with the weight of someone not so much sitting as dropping into the seat next to her, startling her into turning around.

"Rosa, what the…"

"Do you guys have a house sitter while you're going away on your honeymoon?" her bandmate asked. Maya wasn't sure what this was about for a moment, still recovering from the sudden arrival.

"Uh, not really. Sam's going to head out to Tucson to spend time with the family out there, and the Sandersons are looking after the dogs…

"I could watch them, and the house. You know, I can take in the mail, look after the… landscape or whatever, do all that boring cleaning no one wants to do because it's gross? I'll do all that, it'll be like a wedding present."

"You already got us a present, remember? It was very nice, by the way. I still have to do the thank you cards, but… thank you…"

"Sure. But can I?"

"I mean, I'd have to check with Lucas, but I think he'd be okay with it, you… Why do you want to…" She paused, the realization hitting her a split second before Rosa explained.

"I figured it'd be like… mutually beneficial. You and Lucas would have someone looking after your house, and Riley and Dylan would have the apartment to themselves while they do the whole house hunting thing." She looked to Maya, who had a clearly apologetic look on her face for not having told her before. "I'm not mad at you. I'm not mad at _them_, I mean I get it. I didn't think this thing with us living together was going to be a forever thing, it just all happened so fast, and I know they want to try and be moved in as soon as possible, since Dylan has school and all that, but that means I'm either going to have to find roommates or a new place just as fast, and… I need space to think it through."

"Okay, you can house sit for us," Maya agreed, trusting she was right about Lucas being on board, about this and the next part. "And if it takes you longer than that, you can stick around as long as you need to." _Wouldn't be the first time… We should turn the basement into a guest room, now that we have the Hex…_

"For real?" Rosa sat up.

"Yes, for real," Maya laughed. "In fact, I have a project for you, Captain Decorator in Training. You've got two weeks to come up with some ideas for a guest room in the basement." To see her light up, before launching to hug her… Maya burst out laughing, just barely keeping from tipping over the bench.

"Sorry!" Rosa laughed along. "I will get on that, thank you, really, thank you so much."

"You are very welcome, now come on, dance floor, I've been sitting too long."

Lucas had just danced, in turn, with all of his new sisters, from Cara on down to the Hunter twins, plus the Sullivan-Reyes girls, and Dora Cassidy, and the Hillard girls… He temporarily retired from the dance floor and went to grab a drink, only to spot a tiny bent-backed figure trailing along on her walker and take off at a jog after her.

"Hey, hey, uh… Nana Kat?" he tried, falling in slow step with Maya's great grandmother. The woman stopped, looking over at him with a curious frown.

"Who are you?" she asked, in a tone that said 'I know I'm supposed to know who you are but I'm not getting there right now.'

"Lucas? Maya's husband? Maya, your great granddaughter, Katy's girl?"

"Oh, yes, you were married today," the woman's confusion shifted to a beatific smile.

"Yes, that's right," Lucas smiled back at her.

"You're very tall," Nana Kat remarked, looking him up and down. "My husband was very tall, too."

"I'm sure he was," Lucas nodded, thinking of Tanner Clutterbucket and his brothers and sister. "So… did you need something?"

"Need…" Nana Kat blinked at him, looking back the way she was going for a moment like she was trying to remember. "I left something, o-on my dresser, for Maya. I'm going to get it, won't be a minute." Lucas wasn't sure if she meant her dresser at the hotel or back at her residence in Dallas, but one way or another, she wasn't about to get it 'in a minute.' Plus, he was pretty sure her nurse, who doubled as Katy's cousin Randall's date, had this gift and was waiting for Katherine Clutterbucket to decide on the right time to hand it to her great granddaughter. He mentioned as much, as respectfully as possible, to the old woman. "Oh…" she paused, as though resetting the facts into the narrative in her head. "That's right, yes." And she started the process of turning herself around before making for the tent.

"Here, why don't you sit here a minute," Lucas guided her to an empty seat near to the wheelchair where their other great grandmother sat watching the dancing couples. "GiGi, hey, have you met Maya's…"

"Don't believe I've had the pleasure," she motioned for him to come and roll her over, which he did.

"Katherine Clutterbucket, Geraldine Babineaux. GiGi, Nana Kat," Lucas made the introductions.

"You're down the hall from me, aren't you?" Nana Kat asked the other woman.

"No, no, dear, I live with my granddaughter," GiGi casually corrected her, as Lucas went to find the nurse.

As she was dancing with Randall, he guessed someone else had been meant to keep an eye on her. This turned out to have been Shawn, who had been distracted after Haley had bumped her head into a tent pole and started hollering. He'd taken her outside to have a look at her and calm her down – it was really a tiny bump but to the girl it had been the end of the world – and in that time the ninety-nine-year-old had made a break for it.

"Need a hand?" Lucas asked.

"No, no, it's alright, Katy's got her now," Shawn nodded to the corner, where Katy sat with her youngest in her lap, still consoling her as she sat there, face red with tears and thumb barely hanging from her lip. "This is your wedding, you should go out there, mingle, have some fun."

"Yeah, I guess, it's just…" Lucas shrugged, thinking back to the giggling girl he'd swung over the table again and again earlier.

"Give her a couple minutes, she'll be running around again. Or she'll fall asleep, it's late for her already."

Lucas did as told, going back through the crowd, knowing he could hardly turn around without running into someone who'd want to talk to him. Still, he spied the great grandmothers on the side, chatting animatedly amongst themselves, and in the corner he watched the progress of Haley Hunter's 'recovery' from her bump. He knew she was over the worst of it when she locked eyes with him when he was looking at her. At once, he gave her a smile and, getting one back, he signalled for her to come to him. She was let off her mother's knees and she was in his arms in a flash.

"Hey, you alright?" Lucas asked her, getting a look at her forehead. Haley nodded. "That's good, because I don't know what I would do without my favorite dance partner," he told her, putting on a gasp, looking around before turning back to the girl. "Don't tell Maya, okay? Our little secret," he presented his hand and got a high five which required concentration and a small pink tongue sticking out the side of tows of baby teeth. "That was a good one, alright, let's go."

Lucas ended up crossing paths with Maya on the dance floor, where she and Rosa were having a go of giving some moves which really went against the rhythm of the music playing over the speakers.

"What are you doing?" Lucas asked, even as he could only manage to look amused at the whole display.

"Going against the grain," Rosa informed him.

"Right… Well, whatever it is, _she_ seems to enjoy it," Lucas replied. In his arms, Haley Hunter looked to be very intrigued and amused by what was happening before her eyes.

"Hey, Hey, Haley, want to come dance with me?" Rosa asked her.

"Yeah!" Haley proclaimed, and so she was taken off by a new partner, leaving the newlyweds looking to one another like 'well, since we're both here' before joining in some more dancing. As they did so, Maya relayed the situation with Rosa house sitting and then possibly staying with them a little while until she could figure out her situation.

"Wouldn't be the first time, right?" he told her, which was as good as him saying that of course he was on board.

"That's what I said," Maya nodded. "So, what have _you_ been up to, other than entertaining a two-year-old?"

"Stalled a runaway ninety-nine-year-old," he revealed.

"Wait, what?" He recounted the confused flight of Nana Kat, and her return, her making friends with GiGi. Telling all this soon led into the whole reason for her getting away, with Haley's incident and how it had led him out here with her. "There are so many people in here, it feels like there could be a hundred things happening at the same time and we wouldn't even know…" she shook her head with a laugh.

"Okay, so, we have to go and talk to people, right?" Lucas asked, an idea coming to him.

"Mingle, you have to say mingle, it's a thing," Maya nodded.

"Yeah, so we have to mingle."

"Would be rude not to say hi after we had them come out here and bring us a present… Although we did buy them dinner…"

"So, we go out there, for… let's say a half hour, then we come back out here and see what we got," Lucas suggested. Maya straightened up at this, a curious look on her face.

"Lucas Friar… Are you asking me to go look for the weird stuff?" she asked, with conspiracy and mischief in her voice, evocating the day of their field trip flight through the museum.

"That's the gist of it, yes," he laughed at the look on her face.

"You're on," she nodded, briefly kissing him before heading off to begin her search.

Left to his self-imposed mission, Lucas looked around the tent. It wasn't _exactly_ a competition, though knowing Maya she was already being strategic about it. And in no time, in twelve years of knowing her, had he felt compelled to let her win anything. She would not have liked that. So, he had to go to her level… while also remembering, as she was bound to, that this game only mattered to them. This was their wedding reception, they couldn't just run up to someone and demand something good and weird. They just had to more or less do exactly what they had been doing; with all the people around them tonight, the anecdotes were not hard to come by as it was.

"Did you misplace your wife?" He turned around and found Maeve.

"Hey… Uh, no, she just went to talk to someone and… How's it going, was dinner okay?" he asked, realizing they'd yet to talk throughout the day.

"Oh, dinner was great, yeah, and the company, too," Maeve replied. She'd been sitting with the rest of his co-workers from the bookstore, who all knew each other to some degree, even if they didn't all work the same days, and his friends from university, as there was some overlap there, mostly between Maeve and Ramona, who'd come along with Ben Hastings, now her boyfriend of course and – covertly, in case Maeve didn't want anyone asking about the baby – the uncle of nearly two-month-old Erin. "One thing though?"

"Yeah?" Lucas asked.

"Well, you know how you told me how one of your classmates had surgery last year?"

"Yeah…"

"Is that like a secret or something?"

"Uh… well…" Lucas hesitated, which was effectively all the answer Maeve had needed.

"Oh…" she blinked. "Was it…" she started to ask, but then stopped, as the blocks seemed to fall into place all on their own in her head. "I might have done a thing… An unintended thing, but still a…"

"A thing," Lucas sighed.

"I'm so sorry… Is it bad? I mean…"

"I don't know, might not be," he reflected, looking around the tent in search of his classmates. "Were you just with them?"

"Yeah, over there," Maeve pointed. She followed him as he went around to where she'd indicated.

Finding a cluster of them there, he counted off who he saw. Bishop and Leona, Ramona and Ben, Simon and his date, who Lucas had yet to even be introduced to… No sight of Robbie or Josie. The other six, however, appeared to be in deep discussion, the tone of which felt very much like 'wow, can you believe this?' Ramona broke away from the others and came up to Lucas when she saw him.

"Did you know? About Josie? The transplant?" she asked.

"Uh… yeah… She only told me so I could bring her my notes and all, from last semester," he explained. She'd been in the thick of it, of course, even as her marriage to Robbie had been falling apart. The two of them were as solid now as they had been before, even if it was as friends only, and even if they hadn't, she would have felt connected to this revelation now. "Where'd they go?"

"Well, Josie kind of bolted out of here when everyone started putting it together. Robbie didn't get there right away, but then he did and he went after her. They haven't been back yet, so I don't know what's going on. They should be fine, or… Robbie has to, but I don't know why Josie didn't say anything."

"Maybe she didn't want him to think she did it just because she liked him?" Maeve provided. They looked at her. "I don't know, it's all I can think of," she shrugged.

"Hey, they're coming back," Bishop called to the three of them, and they hurried over just as Robbie and Josie stepped into the tent. Going by the fact that they were holding hands, Lucas had to guess everything was good.

"What are you all standing around for? It's a party, right?" Josie asked with a curious smile, as she and Robbie continued on their way to the dance floor.

After leaving off on her quest for tales to tell, Maya had barely made it off the dance floor herself that she was invited back on to it by Farkle.

"How can I say no to a bit of the Minkus shuffle?" she smiled at once. "You don't have your tap shoes, do you?"

"Sorry, I left them at home," he chuckled.

"Such a shame," Maya sighed, as they found a spot to dance. "You know, the plus side of this dress is that as soon as people see me coming, they cut me a path. That's the kind of power I could get used to."

"So you're just going to walk around in a wedding dress from now on?"

"Hey, I look good in this," she confidently declared. "Plus, people walking around have a way of not seeing other people of a shorter… persuasion. Don't you remember when you weren't a giant? You wore turtlenecks and you made it work."

"I have the occasional flashback, yes," he tried not to smile.

"And now you don't have turtlenecks anymore, but you have one criminally adorable daughter and another branch sprouting on the Minkus family tree."

"I don't know how we made the leap from my old clothes to my children, but yes, I do," Farkle slowly nodded.

"You know, I remember a moment very similar to this one," Maya smiled. "You and me, dancing at a wedding, talking about your impending fatherhood… I asked you what you would have liked to have, and you told me you wanted a girl, and now you have one. So I feel like I have to ask you now… Farkle Minkus, what are we feeling is growing in your wife's belly this time around?" He laughed. "I'm serious, I want to know," she grinned. "If you're right again, maybe buy a lottery ticket, or become a fortune teller on the side, I mean, raising two kids, that has to be expensive…"

"I… Honestly, I don't know. On the one hand, having another girl would mean Ada could have a sister, and I feel like it could be good for her, but on the other, since we do already have a girl, it could be interesting to have a boy, too… I really don't know, one way or the other is fine by me. That's my choice."

"What if you can't make up your mind because what you're actually having is one of each?" Maya whispered. Farkle blinked, like he hadn't even considered this as a possibility, and now he would be left to wonder, but then shook his head and dismissed it.

"There's only one, we already saw," he told her. She gave him a look and, after a moment of looking around, he took out his phone and showed her. She smiled, inspecting the bits of light and dark coming together as Baby Minkus the Second.

"Okay, but what if the other one's shy and it's just being real quiet and hiding. You've met Gracie, that girl could be a ninja. You could have a ninja baby."

"How much cake have you had?" Farkle asked.

"Normal amounts," Maya smiled. "Wine, on the other hand…" she added after a beat, holding to the gag a fair few seconds before bursting out laughing. "Can't I just be drunk on happiness instead? Kind of did this thing where I got married? You have known me long enough to know I was _not_ going to get through today without going all loopy." Farkle considered this. Alright, it was fair. "All kidding aside, it really just makes me very, very happy to know that you and Isadora are bringing another cute genius into the world. We need more people like you." He smiled, nodding in thanks, and they carried on dancing.

After leaving his classmates and Maeve, Lucas had continued on his circuit of the room. He had brief talks with family members from about every branch of his or Maya's trees. Friars, and Sullivans, Cassidys, Hillards, Hunters, Harts, Hart-Lanes, Clutterbuckets… He was this close to needing himself a bit of a recharge peace and quiet with Maya, until he'd landed in the midst of his grandparents. Patty had seen him and waved him over to where she and Pappy Joe were sitting, looking after the sleeping Hunter quartet, the twins on either side of their younger brother and sister in what felt like a miniature version of when the two of them would crawl into bed between Maya and him.

"We're about to call it a night, and we can't just leave them," Pappy Joe told Lucas, nodding to the kids. His grandparents were spending the night over at his parents' house, in his old room, rather than heading back on the road to Houston. "Is your wife around?" he asked, in that way many of the guests would do, like they knew it made him smile whenever he heard it, still new as it was to him.

"Sure, she is," Lucas laughed, looking for her. She was kind of hard to miss in that dress. When he saw her, he let out their call to her and raised his arm when he saw her trying to spot him. She cut through the dance floor, like a displacement wave, before landing at his side.

"Hey, are you guys leaving?" she asked, like they had that air about them.

"Just about, yes," Patty smiled as she and Pappy Joe stood. They each embraced the two of them in turn, with repeated congratulations and requests for photos and stories once they came back from their honeymoon. As they watched them go, Patty holding to Pappy Joe's arm as they went, Maya leaned her head to Lucas' shoulder with a sigh.

"Thanks for the gift of a grandma," she grinned up at him, making him laugh.

"You know, up until a minute ago, I was actually hoping to find you, and now here you are."

"You called, I came," Maya shrugged as he half turned and put his arms around her. The way she leaned to him, maybe she had been in need of a quick recharge, too.

"So, what weird stuff have you got for me?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	183. Their Joy in Loving

_**A/N 1: Hey**, almost forgot to say it before (thanks _TeeChamblissful _for bringing it up, sort of ;)), I am looking to do any number of deleted scenes from the wedding, over in The World Around, once I get the chance :) I couldn't get to everyone in the chapters or it would have taken ages :)_

**_A/N 2:_**_ The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

July 1st 2020

_Chapter 183  
Their Joy in Loving_

The departure of Pappy Joe and Patty had only been one of the first, as some of the guests called it a night. Little by little, Lucas and Maya said good night to the grandparents, and many aunts and uncles, some cousins. Randall and Leanne the nurse were taking Nana Kat back to Dallas in the morning and were spending the night at the Hunter Hart house, where they headed ahead of Katy and Shawn, taking the sleeping kids with them so the pair might stick around a little longer. Before they could go, Nana Kat insisted on seeing her great granddaughter and her new husband, showing her more demanding side. When Maya came along, as Lucas was seeing off his uncles and their daughters, she sat with the old woman, who calmed at once at the sight of her.

"I have something for you," she gave her a smile, reaching down for a wrapped box in her lap. Her bony hands held it out to her with a bit of a tremor, and Maya joined her own hands in the exchange.

"Thank you, I… Should I open it now or later?" she asked.

"Keep it for home, I say," Nana Kat suggested, keeping hold of Maya's hand, looking at her with so much affection. "You remind me of someone, you know that?"

"I do," Maya smiled. She told her every time they saw each other, which was getting to be every other week, give or take. She also knew that this person she reminded her great grandmother of was her great grandmother herself, when she'd been young, and it sort of warmed and broke her heart at the same time. She wished deeply that she might have known the woman earlier in her life.

Shortly after seeing Nana Kat off, Maya had found herself joining Lucas in seeing off their other great grandmother for the night, the one who was not really theirs but would just as easily scold them for suggesting they were not family.

"I always wanted to see Paris," GiGi told them both as they walked along with the wheelchair pushed by Zay's aunt Susanne. "Never got to go, I never liked to fly when it was over the country, couldn't stomach an entire ocean," she explained. "You've been before, haven't you?" They confirmed that they had been, yes. "I remember the pictures, yes," GiGi smiled. "You saw it already then, so this time forget the camera, if you can. If you spend too much time worrying about preserving a moment, you won't live it. See with your eyes, look at each other with those loving eyes the way I saw you two all day. Remember together, bring back stories. They last longer."

"We will do our best," Lucas promised her, while Maya sniffed back this renewed wave of emotion.

"Thank you for the cookies," she told GiGi as they hugged. "They were a life saver earlier." _And a gift of gratitude to a little brother._

"I told you they would be," GiGi laughed, pointing at Lucas, who nodded and leaned over to hug her as well.

With the first wave of departures behind them, the party had carried on for some time more, with more dancing here, and more talk there… When the next wave started, taking more and more of their guests with it, the reception had what they'd fondly refer to as 'the lightning round' before finally being officially called as being over, somewhere around two in the morning. Of all people to carry them back home, the newlyweds caught a ride with Ree Forster and her husband, Peter.

Lucas spent most of the ride with his dear wife's head on his shoulder, his arm around hers, as she looked somewhere between sleepy and serene, floating on memories of the day. When they arrived at house on the lane, there was a strong temptation to invite the couple in, to show them around, show the Hex, but it was late for all of them, and they had a daughter to get back to. So, with many thanks and the promise that Maya would call upon her return so that she and Ree might start planning for their project together, the newlyweds got out of the car and waved the couple off, turning on their heels to now face their home.

"Does it feel brand new again to you, too?" Maya asked Lucas.

"Kind of does, yeah," he smiled. "I _have_ been away for a whole day," he reminded her.

"Give it a few hours and ditto that," she hummed, looking up at him. "You got your keys, right?"

In answer, he had swept her up into his arms, surprising her into laughter as she quickly joined her hands together around him for balance. Even with the weight of the dress, he didn't struggle one bit to get them up the stairs and to the door, which he unlocked and opened, carrying them over the threshold and into the low light of the lamp Lucas had left on, in anticipation of this moment.

"You can set me down in a second, just need to do one more thing…" she whispered even as she leaned in to kiss him.

It did sort of feel strange to be back again, after all of today, but it was a good strange in every way. Their house had not changed, it was the same house they had been living in for two years already, right down to the empty coffee cup left forgotten on the kitchen counter and the leftovers from their friends' dinner the night before in the refrigerator. It was the same place, but it also felt like it wasn't, like it had all been given a new gleam, new potential.

When Missy and her parents had gone home for the night, a couple of hours earlier, they had been kind enough to collect and bring back Maya and Lucas' things, the bags they'd brought along to get changed earlier, along with a handful of gifts they had received at the actual wedding reception. The only thing they brought back themselves was Nana Kat's gift.

"That felt good, didn't it?" Lucas smirked when he heard a thump and another and turned to find Maya happily wiggling her toes after having nudged off her shoes, leaning against the back of the couch.

"Like you wouldn't believe…" she breathed. "I think I'm going to need your help for the next bit," she pointed to the back of her dress. "My arms just… don't want to," she showed him what felt very much like an exaggeration of this 'struggle.'

"That can be arranged," he nodded, trying very hard not to just carry her off up the stairs and do more than just help her get her dress off.

"You're so good to me," Maya sighed, picking up her skirts as she started her ascent up the stairs, looking very much like a princess at a ball… or coming home from a ball. Lucas collected her shoes and followed her. Arriving in their room, he found her in the process of carefully pulling the paper flowers from the back of her head, nested atop her pinned braids. "Wasn't sure they would survive the night," Maya told him.

They had found a way to turn the folded flowers into accents which would hopefully hold through the night, and now she was happy to find they had very much remained intact. There were some spots where sweat had become a factor, but now that they were out and sitting on the dresser they would be alright.

"Check this out," Maya turned to Lucas, the look in her eyes suggesting she'd been waiting all day, and possibly months and months, to show him some aspects of her dress. Reaching down her collar, she fished out a small, thin, blue bundle. When she unfolded it, Lucas saw that it held Kermit's guitar pick on its chain. Maya never left home without it.

"So that's where it went," he smiled, lifting up the chain and helping to fasten it back around her neck. In doing so, he came around her to undo her dress. "It was really worth the wait," he told her as she stepped out of the mass of fabric, looking so much smaller all at once.

"Good things always are," she returned the smile as she reached up to release her hair.

"You alright with that?" Lucas asked, pointing to her head.

"Yes, yes," she promised, "Can you just…" Before she could ask the question, he was already taking the dress from the ground. "Just leave it on Sam's bed for tonight?"

"Right," he went, carrying the thing with enough care that she might still have been in it, which made her smirk. By the time he returned, she had finished changing, her hair left in twin braids which she now began to unravel as Lucas went and started changing, too.

"Oh!" Maya stopped all at once. Lucas turned back to find half her hair in a curly mass after being braided all day, the other half still in the process of being undone.

"What?" he asked.

"I just remembered, there's Dot's gift, in the desk, the hidden panel."

"Totally forgot about that," Lucas admitted, recalling now. They'd only found it after Dora had told them about her mother's signature, carried on from her father as he'd taught _her_. Possibly, Dot would have mentioned that they should have a look today, at the wedding, if her daughter hadn't given it away. "Finish your hair, I'll finish changing, then we can go look?"

It was past three in the morning as they climbed up into the attic and unlatched the wheels on Maya's desk, pulling it from the wall to get better access at the hidden panel. Maya looked on, still in the midst of taming the coils of her hair, as Lucas pressed and turned the panel until it would release and land in his hand, along with the wrapped object within.

"Got anything you want to put back in here before I close it?" he asked, looking back at her.

"What, and tell you all my secrets?" she whispered, twisting her long hair into a bun over her head.

"Oh, there's secrets I don't know about, are there?" Lucas gave her a look of curious disbelief.

"There could be…" Maya shrugged innocently, sitting on the floor with him.

"But not right now?"

"I'm too tired for secrets right now," she frowned, stretching out her arms and dropping them limply back into her lap. "Present," she pointed to the object. "You should unwrap it."

"You sure?"

"I will be less sure if it takes too long," she pointed again.

"Okay," he laughed, putting the panel back until it could not be recognized as such by anyone unaware. Taking the wrapped object, he pulled at the paper to reveal a cardboard box. When he opened he found there were four pieces within, two big ones and two little ones, individually wrapped in paper. "I think I know what this is," Lucas smiled.

"You do?"

"Yeah, you know, back at their house, on the mantle?" he explained, and she gasped, seeing them in her mind now. Lucas unwrapped the two little pieces, which would be the stands, to slide the bigger pieces on to in order to display them. On the paper covering the larger pieces, he spotted their initials marked in pencil, so he handed over the M one.

"Maybe we should unwrap them at the same time, put them side by side," Maya suggested. That was the other thing: they locked together. On the Cassidy mantle, there were five of these, one each for Dot and Emmett, and then one each for their children. They would be replaced every year or two, of course, and the 'retired' plaques were collected in a box in Dot's home workshop. Everyone grew, everyone changed…

"Right, well, let's see," Lucas felt at the edges. "I think mine goes this way, so yours…" She did as he'd done, finding her own edge and turning it to face his. "Okay," he scooted over to sit next to her. "Ready?" Maya nodded, and they unwrapped their pieces, pulling the paper back to reveal the two plaques.

"Wow…" Maya laughed, with the amazement of a fellow artist, as she took in the interlocking plaques, one for her, one for him.

In the time she had worked with her nephew, Dot Cassidy had picked up plenty of stories from him, and the more the project had come together, she'd gotten some from his then girlfriend or fiancée as well. She had known Maya for years, almost as long as she'd lived in Texas, although she had not been as present in her life then as she was now, so a lot of blanks had needed filling in.

These two plaques absolutely fit together, in more ways than how the slotted together. Each one came off as a mix between a timeline, a patchworked mural, carved in high and low relief in the wood. One told the story of a girl born in New York, who'd come to Texas with her mother and started to make a place for herself, in art, and in learning, in music and in friendship, in love. The other told of a Texas boy grown in kindness and care, for all living creatures, human or animal, with priorities so deeply rooted that they could possibly get him in trouble. But then, somewhere in the middle, the two pieces met, like two kids sitting side by side, and from them a new story emerged, complementing one another, expanding and improving each one. It showed a museum, and a basketball, dogs, a house… They were already a bit behind the times, with how long it had taken for them to be able to open the box, but it did not diminish the impact in the slightest. Working together, they assembled the four pieces until it became one.

"I really, _really_ want to learn more woodworking now," Maya smiled, looking to the finished product.

"Where should we put it?" Lucas asked. They could just as easily remove the stands and mount them on a wall.

"I don't know," she yawned, tipping her head to rest at his shoulder. Lucas smiled looping his arm with hers, holding her hand. Looking on, she traced at the ring on his left hand. "Looks good on you," she decided.

"Yeah?" he asked, moving his hand around. Maya hummed, nodding her head. "I think so, too. And you…" he picked up her own left hand, the two rings meeting together almost as the two plagues had done, creating a whole. "I remember when my grandmother gave them to me. My grandfather was long dead, I never saw her wearing them, except on that day. I think she put them on before I came, to have them one last time. It was there on her face, everything they'd meant to her. It was important to her that I have them, that I would have those kinds of memories, too."

"I really wish I could have met her," she stated, not for the first time.

"When the right one comes along, you won't be able _not_ to know," he recited. "That's what she told me. And she was right." Maya smiled at him, and he leaned in to kiss her. With the way they both felt magnetically pulled to one another, it only took one look exchanged between them to know what the other was thinking, and they might have ended up trailing off back to their room after leaving the attic if Maya hadn't happened to look out the window and notice a light coming from the Hex. In the middle of the night, it was unavoidable.

"The lights are on," she stalled.

"If you want to put it like that, yeah," Lucas turned back, realizing now what she'd been talking about. "Did you leave them on yesterday?"

"I wasn't in there yesterday, remember? Puppies?"

"Okay, well, maybe the day before that?"

"No, I swear," Maya shook her head. "What if… What if someone's in there?" she half whispered. Lucas came closer to the window, squinting down at the studio.

"They would have tripped the alarm," he reminded her. With the equipment they had and intended to have in there, it had been a no-brainer.

"Maybe one of the girls had to get something before today and they forgot?" Maya suggested after a moment. Clearly, she wasn't going to leave this alone until they went to see.

"Okay, come on," he led off and she followed on his heels. The sooner this was handled, the sooner they could get back on track.

Keys retrieved, they made their way down to the backdoor, leading them on to the path to the Hex. From down here, they could see something they had not seen up on the attic. A note had been stuck to the door, a card, with the kind of design easily found in the aisle reserved for weddings. In what little light they had at their disposal, they'd leaned in together to read the message inside.

_In case you're wondering, the band helped make this happen. I was going to wait until later for this, but it was too hard to pass up an occasion like this. Congratulations on your wedding!_

_Ree_

_PS: I know this might be a tad one-sided, I promise to even the scales when I get the chance._

"What did she do?" Maya blinked.

"Here, you should do the honors," Lucas held out the keys.

After feeling like she had forgotten how to use keys for a second, Maya unlocked the door, reaching in on reflex to turn off the alarm before it could start to ring. It felt very much like her hand was just going on habit, as the rest of her was struck speechless for what she saw. She had always intended to get her hands on some better equipment, to record and work on her music, whether for the band or the songs she wrote via her contract. She did great with her laptop on the whole, but it had been something of a dream to push things forward, and this meant equipment, and _that_ meant money she didn't have yet. She didn't know how long it might have taken for her to put it all together, but now she didn't have to anymore, because here it all was… courtesy of Ree Forster.

"Tell me I'm not hallucinating? It's very late, and this is just…"

"I'm seeing it, too," Lucas assured her, equally startled.

"Maybe it's a shared hallucination. Must be part of the marriage package."

"Maya…"

"This is too much, too much, I…" she turned to him, then back to the equipment, and to him again, and forward… Lucas stopped her from turning again by putting his arms around her. "I can't take it, can I?" she blinked, still in shock. "It's too much, I didn't…"

"Hey, hey," he held her tighter, kissing her head.

He knew what had to be going through her head, this notion that she hadn't earned this. They had thought many times of the ways in which the two of them had been fortunate in recent years, all of it starting with his getting this house from Pappy Joe, and then things like Patty's involvement in her life, and his job with Sullivan Stables, now this… Lucas could tell her how it had been Pappy Joe's choice to leave his house to his grandson, and the same for how his grandmother had thought of him when she'd had her will drawn up. He could tell her how she had been working so hard, for so long, at school, and at the theater, and with her music, and it was this relentless work which had gone and produced the results.

He could tell her all that, and deep down she did know it, of course she did, but right now, this right here, this was the biggest thing yet, this was her version of being handed a house. And being that she was Maya, she understood too much of who she had been to just receive this and be immediately content and ensured of her worthiness. He kind of loved her for it, just as much as he knew that one of the things he was here to do, as he'd always been, was to lead her back to where this felt okay.

"We should check it all out in the morning… or whenever we'll wake up again, yeah?" he suggested, rubbing at her arms. She was still so speechless, but she nodded, taking a beat first to step forward, let her fingers touch the console so she'd know it was really real. They were leaving for two weeks in a couple of days, so she wouldn't really get to explore it all until after the honeymoon, but it was here… It was all here…

"How is she for real?" she whispered as she followed Lucas out. The lights were shut, alarm armed, door locked. Walking back to the house, she couldn't stop looking at the card in her hands, back over her shoulder at the Hex…

Back inside, Maya and Lucas made their way up to their room, where Maya plopped down on the bed, looking at the card for a moment before setting it on her night stand, like a reminder for when she'd wake up and be a little less loopy. Nana Kat's present still sat there, not yet unwrapped. After a beat, she picked it up, almost contemplated it, in hopes of discovering what would be inside without opening it.

"Working on your X-ray vision?" Lucas asked, dropping in next to her, turned to his side.

"That _would _be a practical power to have, especially around you," she agreed with a small smile.

"I feel like I just walked into it again…" Lucas squinted back at her.

"You did, big time," she looked back at him, with those old heart eyes of his.

"Are you going to open it and see if it worked?" She worked to open up the paper as an answer. There was no way Nana Kat had wrapped this, but she could just imagine, for what she knew of her by now, that she'd sat by to watch the process and make sure it was done right.

The box inside was previously charged with individually wrapped tea bags, peppermint, inside, wrapped in tissue paper, was a small figurine, recognizable as being one of those her great grandmother had collected. It made Maya happier than any console.

"The Empire State Building," she turned it about in her hand. "It was the first big place she and her husband went to, on their honeymoon in New York. They went up, up, up, and he was terrified of the heights, stayed near the elevator the whole time. But not her. She said this might be one of the rare times she got to be that high and have the time to notice and she wanted to see everything."

Lucas took the little figure when it was handed to him. He thought back to the old woman wandering off on her own back at the reception. She might not have always been one hundred percent 'there' in her head, but this small token hit all the marks.

"First big place we go, when we get to Paris," he looked back to Maya, who nodded like she'd just been thinking the same thing.

"Make it a high one," she added, as the figurine was set back in the box and placed back on the nightstand, the paper left to tumble to the ground.

Turning back to look at her shiny new husband, Maya was very aware that it was coming on four in the morning by now, and a vast part of her brain was campaigning for sleep, just as his would be doing, too. And still… Still, he was looking at her now, and just like they'd been of one mind with their response to Nana Kat's gift, they were of one mind as the notion became that they weren't so tired that they had left that headspace where they had just been married, hours ago. Heads, and hearts, and whole bodies swimming with love for one another, sleep could wait for a little while longer.

"Today was everything I wanted it to be," she quietly told him, as his weight shifted closer to her, and she moved to him as well.

"I was hoping it would be," he smiled at her, bowing his head to a soft and tender kiss. "I am so happy to be able to call myself your husband, there are no words."

"I'm not looking for words right now," she reminded him, as though she even needed to. He kissed her again, and there was no talking for some time.

After having spent a night apart, through no choice of their own, Maya and Lucas were infinitely glad to find themselves in their own bed again, big spoon and little spoon together, spent, content, and drifting ever closer to sleep.

"I would pick up a pencil right now and I wouldn't put it down for hours, except I don't even think I could lift up my arm right now," Maya declared, holding her husband's hand between both of hers, playing around with his fingers.

"I could lift it for you," Lucas offered, peppering kisses at her neck and making her laugh.

"That would require us moving, and I am not up for that at all, I will have you know."

"Alright, so just use what you've got."

"What I've got… let's see…" she hummed, taking hold of his hand and turning it over, palm up. Folding in all but her index, she used this to lazily draw on her small bit of 'canvas.' "What's that?" she quizzed him.

"Didn't get that, try again?" he chuckled, attempting to see over her shoulder.

"No peeking, no, just keep doing what you were doing before," Maya nudged at his face.

"Which before would that be?" Lucas teased.

"The one I'm not too tired for now that the other one happened," she grinned to herself.

"Oh, this one?" he asked, kissing at her neck once again.

"That would be the one, yes. Alright, here goes," she started 'drawing' again, amused at the way his kisses sort of slowed, like he was trying to concentrate on what he was feeling in his palm.

"Person?" he mumbled against her skin.

"Maybe…" she let the word trail as she kept going.

"You in your dress?"

"Hold on, hold on…" Maya kept going.

"You and me on the dance floor," he gave his third attempt, and she tapped his hand.

"We have a winner, well done," she told him, caught halfway by a yawn.

"No more drawing for you," Lucas told her. "Try and get some sleep, okay?"

"Mkay…" Maya mumbled. "Hey…" she spoke after a few seconds.

"Yeah?" Lucas asked, pulled back from the brink of being eased off to sleep by the scent of her hair.

"I love you so very much, my husband," she declared, and even without seeing her face, he could just picture the dorky little smile she'd have.

"And I love _you_ so very much, my amazing wife," he pulled her nearer, his own smile almost palpable with his face to her shoulder as it was.

"We didn't… say the weird…" her voice trailed off as she fell asleep a minute later. Lucas would not even after remembered this fleeting realization, as he'd gone to sleep all of seconds before she did.

They were both so deeply asleep, after the day they'd had, every last bit of energy in them utilized in the spirit of happiness, and love, and good times with family and friends, that if either of them dreamed, neither of them remembered by the time they woke up again, just before noon.

Whatever dreams those were, if they existed, could only be the good kind, the kind that did not pull you from sleep but maybe kept you there, so comfortable as leaving your body no reason whatsoever to change a thing. Maybe it was just that they had been really, really tired, and no matter what they did their bodies would have commanded them to this restorative pause. They would choose to believe that nothing could have come in the way of this pause between them, and so nothing did.

Today, once they finally got up, they would get to take the day with ease, more ease than they'd ended up getting on the day _before_ their wedding. They would double check that they had everything ready for their flight off to their honeymoon, two days later, though none of this before they had a chance to go back to the Hex and have a look at the equipment gifted on to them by Ree Forster. It was going to be little more than a tease, and after a while they would just have to leave the studio, or else they would have fallen way too deep into the potential of it all. They would think about what would happen if any of the band came out here while they were gone, having no idea what they would find, and they decided not to tell anyone, the better to preserve the surprise.

Tomorrow, they would go and celebrate the fourth of July along with 'the third of Haley,' as Maya would call it, and find it to be something like a going away party for them as they prepared to leave for two weeks, and just the morning after that, they would leave for the airport, leaving their house in the trusted hands of Rosa Del Vecchio.

But, for now, they slept on, happy and at peace.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	184. Their Escape to Paris

July 2nd 2020

_Chapter 184  
Their Escape to Paris_

As they would awake this morning, both Lucas and Maya would be taken with that happy surge they had felt over the last four mornings. They would wake and remember that they were now married to one another. In due time this memory would manage to settle, to not feel so new as to be the one of the first things they thought about when they woke up, and that would be fine, of course. But until then they would happily bask in this feeling. This morning, they'd have to say, would easily be the most notable of these surges, as it didn't hit them back home in Austin but rather in a hotel room in Paris.

They had flown in the day before, landing in mid-afternoon. They had taken the rest of the day to settle into the hotel, to familiarize themselves with what would be their home for the next two weeks, from their room to the pool, to their room, and the restaurants, and their room, and the view from the balcony, and their room... They'd had dinner up there, finding no desire to explore the city beyond just yet.

It was the most relaxing day they had had since the day of the puppies. Sure, they hadn't done much on the day after the wedding, especially since they had slept through most of it, but with preparations for the trip, and for the following day, and the miracle of the Hex out there, it hadn't really left much of a mark. They were really just in a haze.

And then the day after that was the fourth of July, and the party for Haley Hunter's third birthday. As though being surrounded by several toddlers wasn't enough of a frenzy to leave one exhausted, they also had to contend with the heat, which left them in a perpetual stage of feeling sweaty and gross, seeking the nearest means to cool down as soon as they could have it again, and overall finding their energy to be in the red. By the time they had returned home, Maya and Lucas both felt compelled to go straight to bed after a refreshing shower, to ensure they didn't sleep too late and end up missing their flight.

They very nearly did, too. In something bordering on Home Alone levels, they ended up speeding through the airport and being allowed through just in the nick of time.

"I know we said we were going to make this memorable, but that's not what we meant, was it?" Lucas asked as they were finally able to sit in their seats.

"Wasn't it your mom who said trips were no fun without a surprise or two?" Maya asked with a smirk, which made him laugh and relax, finally taking in how they were on a first class flight - thanks to Diana Zvolensky - to Paris, for their honeymoon. He looked back to his wife, and he knew his smile echoed hers.

"We would have been fine with our old seats, wouldn't we?" Lucas pondered as they both settled in, looked around at what they had at their disposal.

"Sure, yeah," Maya nodded, leaning back in her seat.

"But hey, we're here now," Lucas did as much, which made her laugh.

"Yes, we are." After a few seconds of their quietly enjoying their accommodations, Maya reached into her bag, pulling out a folded piece of paper, which she opened out as she sat up straight. "So, here's what I've been thinking," she started, and Lucas wore his confusion on his face. "The name thing," Maya told him.

"Oh," he blinked. He had forgotten how they had agreed to talk about it on the flight. With this tiny bit of information, he understood what this was about. She wanted to get it settled quickly, the better for them both to get to enjoy their fancy bit of flying. "Okay, yeah, what do you have?"

"Thought about it a lot... probably even before we were engaged," she told him.

"Sounds right," he laughed.

"Yeah, so you know some of the points already."

"The Hart name means a lot to you," he nodded. "You kept it even when your mom got married to Shawn."

"I did," Maya nodded. "And he understood that," she went on. Sometimes she worried, like maybe it would have meant so much to him, too, and he hadn't said anything because he wanted her to do whatever she wanted. "I think part of me had to wonder if it would be weird now, if I did take your name when I wouldn't change mine for his."

"I get that," Lucas nodded.

"And then, now, there's the music side of everything. Everyone's starting to know who Maya Hart is, and they would probably make the transition easily, it hasn't been so long... There are all these small factors all over the place, and I know you'll say that I don't have to do it for you..."

"I would say that, yes," he nodded.

"Do you know who Christine Sutcliffe is?" Maya asked. Lucas did not, at first, but then having seen the surname in recent times, he was able to connect the dots. "I didn't even know that was her full name until I met her daughter. Everyone called her Ree for as long as she could remember, so that's who she became when she did her first album. And then when she got married, she took her husband's name, everywhere except on stage. There she was still the Forster girl."

"So, does that mean..." Lucas slowly asked.

"This might sound like a weird plan, but this is what I came up with. There's like three parts, so just stay with me."

"Okay," he nodded.

"One: Whatever music I put out there, with the band, or for the label, I am and will continue to be Maya Hart," she declared. He nodded again. "Two," she breathed, "I first become, officially, finally, Maya Hunter."

It was as Lucas had said, the Hart name had meant a lot to her, for how she had carried it with her after coming to Texas, one of the few things left to her to remember who she had once been. So when Shawn had married her mother, he had adopted her, yes, but she had kept her name. To take it now, nearly a decade after the fact, could have come off as pointless, especially for the time it would last, but it wasn't pointless to her... and it wouldn't be pointless to her father.

"Sounds good," Lucas smiled. Of course he would see it how she did, too.

"And three," Maya stared back at him with that happy little smile he'd seen so much of over the past few days. It shifted now into the precursor for her most Southern Belle of an accent."Mrs. Maya Friar, at your service," she tipped her head, snapping back with a grin, presenting him with her notes. "I call it the Maiden, Mother, and Crooner plan. What do you think?" she asked, for the first time almost shyly so. She wanted to make sure he was on board. It was her choice, but this was for the both of them in the long run, wasn't it?

"I think... I have never been so proud to share my name with anyone," he told her, and he meant it wholeheartedly.

"Good," Maya beamed, leaning so she might kiss him.

"Looks like we have the next few hours to ourselves then," he told her, as they were informed their flight was about to take off.

They had spent the flight brushing up on their French, which didn't actually require any refreshing. Their old days of French class had been memorable, always, but they would both claim they had been each other's best tutor in making so that they not only learned properly but also maintained it after they had graduated. They had vowed to return to Paris one day, and now here they were.

"Bon matin," Lucas spoke at her ear as they both eased into waking, their first morning at the hotel.

"How bad would it be if we just stayed here today?" Maya hummed pressing kisses to the knuckles of his hand laced with hers.

"I would like to see anyone try and make us do anything we don't want to do," Lucas pointed out.

"They are kind of far away, they won't know," she agreed.

"And even if they were in the next room..." he added, smirking, especially as she laughed and turned toward him. After a bit of light kissing, continuing their way along this good morning, she was taken with a look he equated to a light bulb popping up over her head.

"Compromise? We enjoy the hotel for today, and tonight we go out for what I can only describe as a capital D Date... bolded, italicized, double underlined. Because, you know... Paris..." she finished, in her best French accent."

"I like this plan a lot," Lucas smiled. "Good thing I already have a reservation for dinner tonight."

"Do you?" she inquired playfully. "Who with?"

"A very interesting, smart, beautiful woman..." he indulged her with truth. She responded with a modest smile.

"So, you and me and a quiet day in, huh?"

"You do make a compelling argument," he nodded, pulling her closer and making her laugh.

"First things first though, I am starving, so..."

"Breakfast, on it," he kissed her before going in search of the room service menu. For as long as they had been talking about this trip, since they had chosen Paris as their destination, he knew she'd had some images stuck in her head, things she wanted to do. Breakfast on their room's balcony, overlooking the morning city beyond, was one of those, near the top if not the top itself.

Opening the doors and stepping out on that balcony the day before, when they had first checked in, Maya had felt that immediate twinge, the kind she usually got moments before reaching for paper and pencil. She knew she'd want to spend every minute here she had a chance, her and Lucas, sitting together in their small pocket of the world.

"I think there's still a part of me that can't believe we're here like this," she told him as they settled in with their breakfast once it had arrived. "This is my third time coming to this city and I still remember when it felt like it couldn't be real." He could have said that he knew what she meant, but in his case he knew it would have only been general amazement, while in hers... it had been something just deeply unattainable.

"Good feeling?" he asked her.

"I think so," she replied, looking on to the city with a smile. "This time will be so different though. The first time, I was here with my parents, for a couple of days, mostly sightseeing. And then the second time, it was all of us, but we were not here so long either, and it was kind of..."

"Crowded?" Lucas offered.

"Very," Maya chuckled. "This time... this time it's just you and me, for two whole weeks." He smiled back at her, feeling anticipation as well as she did on this part.

"Still feeling this day in or are you starting to rethink?" he asked, in an effort to decipher her face.

"I don't know... I could be talked into going for a casual walk later on," she replied, turning a look to him. "What about you? Do you want to go out?"

"I have to say, I'm getting a bit conflicted on the subject," he told her, his chin in his hand as he watched her sitting there, eating breakfast, looking like she was in a constant state of happiness, radiating out, over being here with him. She was so beautiful right now that the thought of there being anything he'd rather be looking at felt impossible. "Here sounds good."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	185. Their Escape to Lights

July 3rd 2020

_Chapter 185  
Their Escape to Lights_

Lucas stood in the hotel lobby, hands in his pockets, looking up at the impressive sculpture greeting arrivals. When they'd walked in the day before, Maya had stalled and stared at it with wide eyes for several minutes. She'd stopped a couple more times in their zig zag of a tour through the afternoon and the evening, and he fully expected her to come back another time… several times… to sketch it. There was a young man right now, sitting nearby, doing just that. Lucas had noticed him and moved to the side just a bit, ensuring that he wasn't blocking his view, and the man had given him a nod. A minute later, a young woman emerged from the elevator and joined him. The artist had slipped his thin sketchpad in his jacket pocket and led her out of the hotel, and Lucas smiled to himself. So they had both been waiting for their own dates.

Date… Capital D, bolded, italicized, double underlined… _Because Paris_. Maya had insisted that he should get ready first and head down, so she could do her own preparing and then meet him downstairs. He'd asked if what she really wanted to do was to make him pass out when he'd see her.

"Any chance to practice my French, right?" she'd teased.

He had agreed to her request, and so he'd gotten dressed, putting on the suit he felt most appropriate to what this night was shaping up to be. Maya had been 'hiding' on the balcony, and he let her know he was going down when he was all set. She kept her eyes shut as she nodded to this, preserving her own surprise, even if this was not a new suit and she would have seen it before. As she would tell him, after they'd spent the last couple of days in casual clothes or no clothes at all, it _would_ be a change.

As agreed that morning, they had not left the hotel all day. Breakfast had been enjoyed with all the leisure inspired by their location and the company they kept. Lucas firmly believed that, if she could, Maya would have taken as her sole souvenir of this trip the view from their balcony. She looked into the city with so much peace about her, like she'd always been meant to be here. Lucas vowed, then and there, to bring her back, right here, whenever he could, for all the years of their life together.

It was almost midday, time for lunch, by the time they could be convinced to head back into their room, though it wasn't food which drew them there. Instead they gave in to that ceaseless drive to reach for one another, until time and activity had worked them into finally ordering up something to eat. They had enjoyed this with a bit of French television, which had turned into a bit of hilarity when they had come upon a show that their teacher in high school would show to the class from time to time. This would usually lead to exercises where they would use the characters in their sentences. It was something between a blast from the past and a perfectly timed memory. They sat there on the couch, pretending to be writing their summaries as they used to do, or commenting on what had become of some character or another. These were not new, the series had been over for a while, but they had never exactly seen the whole thing from top to bottom.

"I feel like we owe it to them to find it," Maya declared, when they'd turned off the television and started thinking about getting ready for dinner.

"Because they taught us French?" Lucas guessed with a smirk.

"Exactly," Maya grinned.

So, when he had trailed off from the sculpture in the lobby, still waiting, Lucas had turned to his phone, making a search for some way or another for them to do just as Maya had suggested. There were DVDs, he might be able to get a hold of them… They would need a different player to watch them, or they…

Oh, she had been turning his head for years now, and it had never gotten to feel any less powerful, only strengthened. The first time had been that morning when the two of them and Zay, no longer grounded from their near run to New York, had shown up at school in 'fancy dress.' Other big hits had been the violet dress when they'd gone to their first school dance, or that poor rain drenched dress the night of their first date… It would be very hard to surpass the long awaited wedding dress, but on their first night out in Paris, he could have called it a very close second.

"I better not leave you unattended too long," Maya told him as she swept up to him. "Someone's going to try and steal you away, looking like that," she hummed, looking him over. _He'd_ been making her weak in the knees for all those years, too.

"Guess we'll just have to stick together then," he smiled, leaning to kiss her briefly.

"What a sacrifice," she smiled back at him, taking his arm as he led her out of the hotel. She did not miss a chance to take a passing glance at the sculpture. "Looks like it might rain," she told him as she got a look of the sky.

"It does," Lucas agreed, looking back at her with a smile she read easily as holding a memory of their first date, running for cover under an unexpected shower, kissing in the rush of breathlessness… "It's good luck," he decided with a confident tip of the head.

"Yeah?" Maya smiled.

"It was… not the start anyone would aim for," he explained, "But now we're here, ten years later, going on eleven…"

"You did say we would remember that night," Maya nodded, laughing.

"Haven't forgotten a minute of it," he promised.

"Well, I'm not sure how kind the rain will be to _this_ dress, but if it gets us more of all that, then it will be worth it."

"But if we can find our luck elsewhere…" Lucas suggested, and Maya responded at once.

"That'd be great, too," she nodded and made him laugh along with her. "So, where is this restaurant and how are we getting there?"

"Well, it depends. It's supposed to be twenty minutes on foot from the hotel, so if you'd rather we get a ride we can do that. The reservation isn't for another… almost forty minutes," he explained, getting a look at the time on his pocket watch. Maya considered this as they strolled along, all the while gazing at everything around them. When she turned her eyes back to him, she didn't even have to say it. They were walking.

It was one of the things he loved the most, just to watch her when her eyes took on the wide openness of her curiosity as it was being given constant stimulation by what she saw. And to have it happen here now, it was like she might have gone on overload. He doubted that she felt those twenty minutes go by before they reached the restaurant. They were probably going to be walking back, too, the better to let her catch what she might have missed on the way in.

"So, what made you choose this place?" Maya asked as they walked through the door. She was already scanning her surroundings, and Lucas was sure she'd figure it out in no time, but he told her anyway.

"I saw pictures when I was looking up restaurants, and I saw that," he pointed up. Maya turned her eyes to follow his direction and she discovered the ceiling.

It was a swift face-off between the drop of her jaw and the awareness to rein her expression back in. He had known from the time they had been bare acquaintances, new friends, that she always appreciated a good ceiling, and she had maintained this through the years, declaring that a bare ceiling was okay a lot of the times, but oh when it could be more than that… When she had helped design the Hex, it had been a very important factor for her to give its ceiling something worth looking at.

"Well played," she breathed, turning a smile back to him.

"I'm just glad you didn't see it before," he smiled back.

They were led to their table, where Lucas would find Maya's attention divided between the menu and the ceiling enough that he ended up reading out the options to her. Her discreet sort of smirk confirmed that she was not only listening but also actively amused at the sound of his accent dipping in and out as he spoke French. It went back to their days in French class. As much as she would tease him by putting on an exaggerated southern accent in imitating him, he didn't actually have one of those. But then he'd go and speak French and, according to Maya, his inner Huckleberry would burst out of him and announce itself.

"I don't know, it all sounds great, can you start over?" Maya asked, looking back down to him.

"I could, so long as you don't mind not eating for a while," he turned the pages back to the start of the menu. "Or I could just _continue speaking to you in French for the rest of the night,_" he suggested, switching over. Maya laughed.

_"Alright, I can get in on that,"_ she sat back in her chair. _Her_ accent bordered on flawless, which she credited to her singing, her music.

_"Do you still need me to read the menu again?"_

_"No, you just keep talking to me like that,"_ she replied, and he resettled in his chair, ready to talk her ear off if it was what she wanted. He told her about his hunt for the series and what he'd so far discovered. She was very eager to track down those DVDs with him, to bring those back home and finally get 'the full story' once and for all.

_"I know we said we wouldn't take too many pictures, like GiGi said, but this was too good not to take,"_ Lucas told Maya as they were waiting for their desserts. He held his phone out to her and she smiled at once, finding the picture he must have taken earlier, as he was reading the menu to her. There she sat, front and center, eyes turned to the ceiling spread overhead and a smile on her lips.

_"I can see why you did,"_ she agreed. _"Maybe… We can make a… a challenge. We decide how many pictures to take every day. That will help us to really narrow it down, only the big moments."_

_"I like that," _Lucas nodded. _"How many per day?"_ he wondered, and they both thought about it for a few seconds.

_"Ten?"_ Maya first suggested. They both thought about this and agreed without saying that it might have not been enough of a challenge. _"Five then?"_

_"Five,"_ he repeated, considering. When this drew on, she nudged his foot under the table.

_"Are you counting?" _she asked, smiling.

_"Well, five every day makes seventy. I was just thinking… one hundred in total, that might be a nice goal?"_ Lucas explained. Now that she thought about it, she kind of liked the number, too.

_"Alright, well that would be…"_

_"Seven every day, plus two spares… for emergencies."_ She laughed at this, liking the idea of a photo emergency.

_"Oh, but we didn't do it yesterday, and today's almost over…"_

_"I took some, here and there," _he admitted, _"And I'm sure you did, too."_ She gave an innocent face, but at a look from him she gave in with a chuckle.

_"Fine, but we are not looking at those until we're back at the hotel. I did not put this dress on to look at our phones."_ He gave her a look which needed no translation, and his phone disappeared back into his pocket.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	186. Their Escape to Portraits

July 4th 2020

_Chapter 186  
Their Escape to Portraits_

"Is that me down there?" Lucas asked as he sat back down next to Maya. He'd left their spot on the bench where they had been for a little over now in order to check out a small shop nearby. While Maya went on painting in her sketchbook he had retrieved a small box of pastries and two coffees.

"How did you know?" she smiled, taking the cup he extended to her and finding herself in a need for an extra hand when she spotted the treats in the open box. Carefully setting her things down on top of her bag at her feet, she sent her hand fishing for a pastry.

"Looked sort of like a cowboy," he informed her, getting a look back which seemed to say 'did not.' "If there was a tiny you next to tiny me, she'd be calling him Huckleberry."

"Yes, well, that just means she likes him a lot," Maya raised her chin before hiding her giggles in her cup at the look he gave back.

It was hard to believe they were already on their fifth day in Paris, the fourth if they discounted their arrival day. Of course, it all had to end sooner or later, but something about the halfway point being just two days ahead of them felt unreal. The time they had spent in the city was just like a dream come to reality.

After their day of peaceful hotel living, they had set out on their third day with the intent of departing from the hotel bright and early and not returning until late in the evening, and that was just what they had done. Other goals for that day had included finding Nana Kat's souvenir, the echo to the gift she had given them for their wedding, and tracking down the infamous DVDs. They had accomplished both of these, too. They'd had a very loaded day, which was not without moments of sitting and enjoying their surroundings. Even so, by the time they had found their way back to their room, they were both in a state of going straight to bed, where they fell asleep in all of a minute.

Day four, they had decided, would be taken with a tiny bit of restraint, and so they'd gone to the beach for some swimming and sun. The newlyweds had both seen their personal cases of baby fever take a flare upward at the sight of tiny toddlers running around, playing in the sand… Lucas had been recruited by one such small girl to assist her in building her castle, after one of her little buckets had rolled their way. He had gladly complied, and Maya had captured their third picture of the day.

"You like your gift?" Lucas had asked his wife that night, as he'd come back from grabbing them both some drinks and found that she'd made something of a crafts station out of their bed.

She had already put the small photo printer to some use, with the products of their first few days' shots lined up at her side. Now she had taken one of the many sketchbooks given to her by their friends and repurposed it as something like a travel log and photo album. He had found the printer in a store the day before that, the day of morning to night, bought it along with a gift bag. He would have given it to her that very night, but then they'd gone right to sleep when they'd come back to their room. And then the next day, once they had gotten up, they were soon out the door and off to the beach. It wasn't until they'd come back, relaxed and a little tanner, that he'd remembered and gone to dig out the bag from where it had remained hidden.

"What's this?" Maya had asked, curious at once. He'd given her the bag and it was opened within two seconds. "Oh!" she'd gasped, pulling the box out with growing excitement.

"Had a feeling you'd be getting eager to get those pictures out by now, so when I saw it…" She'd come up and kissed him at once, turned into a kid on Christmas as she moved to quickly unpack the printer and get it working. Lucas had assisted, and before long they had gotten their first print, a selfie taken then and there of the two of them mid-kiss. "Does that count as today's seventh?" he'd asked her with a smile as she held the print for him to see. She'd nodded, grinning proudly.

"This needs drinks," she'd told him, and he was on it.

Now, here she was, hard at work. There would be bigger prints once they made it home, but this was something already.

"I love it very much… as you can see," she gestured majestically to everything she'd already done in the brief time it had taken for him to go down and get their drinks. "After I get all the pictures in, I want us both to write in here about each day."

"I like that," Lucas had nodded, and they'd spent the rest of that night putting days one through four into the log, looking back through their photos. The limitations had really made their seven every day feel stronger, capsules of time in these days they would remember forever.

Today, as they had been going along the city, stopping in certain spots for Maya to add to her watercolors, Lucas would sometimes watch her work, other times look around at where they were, look at the people walking along…

"Hey, look," Lucas turned back to Maya, a few minutes after pastry and coffee had been traded back for sketchbook and paint set. She lifted her head and looked where he pointed.

Further along, on another bench, sat a young man bent over a sketchbook of his own. After a few days at the hotel, it got to feel like a village, faces growing familiar. That included the couple Lucas had seen leave the hotel on their night out, the artist who had been sketching the sculpture and the woman he had been waiting on. They hadn't spoken, but they had gotten to the point where they would wave or nod to each other whenever they'd see one another.

"I don't know where…" Lucas looked around.

"There," Maya nodded over to where a small crowd watched a street performer. Their other nameless friend stood among them, swaying about to the music. They looked back to one another. Maya nodded down to the pastry box.

Once they'd gathered everything, Maya packing away her painting supplies but keeping her sketchbook in hand to protect the page in progress, they'd walked two benches over. The scuff of their feet made the young man lift his head.

"Oh, hi," he blinked. He spotted the sketchbook and sat up, like it suddenly made Maya more familiar to him. Lucas held out the pastry box.

"I'm Lucas, this is my wife, Maya. We thought it was time we said hello," he explained.

"Wow, thanks," the artist started to reach, then stopped as he thought to first introduce himself back. "Oh, my name's Caleb," he pointed his pencil back at himself. His accent suggested perhaps American, or Canadian. "And, uh," he looked over to the performer's crowd. "Well, that's Talia out there… my wife," his pencil now pointed to her. The smile on his face was familiar enough to them; it was built on the same emotion as their own.

"We got married… a week ago today," Maya told Caleb, turning a smile to Lucas as she realized it for the first time. "What about you?"

"Six days," Caleb nodded. Lucas tipped his head to the box again, and he finally served himself. "Thanks," he told Lucas, looking over to his wife. "Can you watch my stuff for a second?" He jogged over and soon returned with the young woman. The introductions were made all over again, and soon the four of them relocated to where they could sit together, after having gotten something to drink to go with the pastries.

Their fellow newlyweds, twenty-two years old the pair of them, were from Atlanta. They had just graduated college, and instead of any gifts their parents might have intended to give them to celebrate this, they had asked them to contribute this trip, as they had asked again, from their families and friends both, when they had gone and gotten married. It had been a dream of theirs to come out here, each for their own reasons, and so now here they were, for their own honeymoon.

Maya and Caleb had swapped sketchbooks, taking in one another's work, while Lucas and Talia watched their respective spouses with looks of amused recognition.

"Do you ever get the impression like they might run into a wall one day from staring at something else?" Talia asked.

"She's got a thing for ceilings, so yeah, all the time," Lucas told her, nodding to Maya. He told Talia about the restaurant they had been to a few nights back, and she made a note of it.

They spent most of the day hanging out, the four of them together. New spots were found for the artists to go and explore their talents, while the other two either sat with them or wandered around. Eventually, after dinner, they made their way back to the hotel, where they parted ways at the elevators.

"Hey," Maya turned to Lucas as the doors closed at Caleb and Talia's floor and continued up toward theirs. When he turned to look at her, she came up to kiss him.

"What was that for?" Lucas asked, smiling to show he was more than happy to have it happen again.

"For today," she shrugged, "Giving me a day to go all quiet and paint-y."

"Is that what I did?" he wondered. He had his arms around her now, like they had all the time in the world.

"It's just this is supposed to be _our_ trip, and today was kind of mostly about me…" The elevator doors opened and they stepped out, walking hand in hand down the hall to their room.

"We are in Paris, of all places. What kind of husband of yours would I be if I said you couldn't do any of what you did today?" he asked.

"I'm sure you'd have your redeeming qualities," Maya laughed, looking up at him.

"I have a feeling I know what they would be," he smirked back at her. "Anyway, I'll have you know I like watching you work. Plus, I do have a strong appreciation for the arts."

"I know you do," she told him, in a way that sounded like 'I love you.'

"And we had fun today, you and me, and Caleb and Talia."

"Do you think we'll see them again after we go back home?" Maya wondered. "Or are they just going to be part of our memories of being here?"

"I don't know," Lucas replied, wondering this himself. The other couple had arrived the day after them, the day Lucas had seen Caleb sketching the statue, but they were leaving a few days before the two of them were headed back to Austin. As of yet, they hadn't exchanged contact information, though they had made plans to meet the next morning at breakfast.

"I'm slightly concerned at myself that I kept expecting one or the other of them to recognize me from the band. I don't think they actually know about us."

"They do tend to pop up in the most unexpected places," Lucas pointed out in her defense.

"It's kind of nice," Maya smiled. "Like I'm undercover."

"Come on, Super Spy," he led her into their room like the concept of her being unnoticeable amused him.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	187. Their Escape to Art

July 5th 2020

_Chapter 187  
Their Escape to Art_

"There, I think this is a good 'walking through Paris museums' look, yeah?" Maya stood upright after getting her sandals on, taking a turn for Lucas as he turned off the television. She had to smile, seeing his little befuddled look for a second before he could blink and respond.

"What are the qualifications for a good museum look?" he wondered.

"Proper but not formal, not too heavy, good footwear," Maya listed off at once.

"Then it's perfect," he stood from the couch and moved to join her. "Plus you look very cute right now," he informed her with a nod.

"Bonus points," she smirked, kissing him before moving to get her bag. "Let's go, husband!"

It was their seventh day in Paris, the last of the first half of their trip. Maya and Lucas were both eager to get going and head out into the city, even if it would be to spend most of it indoors, at a couple of museums. It had been the plan for days, that this would be their museum day, though they had come very close to rescheduling it after the previous day had been sort of a wash.

The previous morning, when Maya had awakened, she'd had one thought in mind, and it was to hand over controls of their activities over to Lucas. After their day of painting excursion, it had been important to Maya that he should get to make that same kind of choice, too. He wouldn't see it that way, and she knew he would have been one hundred percent honest in saying that he was satisfied to spend the day watching her as he had done. But at the same time, she knew that, given the chance, he would get such a kick out of finding something here that meant a lot to him in some shape or form. She'd wanted him to have that.

It had been raining when she'd woken up, and she hadn't thought too much of it. If anything, she'd just smiled, thinking about Lucas and his good luck rain theory. It _had_ rained, on their big Date night. The dress had managed to be saved from it, just barely, as she'd only had to run from the cover of the restaurant to the back seat of the waiting taxi. It had been enough, in her mind and his, that they were 'blessed by the luck rain.'

By the time Lucas had woken up, too, and by the time they'd gotten out of bed, the rain had grown steadier, a downpour which forced them to look at the forecast for the day. It had gone from the previously announced light showers to possible heavy falls throughout the day, and it had left them with a choice to make. They did not mind going out in the rain, although it did sort of take some of the freedom out of their choices, and they didn't want to have to think too hard about what they would do. They might have switched things up and done their museum day then, but Lucas had pointed out that they would be more at ease in this on a sunny day, and they might want to take a chance that the following day would be one of those. So, museum day remained as it had been planned.

This left them with this rainy day to contend with. They met with Caleb and Talia, the four of them joining for breakfast downstairs. The other couple was just as perplexed about what they might do, didn't feel like going out. So, at first, they had all decided to spend some time at the hotel pool that morning. They had arrived there, after breakfast and after getting changed, to find they had the place to themselves. It made way for a whole load of silliness mixed with moments of peace. It wasn't long though that the four of them were joined by other guests, and within an hour it seemed that much of the hotel had chosen the same solution to wait out this rainy day.

"Why don't you guys come up to our room?" Lucas had told their new friends. "It's almost lunch time, we can order something to be brought up and eat there."

That was what they had done, and as they'd been waiting for their food, Talia had spotted the set of DVDs sticking out from the top of one of their bags. Maya had explained what they were, and then all it had taken had been for Caleb to say that his laptop could play DVDs from anywhere, and the plan was set for the rest of their day. It had been ridiculous and wonderful, and after a while they didn't remember about the rain.

It had all been such a great day, and they might have taken their fellow newlyweds with them to the museums, knowing well that Caleb especially would have loved it, but then they were unavailable. Talia had some family living out in Poland, and with her having already crossed the ocean, they were making their way into Paris today and tomorrow to spend some time with her and her new husband.

"We still have times, and who's to say we can only go once?" Lucas smiled as they went their separate ways after breakfast.

"No one, no one is saying that," Maya agreed with a laugh.

For how much the previous day had been led by rain, this one was mastered by the sun. Maya and Lucas made their way out into the city and decided to be dropped off a little way away from their first stop, walking the rest of the way.

"We are not going to be running around this one, are we?" Lucas guessed as they walked through the doors and Maya already had her eyes turned up and all around. He got hold of her hand and gave it a light squeeze to get her attention.

"Huh?" she asked. When he chuckled, she looked back at him. "What?"

"I was saying we were not going to be running around in here, and then you distracted me by… well, being you," he told her. She smiled, tipping her head to his shoulder for a moment.

"I think it's going to be one of those 'you should hold on to me' days."

"Got it," Lucas assured her, lifting up their joined hands.

They had gone to a few museums the last time they'd been here, but they'd only had an afternoon at their disposal, which did not make for any lengthy or really complete explorations, certainly not as much as either of them might have liked. That had been six years ago, nine years since Maya's first time out here. She'd had a week back then, with her parents, but they'd definitely gone in with a goal of seeing as much as they could. They _had_ been to some museums, but again really not in the way she might have wanted to take it all in, and it was so long ago by now…

Between this, and her education, and his old guide job, and their history together, museums were so much of a thing that this day felt like a necessity and, yes, something they would happily repeat once or twice more before they left.

The strongest memories they had, when it came to museums, oh, they had so much power in them, whenever they were remembered. Their field trip in seventh grade, her first year with the rest of them, breaking away from the rest of their class, searching for weird stuff… Their first date, even if they'd never really made it into the museum for being so rain soaked as they'd been… And then the chance they'd had, to make up for that with the museum to themselves, thanks to his mother… Lucas remembered the two of them, sat on the floor, staring up at one painting for… ages. He had gotten Maya a poster of it, and it had been on her bedroom wall, and then in their room in Houston, and now, framed, it hung in the living room at their home…

They might not have been able to sit on any floor here, but they'd stood in some places, hardly moving for some time. The way Maya looked at some of these works, she might never have left until she had fully internalized what it was like to see what she saw with her own two eyes. When they'd stopped for lunch, after having spent hours in one museum and as they prepared to also spend hours in another, she'd pulled out her sketchbook at once, like her brain was spilling with so much that she had to set some of it down. By now she was getting to feel less guilty about 'painting in his face' and to know he did not feel like he was being ignored. It would have been ignoring who she was to make her do anything else.

"You're going to have so much to tell your students, aren't you?" Lucas asked with a smile as he looked to the tube carefully stood next to his chair. It contained a pair of posters they'd bought at the souvenir shop and would likely hold more after their next stop, the better to be carried back home next week.

"Might not start with that, but yeah," she agreed, and he loved to see how excited it made her, more than she already was.

Their afternoon was equally enthralling if not more. Lucas would sometimes start and whisper at her ear some facts he had retained over the years, pulling out his 'guide voice,' with a French twist. He might have done it to see if she would be able to hold her composure. And oh, how close she'd come to losing it a few times.

"I…" she'd whispered back, pointing at him, clenching her hand, like she was resisting saying what was on her mind, which only made him press on. "You put a pin on that right now, Friar."

"Why, Friar?" he turned back on to her, and the smile it earned him was perfect.

"I'm just saying, that voice could be put to much better use later… tonight," she whispered, eyebrow arched in such a way as to make him become the one in need of controlling his face.

So, the remainder of their time at the museum was spent great and quiet reverence, passing the odd whispered reaction between the two of them.

"I could live here…" Maya breathed, looking back at the building as they'd walked out into sunset over Paris.

"Here in the museum or the city?" Lucas asked with a curious smile. Maya responded by pointing back to the doors. "Well, the benches were pretty comfortable, I bet we could push a couple of them together. And there's a restaurant for food, bathrooms… I bet we could make it work. The dogs though…" She let out a small sigh as they started on their way to find where they might have dinner that night. "We'll come back," he promised her. "Before we leave, or on another trip… We'll come back."

"We will," she echoed. In her mind, she imagined returning here, in a few years' time, him and her and a child, or two, or more… "There are a lot of other places we need to go, too, other cities, other countries… Growing up, I never thought I could ever get to see them, but things are different now. I want to see them, with you."

"Count me in," he gladly smiled back at her, pausing a moment where they stood so he might kiss his wife, see that light in her eyes. "So, where are we going to hang these?" he asked, pointing to the tube slung over his back.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	188. Their Escape to Bonds

July 6th 2020

_Chapter 188  
Their Escape to Bonds_

Of all the memories which would come to be captured in their travel log/album, of their one hundred pictures, they would say there were several who would fall under the category of 'you really had to be there.' A lot of those included Caleb and Talia, and maybe the top most of those had been the tenth night they spent in Paris, the night of July 14th. The other couple, who in just a few days had really taken to feel part of their world, was checking out the following day, flying home to Atlanta. There really could not have been a better send-off than to find themselves in the middle of a holiday.

They had used one of their 'photo emergency' spare shots today, after having filled their quota of seven only to return to the hotel and to Caleb and Talia's room, only to find themselves putting on something like a small show, born of tipsiness and emotions over the split that was to come.

The last few days really felt as though they had gone by in the blink of an eye. They kept saying it, but it really felt that way, like the days had been unmoored and sent spinning away much faster than they were meant to go along. In just a few more days, _they_ would be flying home, too, back to the real world, real life, back to work, and very soon school… one a student, the other a teacher… and sooner still another wedding, Asher and Ray…

They hadn't spoken or corresponded in any way with anyone back home since they'd left. That had been a reasonable choice, respected all around. It was one thing to check in with home when they were just travelling, but this was their honeymoon, this was something for the two of them as they began their married life, their bubble, far away.

It wasn't as though they didn't think about their people back in Texas… and Arizona… and Arkansas… and New York… Often they would see something and it would remind them of one of their friends, or of family. They would see a person and it would feel like they had found this one or that one's French counterpart.

The day after their museum adventures, they had gone for a bit more sightseeing, with their friends from a few floors down off with their visiting relatives, all leading them to the evening, where they had tickets to go see a play. This had been one more gift from Sophie's mother, as though their being bumped up to first class on their flights to and from France hadn't been enough. She had seen it herself, on her last passage through Paris, and she'd insisted that the two of them would enjoy it as well.

Lucas could not say what Maya had enjoyed the most between the play – which had genuinely been wonderful – and the theater itself. It had been just one of the things to make them think of their friends, in this case Rosa, who would have gone about as wide-eyed and quiet as Maya had done upon seeing it.

The day after that, yesterday, they had been reunited with Caleb and Talia, and they'd taken the opportunity to go and have themselves a bit more of museum strolling. Lucas had quickly found himself joking along with Talia as the two of them would look on to their respective spouses looking like a couple of gaping kids in candy stores, if those kids could talk and talk and talk about this artist's inspiration or that artist's use of colors as though it was the greatest thing they had ever seen.

"We better not given either of them any sugar…" Talia had whispered to Lucas as Caleb and Maya had led them into the next section and both given something like a squeak at what they found.

"I will literally carry her away if I need to," Lucas had laughed, miming himself lifting his wife off the ground. "What about him?"

"He's all limbs, and I'm stronger than I look," Talia had assured him.

After having spent most of that day with long pauses, followed by brief steps and another pause, they had flipped things on their head by ending up in a club and dancing the night away. They had returned to the hotel in the middle of the night, splitting off to their rooms and much needed sleep.

When Lucas had awakened that morning, he'd found the bed empty next to him and his wife sitting off on the couch. Walking over to her, he already heard the low whirring that told him she was printing photos with the printer he had given her, with her log open in front of her.

"Hey," he'd leaned over the back of the couch, pressing one and another kiss to the side of her head, until she lifted her head back and turned it so they have one proper kiss. "Been up long?"

"Ten minutes, I think," Maya told him, peeling the little paper covering the sticky part of a photo they'd taken the night before, showing them and their friends huddled together at the club, and sticking it on to the open page. "I just wanted to get the pages set, figured maybe we could ask Caleb and Talia if they wanted to write in here, too, and since they're leaving tomorrow…"

"That sounds great," he told her, moving around to sit with her, feeling the unmade sigh in her words. He wasn't looking forward to seeing the pair disappear either. "I love this one," he laughed, picking up the just printed photo and showing it to her. He'd been the one to take it. The picture showed him walking with Maya on his back, her arms around his neck, and next to them Talia, holding Caleb in the same way as he pointed ahead.

"She really is strong," Maya declared. "What was he pointing at?" she asked, trying to remember.

"I think he saw some old movie posters in a shop window," Lucas recalled.

"Oh, yeah, I think I saw those," Maya smiled. One thing they had learned about Caleb was his love for that old style of movie posters. It wasn't even about the actual movies themselves, not all the time, but the aesthetic of the posters. According to Talia, they were running out of wall space. Soon enough, he'd hit the ceilings, and then it would be down to the floors.

They had met with their friends for a breakfast that might as well have been called lunch for the time they'd finally woken up, and gotten dressed, and made their way to the restaurant. They were all still just about getting used to the time difference as it was, which only made them laugh now, as they would have to go and get back on their old time.

After their plates had been cleared off, they'd stuck around at their table a while longer, as Maya and Lucas showed their travel log to the other newlyweds. Caleb and Talia had been very eager to put in their part when they were asked. Talia had written in, bent over the page with a curtain of wavy brown hair to hide the words. When she'd been done, she'd pressed the pages together, 'locked' them together with a pair of folded triangles, one at each of the outer corners.

"Don't look yet, okay?" she'd told them. "After you go home, the first time you think about how you miss when you were here…" she mimed the removal of the triangles with a smile.

"Deal," Lucas nodded, even as Maya chimed in.

"Done," she grinned.

"My turn now," Caleb motioned toward the log. He'd already pulled the small case he always had in his pocket, with his pencils, sharpener, erasers… He was itching to sketch. In no time, he was working on what turned out to be a portrait of Maya and Lucas, and the clothes and the presence of others around them set the scene as their dancing at the club the night before. He had a particular talent in depicting motion, and looking at the two of them on that page, they could practically hear the bounce of the music, the flash of lights, the energy, the joy in their eyes, their faces…

"A Caleb Stamp original, and it's all ours," Maya beamed, after passing the log over for Lucas to get a closer look.

"Well, now you owe me one of yours," Caleb grinned back.

"May I borrow your pencils?" Maya reverently asked.

"Why are those girls looking at us?" Talia asked, as her husband was passing his sketchpad and the pencils across the table. Lucas, Maya, and Caleb all looked to where Talia nodded, discovering a trio of teenage girls, possibly two sisters and their friend, going by looks and the presence of parents along the table. They were indeed looking toward them, and when Maya looked up and made eye contact, they perked up at once.

"Friends of yours?" Caleb asked.

"Uh, well…" Maya blinked. Ten whole days and there hadn't been any kind of encounter. "So, I mentioned how I was in a band, yeah?" She had never gone into much detail about any of it, especially about the fact that they were privileged with a following that dotted the globe. It wasn't so much that she hadn't wanted to tell them or worried of what they'd say. Really, there was no reason except for an opportunity to kind of… unplug. She had to plug back in real quick, the better not to turn this into a scene. She'd waved back to the girls with a smile. "Following's kind of all over the place."

The girls had remained at their table, and Maya had done her own drawing for Caleb and Talia, as she answered their questions about the band, and her music… When they'd found out who she was working with these days, they'd been understandably surprised, though to their credit they hadn't gone and changed their behavior around her in any way.

With the favor returned, pencils and books had been collected and the four of them had finally left the dining room. They'd gone out into the city after this, catching the odd celebration or activity for the holiday. This had seen them through the afternoon and part of the evening. They might have stayed out longer if not for the fact that Caleb and Talia needed to get back and get some rest in anticipation of their departure the next morning. They weren't quite ready to turn in, so they'd invited their friends to their room.

Thus, there they'd ended up, the balcony doors opened on to the city so they might catch any remaining sounds of the day. At some point, Talia had revealed how she was on the verge of signing a contract of her own, with a ballet company, which would take her travelling around the world. It was the perfect sort of arrangement for the young couple, as she would get to dance professionally, as she'd always wanted, and Caleb would get to discover new cities, explore his art in that way… They didn't see themselves settling down in any one place for a while.

The end of the day, with the stories of the singer and the ballerina had ended in the most random of ways, with Talia being talked into giving a bit of a demonstration, for which Maya happily provided a soundtrack. If this was to be the last time they all hung out together, they could not have asked for a better epilogue. It was at once very silly and kind of beautiful, and that had been their time together in Paris in a nutshell.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	189. Their Escape to Travels

July 7th 2020

_Chapter 189  
Their Escape to Travels_

One last breakfast together, the quartet had gathered on day eleven, early off to what had fast become their favorite spot whenever they didn't eat at the hotel. After returning there, they'd all gone and had one last go at the pool before it came time for Caleb and Talia to pack up their belongings and clear out of their room before checking out. Maya and Lucas might have gone off to enjoy one thing or another on their own ongoing honeymoon, but they chose instead to pitch in and help the others finish up, the better to increase what little time they had left.

Taking it one step further, Lucas had rented a car for the day, the better for them to drive their friends to the airport and see them off, after which he and Maya could go and expand the scope of their sightseeing, as they saw the days of their trip flying away.

To see them parting at the gate, you would have thought they had known one another their whole lives and were now saying goodbye forever. There were hugs, and many tears, and promises to write, and call, and someday visit one another. They had the means to contact one another now, so the ball was in the air, waiting for any of them to strike.

When it was just the two of them again, both Maya and Lucas could say that to drive along, windows down, music up, was the single best way they could have been given in order to just breathe, and resettle into where they were and why they were there, now that they had parted with Caleb and Talia. Lucas could see Maya, leaning to the open window at his side, long hair caught in the wind as though it had a life of its own, and she looked so far away that he thought she might have been taking harder than expected. But when he'd managed to get her attention and he'd asked what she was thinking about, she'd turned a smile back to him.

"It's so beautiful out there, isn't it?" she'd asked, her voice halfway hooked to a dream. He'd smiled, reassured now.

"Yeah, it really is," he'd told her, maybe noticing it for the first time. It wasn't as though they hadn't had their fill of picturesque sights in the time they'd spent out here, but then it could only strike them some more whenever they discovered new things along the way.

He had to hand it to her that, after a while, she'd started painting in her sketchbook, even as they drove on. They would stop from time to time, and he would go to grab them something to eat or drink, and he would come back to find her door open, her feet on the ground though she remained at work. She had not filled a dozen sketchbooks out here, but this was her third and it would be full by the end of the day, leading her to start a fourth and final one, not counting the one which had become her travel log. Other times they'd left the car together, just to take in their surroundings with as much staying power in their memories that a camera may have had.

It wasn't until they were driving back into the city that Lucas discovered a plan had been percolating in his wife's head all day long. She was back at her sketchbook, this time with a pencil, inside the back cover. And when they got to the hotel, she went up to the concierge, who was right up there with the people they'd interacted with the most out here. She'd asked him something and almost at once he'd scribbled something down for her on a pamphlet and handed it to her, sending her dashing back.

She had been talking for some time about getting a new tattoo, to join the owl and nightingale they had both gotten, and the clock they and their former roommates had gotten, one that would be only hers. And now she had decided it would be doubly exciting to have it be done out here, in Paris. Now she knew where to go, and she had her design at the ready.

"Tell me what you think, Big Spoon, because it will be the first thing you see every morning," she'd explained, presenting him with her sketchbook even as she pointed over her shoulder.

The next morning, her prediction had been correct, as he had awakened and opened his eyes to look upon the still covered stretch of skin. It went from the back of her left shoulder and trailed on that line, up to the back of her neck, disappearing just into her hairline. The long, delicately flowered branch was garnished at the top, the part coming down her neck with little more than the potential of buds, barely detailed. But the further up the branch the eye travelled, the flowers developed, and they grew, up to the most detailed and largest of those, at the other end, even as the branch was left with an open end. As Maya told it, the whole thing was to represent growth, evolution. _Her_ growth, _her _evolution, in her life up to now… and the open branch to represent all that was yet to come.

"How does it look?" she asked, when she woke as well and knew he was awake from the way his thumb lightly stroked at her hand in his.

"Healing nicely," he let her know. "Eager to be uncovered."

After he'd helped her do so, carefully washing and drying the whole piece, he'd used their very first picture of the day to chronicle the moment as much as to show her how it looked. By the smile on her face, he knew it was just as she'd wanted it.

"You're going to end up with a full sleeve if you keep this up," Lucas had told her. She'd turned her head up to look at him, asking with a look if that was something he'd be into. "It's all coming together great so far," he smiled.

"I love how you can tell a different person inked this one," she looked back to the phone, holding it next to her arm.

They had this day and the next, and then the one after that… home. So, the plan was for them to get at anything they might still have wanted to do or to see today. Some of it was new, things they hadn't had the chance to get to yet, or things they'd only found out about in later days. And some of it was not new, and they just wanted to see it all again while they had the chance.

"So, about tomorrow," Maya came up peer over the back of the couch, where Lucas had dropped after they'd returned. He looked about to point out that it was their last full day, and just the way he stopped himself saying it told her he'd understood where this was going. "Yeah," she nodded. She could easily foresee herself hitting a bit of a downer.

"Okay, but," he sat up as she came and sat with him, "We're not going leaving here to head somewhere bad. We're going to our home, our house, with the dogs, and your brother. We're going to Austin, where our families are, and our friends, where we have so many good things coming up."

"I know," Maya promised him. "I'm not saying I _will_ be in a bad mood tomorrow, just that…"

"The forecast is uncertain?" he guessed.

"Yeah," she nodded. "So, I've been trying to think of what we'll do." They hadn't set so many things in stone in the whole of their two weeks, except for the play, and that was just how they'd wanted it. With the trip near to its end, they were happy to say it had all worked in their favor. Now though, they had just this one full day left ahead of them, and it felt like they needed to do it justice, but at the same time it felt like pressure they shouldn't put on themselves either.

"Come on with anything?" Lucas asked, leaning back into the couch cushions and lightly pulling for her to follow until her head would be at his shoulder and his arms would be around her.

"Nope," she sighed. "I'm this close to just saying let's stay here, like we did on the first day after we got here. I don't want to end up back home feeling exhausted, and right now my feet are just not having it…"

"Huh…" Lucas spoke after a beat of silence. "Well, here's an idea…"

Their penultimate day in Paris had been spent in great part at the hotel spa, after having gone for a swim at the pool. When they'd returned to their room, a couple of walking cotton balls, the next course of action was an easy reach. They had dressed again as they had done on their first night out, for one more dinner out, another Date.

"Have I mentioned how much I'm kind of liking this a lot?" Lucas asked, trailing his hand along the flowered branch peeking through the straps of Maya's dress.

"You didn't, but I guessed you might," she smiled, turning back to look at him. "Why do you think I wore my hair up like this?"

Leaving the hotel on foot as they did, their last night in Paris, it got to feel as though these streets they'd been walking for near on two weeks now had gone and put their shine on. Neither Maya nor Lucas could decide if this made them sadder to leave than they were happy to be here and to have been here.

"Sometimes it just bowls me over that we've been married for two weeks already," Maya declared as they sat in the restaurant, waiting for their plates.

"Oh, me too," Lucas smiled. "My mother's been giving me the whole 'time flies when you're having fun' line since I was a kid, but I don't think I've ever felt it as much as I did here. It flew so, _so_ fast."

"We had more than 'fun,' that would explain it," Maya agreed. Lucas reached his hand across the table, his fingers winding with hers and making her smile.

After a wonderful last dinner, the newlyweds took an eased stroll back to the hotel, a slow walk to allow them equal parts digestion and a peaceful time together while it was still just him and her.

"It's the same moon…" Maya hummed, looking to the night sky. "The same stars, same as the ones back home. But they feel different, don't they?"

"They do," he smiled, looking to her, kissing the side of her head.

"We need to get back to the hotel," she told him now, and there was no mistaking the tone in her voice. It spoke of inspiration in need of manifestation.

They returned, they changed, and soon they were settled on their balcony, one last bit of Parisian stargazing. Maya had taken the travel log, a pencil, and she'd sat in her chair, legs folded beneath herself. From where he sat, Lucas saw she wasn't drawing, not exactly. Words… words, and short partitions holding notes. Lyrics… It was a song that brought her here now. From the looks of it, this was one of those that came so fast as though they had been fully conceived in the space of a breath. Soon, he could hear her humming under her breath, and the air felt… like them, like walking, like looking to the stars as they sat in a night sky over Paris.

He took a picture of her as she sat there, small in her chair, book in her lap, in deep concentration.

"Can I hear it?" he asked, when she finally sat back, feet untangling themselves until one was lowered to the ground again. She was done.

She looked around for a moment, to the balconies attached to nearby rooms. A few of them were occupied, but she took a breath, smiling back at him before granting his request. If she was ever going to share this song on a stage, with the band, if she was ever going to pass it on to some recording artist or another, she might translate it, though he couldn't see it ever having the charm it had here, couldn't see it having that same meaning not without her voice as she sung the French words.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	190. Their Escape to Home

_**A/N:** The new chapter of **"We Three Hearts"** is now available!_

* * *

July 8th 2020

_Chapter 190  
Their Escape to Home_

Maya woke with the sun. The curtains had been left open so that she might, so that the light would go and bring them around, that they might enjoy the most of this last morning. Sometimes she did not do well with hotel beds, but this one had suited her very well, suited them both. They'd slept well, always. And for all that, in that moment she was certain they would sleep infinitely better tonight, back in their own bed. It still didn't feel real that, by the end of the day, there would be an ocean between them and this place.

Slipping free of her husband's arms, she'd scooped up Lucas' university hoodie from the back of the couch and pulled it on. She practically swam in it, especially in the arms, and that was fine by her. It had his scent, it warmed her.

Opening the balcony door with caution, she'd stepped out, tugging at the hem of the hoodie to ensure it covered her. The first of this last day's pictures became a panoramic view of the city in the morning, one last look taken like the last morsel meant to hold her until the next time she'd be so lucky as to see this part of the world.

"Hey…" Lucas spoke quietly as he came to stand with her, wrapping his arms around her midsection as she leaned to him.

"We should start packing now," she told him. "It's too early for breakfast anyway, it'll be done."

"Sure, okay," he agreed, looking to the city below and all around, as she did. "Tonight, you and me, in the Hex… _Will you show me how to play your song for the stars?_" he asked, the twang of his French feeling less comical now and just as it should be.

_"Only if you sing it with me. We record it, just for us. The Friars, year one."_

"New tradition?" he asked, thinking of more songs, year to year, her and him… little voices…

"New tradition," she turned in his arms, and she kissed him, smile meeting smile. They would be in love wherever they were in the world, but this was their last chance to be in this moment where they felt as though they floated all the time, and it was like she said, if they got through with packing now, every last minute afterward, until they left for the airport, would be theirs to enjoy.

The packing had made them realize how much the two of them had settled into this room since they'd arrived two weeks before. Sure, the housekeeping service had been through here several times, and they weren't by any means messy, but one way or another they had become settled in their ways as this had been their home away from home. Now it felt like they were moving.

"Does this feel too dressed up for flying home?" Maya asked, holding up a sundress. "Never actually wore it the whole time, and I was sure I'd dreamt having packed it, but it just fell behind the suitcase and I never saw it until now."

"We _are_ flying first class," Lucas reminded her.

"Good point," Maya smiled. "Travel outfit, check. That'll make the whole 'look, new tattoo' thing easy enough," she added with a nod before turning to him. "And what are _you_ wearing?" she asked, waving the dress about.

"Gotta get up to your level, yeah?"

"I mean…" Maya shrugged, essentially telling him that she wouldn't insist, but…

"Right," Lucas laughed, looking through his options before pulling out a shirt and pants. "Did I wear these?" he frowned to himself. Maya turned back.

"Museum, round one," she informed him. "Good choice," she smiled.

"Check," Lucas set these aside, and they carried on. When they'd turned to look at each other, both of them having reached the point where it seemed that they were done, they nodded at once: they needed to double check. "I'll take the bathroom," he told her.

"I should check the couch," she nodded again, as they crossed one another and went after their chosen targets.

Double checks and triple checks had assured them there was nothing left. So they showered in turn and got ready for the day, finally heading down for a well-earned breakfast.

"You know how Trix, and Lou, and Archer just keep following us whenever we've been gone most of the day?" Lucas asked as they ate, and Maya made a whimpering sort of laugh as she chewed, covering her mouth with her hand for a moment until she could speak.

"Joke's on them, we'll be so happy to see them, we'll just carry them around with us wherever we go for the next month."

"The plan is to make them want us to just leave again?" Lucas laughed.

"Possibly…"

"I am learning so much about you," he teased, and she hid her smirk in her coffee.

Their flight home wasn't until mid-afternoon. Having talked it over as they had breakfast, they finally made their way up to their room in order to get all their bags out of there and down into the lobby so they could check out. They'd head to their airport, where they would deal with whatever they weren't keeping as carry-ons and then just hang about near the airport until it was time to head in for boarding.

"Okay, having the tiniest flare up of emotions right now," Maya breathed, slipping the poster tube's strap over her shoulder along with her backpack.

"Think of the other side," Lucas told her. "Your brothers and sisters, your parents…"

"Can't they come here instead?" Maya turned an almost pitiful look to him.

"I think you know," he told her. He might have entertained the possibility, as a joke, but it would just have been counterproductive in the end.

"Alright, alright," she finally sighed, leading the way as they exited their room, rolling their suitcases off to the elevator.

After they'd officially checked out – and after taking one last look at and a picture in front of the sculpture in the lobby, they got into a taxi which took them to the airport. The whole way, they were both spending a fair amount of time looking out the windows, getting a last look of their surroundings. No, not a last look, or at least not a last ever look. They would be back, it was already decided, and they were promise keepers, both of them.

"Only a few more to go," Maya noted, as she'd taken out her log and printer and got their latest shots printed and stuck to the pages of day fourteen, the last day. They'd used their last spare yesterday, and they'd taken three already since they'd woken up, which brought their current total to ninety-six, four to goal. "What is 100 going to be?"

"Both of us, hugging our dogs?" Lucas guessed, which made her laugh. "Both of us crying about hugging our dogs," he amended after a moment, and he'd as good as finished her off. "So, I think that, seeing as we're going to be boarding in a little while I can tell you why you haven't been approached by anyone all week."

"What do you mean?" Maya asked, not following.

"The fans of the band," he specified, and she still didn't understand. "The others, they said that once you were 'off the grid' they would put out a message, asking that if anyone saw you in the next couple of weeks – without specifying where you would be – they should let you be, because you were going to be on your honeymoon. They weren't sure it would work, but looks like it did." Maya wasn't surprised that they would do something like this, more like touched, although she didn't see the lack of contact as being indicative of this request. "Oh, it was," Lucas promised.

"How do you know?" Maya raised a brow.

"Just because _you_ didn't see them, doesn't mean I didn't," he proudly revealed, chin up. "When you'd look the other way, I'd give them a sort of…" He gave silent thanks. "Why do you think those girls never came over to our table that one morning? The only reason you saw them is because Talia spotted them and said something." Maya sat back, taking all this in with an awed smile. She'd have to do something about it once they got home.

Finally, the call went out that their flight was going to board, and Maya and Lucas were once again led to their Diana Zvolensky upgraded first class seats. They really tried not to think about the time zones, and what time it would be or what time it would feel like. They could have landed in the middle of the night and they would have been wide awake.

"As soon as we take off, all we'll want to do is land again, won't we?" Maya wondered as they settled in.

"I think we might have it in us to enjoy all of this for a while first," Lucas suggested. Maya couldn't deny that. "Want to watch a movie?"

"Couldn't focus on it," Maya shrugged. After thinking it over, she smiled. "You know, I'm not sure we ever said what weird stuff we found, when we split off at the reception." This got Lucas chuckling.

"You want to know now?" he asked, and she actively nodded. "I'm not even sure I remember anymore," he pointed out.

"I'm sure you do," she challenged. "But if you need to think it over, I can tell you about mine."

The plane took off from France as the newlyweds dove back into memories of the party following their wedding. As predicted, Lucas did remember, once Maya had gotten them started. After they'd run out of stories, the mood had changed regarding movies, and so they picked something, giving one last nod to their trip by slipping on the French dubbing. They were very familiar with the fact that this tended to be a solid hit or miss, but they did not mind. They could have found the most ridiculous translation and interpretation and it would have reminded them of their trip, which would have left them happy.

They landed in Texas after dinner, which they had on the plane. As eager as they were to see their people, and as eager as their people were to see them, they had asked not to be met at the airport, so they could have the rest of this day to themselves. Whether a part of them had gotten to the point where it wouldn't have minded breaking that choice, well…

"It's weird, isn't it?" Lucas told Maya as they got into the taxi they'd called, for the ride home. "I don't know any of these people, but I know they're from here and…" he gestured around them, and she actually knew what he meant. They all just felt familiar by association.

After two weeks out of the country, finding themselves driving through their hometown felt a particular kind of surreal that could only come up after a trip. And the closer they got to their home… The prediction earlier had been correct. The notion that they had started this day in Paris felt so, so strange…

_Welcome home! Once I saw that your flight had landed I left to go crash at Ramona's for the night. Enjoy your first night back, text me in the morning? – Rosa_

The note waited for them, sticking out of the mailbox. Maya had gone back and fetched it while Lucas and the driver got their bags out of the car. Once the man was gone, the couple looked up to their house.

"I don't think I've been this emotional about being here since…"

"The night you proposed to me?"

"Exactly."

With a smile, Lucas looked to his wife, and the notion that he would pick her up barely had time to exist before it was made to happen.

"We already did this after the wedding," Maya laughed.

"Yeah, but I am doing it again anyway," he replied.

"Fine, just don't trip over the dogs," she told him. They could already hear barking and scratching from the other side of the door; they knew.

The reunion went about as they had predicted it would, with hugs and tears all around. It wasn't just their three, of course, as Rosa's Peanut was also here. But then the dog had been one of theirs long ago, and he had not forgotten.

So focused as they were on the dogs, it didn't take long for them to feel some of the shock of being home had worn off. They were here, they had their pups, they had each other… Rosa had taken good care of the place while she'd been their house sitter, as far as they could see, and they trusted that this would extend to the rest of the house. Now that the house sitting gig was over, of course, she wasn't off their hands yet. Now she was to be their roommate, for a little while, unless this had changed in the time they had been away. They weren't checking messages, e-mails, none of it, not tonight. Tonight, they were still on 'honeymoon mode.' They mostly were.

There was one piece of mail on the kitchen table, and maybe for it being addressed from Atlanta, Rosa might have figured it was something important, not to be relegated to the 'open at your own leisure' mail pile. It had been written a few days back. The short message, in Caleb's familiar handwriting, let them know that they had landed back safely, and they that he and Talia had spent their flight home taking a deep dive into TXNY's back catalog, which had been a blast.

With the dogs trailing on their heels, Maya and Lucas went upstairs, almost like they needed to walk into their room to properly feel like they were back. Maya indulged herself with a happy fall back to the bed, which could not possibly have felt more… new and familiar all at once.

"Pillow…" she hummed, yanking her pillow from the head of the bed and hugging it like it might have been one more pup. Lucas sat at her side and she rolled about until she could look at him. "Hey, there."

"Happy to be home?" he laughed, lying back on to his side.

"There are absolutely no words. Mostly, I don't know what time it is anymore, except I want to sleep so bad…"

"I think it's the bed…"

"It would make sense," Maya smiled, kicking off her sandals. "I won't wake up and find out it's all been a dream, will I?"

"Did any part of the last two weeks feel unreal?" Lucas challenged.

"A lot of it and none of it," she beamed. He kissed her lightly.

"Then I think we're in the clear, Mrs. Friar."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	191. Their Circle Around Returns

July 9th 2020

_Chapter 191  
Their Circle Around Returns_

Waking up for the first time back in their own home and their own bed, Lucas felt more relaxed than he'd done since before the wedding, which was saying something. The whole time they had been in Paris, oh… they might as well have had clouds under their feet the entire time for how relaxed they were, but this? This was a whole honeymoon and that distinct feeling of being at home, waking up next to his wife, of breathing her in, and feeling the softness of her hair brushing against his cheek… His arm was around her and he could feel the breath in her, rising, falling, at a steady pace, and even as she went on sleeping he could swear he felt the thumping of her heart speed up a tick as he trailed his fingers along her arm. Maya would say that, if it were physically possible, she could spend her whole day this way. He was right there with her.

Most mornings, they'd barely be awake that they would hear something to let them know that Sam was downstairs, getting a start on breakfast. Sam wasn't here, not this morning. He was coming back from Tucson in a couple of days. Today, it was him and Maya, their first morning back, so as much as he would have preferred to stay by her side, he carefully extricated himself from the bed and headed down the stairs.

"Alright, can't lose four whole dogs," he muttered to himself, looking around. He wouldn't notice half the time, how he'd pass through the house and be looking for the dogs, ticking off their usual hangouts one by one. Maya did it, too, and that was usually what made him catch himself in doing it the next time. This time around, he caught himself because… they were home again, and it felt good.

The four dogs were in the basement, lounging in the sunbeams streaming from the windows. They perked up when they heard him coming down the steps.

In the time they had been gone, Rosa had clearly been busy preparing the space that was to become their guest room. What had once been the band's practice space, once it had been relieved of the instruments and other materials, had become something of an unintentional dumping area for any number of items in need of storage or possible disposal. While they'd been gone, Rosa had cleared it all away, organizing it properly where she could, for the time being. There were several sticky notes on the walls. Measurements, color ideas and other notes… It took him right back to the days when the two of them worked at Coleman's Books back in Houston.

_Lucas: If you want to come on back in about an hour, Maya should be up and breakfast will be ready._

After sending their temporary roommate a text, he sent another to his father, letting him know that he and Maya would drop by the house, hopefully this afternoon. That kind of vagueness would not do for his mother, but he knew at least with this bit of information his father would be able to manage.

He was putting the finishing touches to the waffle batter when he heard the telltale creak of the stairs which would bring Maya down to join him. After two years of living here, the three of them together, he could usually tell which of the Hart siblings was making his or her way down by the creak. _Hart… Hunter… Friar…_ He smiled, thinking about the choice Maya had made. None of it was official yet, though on the plane she had told him she wanted to get the ball rolling no later than a week after their return, no more than a day or two as far as she was concerned would be more than enough. First things first, she was to become a Hunter.

"I smell food… and coffee…" she hummed, barely awake. Lucas carefully floated a cup in her reach, waiting for her to properly take hold. "Thank you," she stretched up to kiss him before taking her cup to the kitchen. The dogs, having emerged from the basement, now crowded by her chair. "Hey, everyone!" Maya bent down to pet each one in turn, a couple of times.

Never tardy, Rosa arrived just a few minutes later. She had a key, of course, though she still rang the bell before using it. Maya was quickly on her feet, the dogs trailing her, and in a flash she had her bandmate in her arms.

"Hey, you," she breathed, receiving as much as she gave. "You were missed."

"So were you," Rosa assured her as they pulled back, and in the next moment she was in a hold again, this time with her former co-worker. "How was your flight?"

"I think it might have given me standards which will make all future flights a bit of a problem if they're not like that," Maya declared, which made Rosa smile.

"Waffles in the iron?" she guessed, catching the smell.

"Yeah," Lucas hurried back, even though there was no reason to think they'd have had time to burn.

"I can't wait for us to start on the basement," Maya told Rosa as they headed to the kitchen.

"Me, too," she nodded. "Hey, I'll take care of those," she moved to Lucas, nudging him along. "Really, I insist."

"Rosa, what's going on?" he asked, sensing something that felt a lot like their friend was setting the pieces before they could fall down.

"Look, I don't know what you guys had planned for today, and not one of us wanted to have to make this your return home," she sighed, fussing with the waffle iron before turning to look at the two of them with a serious face. "GiGi Babineaux passed away four days ago… five days ago," she amended after a moment.

Even the dogs stayed silent, as the news settled over the room. It was a feeling neither of them knew how to describe. She was… She had been a hundred and six years old. In anyone's book, that was a good, long life, and she would say the same thing. It was a life filled with countless moments of joy, even as it had also been dotted with any number of painful moments, personal ones or otherwise. She had been telling them… ever since she'd turned a hundred years old… that she wasn't afraid to die, that they should not be sad to see her go, and to some degree they could look at all of that and follow that instruction.

But on the other…

Lucas had known the woman for so long that a part of his brain felt like it had rewritten that handful of years where he hadn't known her, so suddenly she had been there all along. And Maya, well, she had not known her nearly as long as he'd done, so she couldn't access that kind of rewriting, but she _had_ known her since she was thirteen years old, and from day one she had been treated like family. Now, one way or the other, to hear that she was gone… It was not a soft blow.

"What did… How…" Lucas blinked.

"She went in her sleep, overnight," Rosa told him. "The funeral is this weekend. Nadine wanted me to tell you, whenever you're able to, to just head on to the house to see her and Zay."

'Whenever' was quickly realized. Lucas and Maya went ahead and got dressed while Rosa finished making the waffles. The three of them had a fairly quiet meal, the stories of the honeymoon and the two weeks of house sitting being shelves until later. Lucas texted his father again and told him they were going to have to reschedule their visit. He mentioned the reason why and discovered in the reply that his father was already aware of GiGi's passing. It was strange to think how they had all been out here, dealing with the news, while he and Maya were off in France on their honeymoon, entirely unaware.

The trio hit the road in record time, and both Maya and Lucas suspected Rosa had cleared out last night not just to give them some space to themselves upon their return but also in order to give them a few more hours before anyone had to come and yank them back into the real world.

They let themselves in at Zay and Nadine's house, much as Rosa had let herself into the Friar house on the lane. Right away they found Nadine sitting on the couch with her laptop. When she saw them come in, she set it aside at once and flew to embrace the returned pair. There were no words, but in the hold the conversation was endless. One side expressed regrets for the loss, while the other expressed great happiness for seeing them again, with another share of regrets, this one for the rough state of their return.

"Zay?" Lucas asked Nadine, and she nodded up the stairs. He shared a quick look with Maya before moving in search of his best friend.

"How are you doing?" Maya asked Nadine now, as the two of them and Rosa sat down.

"Mostly alright," Nadine told her. "It's been sort of non-stop since we got the call from Susanne. GiGi apparently had this whole list of things she wanted them to do for her funeral…"

"She told me once how she wanted it to be a party," Maya smiled, reminiscing.

"Yeah," Nadine laughed lightly. "Zay's been working all day, every day, to make it happen. He wanted to be in charge, so they let him. I've been helping, and the others, too," she indicated Rosa.

"Whatever you need, clock us in, okay?" Maya told her at once.

"Already done," Nadine assured her. That had not even been a question. "I am going to want to hear about your trip at some point."

"Count on it."

Upstairs, Lucas found his friend in one of the spare rooms, which for the time being had become some kind of office/storage space. Zay was browsing through the contents of a banker's box, spread over his desk.

"Hey…" Lucas announced himself, and his friend straightened up and turned at once. He had that look to him of a student gearing up for finals and getting very little sleep in the exchange. But then he saw that it was him, and he looked relieved. They met halfway in a hug. Lucas held on good, tapping at his friend's back. "I'm so sorry."

"I almost called you out there, man…" Zay admitted, sounding almost ashamed.

"You could have," Lucas told him, no question to it. It would have been easy to say he preferred not to know until they were back, but… no, these were his friends, and GiGi…

"I think she knew she was going," Zay went on. "I talked to her, the night before. She called… like she wanted to talk with me, one more time." As much as GiGi had wanted them all not to feel sad when she went, there was no way to change the fact that she occupied a space, in the hearts of all those whose lives she'd touched, and now her absence had left a hole. She might not have left a single void larger than the one she'd left in her great grandson.

"What are you looking for?" Lucas asked, nodding to the desk. Zay looked very much like someone who wanted nothing more than to have something to keep him busy, and Lucas wanted to help give him that. Right now, getting this party together was what mattered to Zay.

"I don't even know, just memories, I guess. Photos, trinkets…"

"Need a hand?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	192. Their Circle Around Grief

July 10th 2020

_Chapter 192  
Their Circle Around Grief_

Driving back up the lane, late that evening, neither of them knew how to express the way they felt. They had both awakened feeling light as air, anxious to see their people again, and now… now there was this weight, in the pit of their stomachs.

They had spent the day up at Zay and Nadine's house, the two of them, and Rosa, and in no time a few more, too. There had been plenty of time for them to imagine what it would be like to be reunited with their friends after two weeks away. They imagined great big hugs, and so many smiles, so much laughter, and stories and souvenirs and photos… There _were_ hugs, big, squeezing hugs, but they were just kind of quiet, and the stories they told had more to do with getting the call about GiGi, and what they had been working on over the past few days, in preparation for the funeral/party. After that, they'd simply been helping Zay and Nadine with whatever they needed to get done. The rest of the band briefed Maya on the playlist they had been assembling, of GiGi's favorite songs, which they were to perform. She was right on that.

There had been lunch, and dinner, and the way they were going they might as well have slept there, but in the end the friends were thanked for their help and sent off home. Maya, Lucas, and Rosa got back in the car and drove off.

"She fell asleep," Maya reported, whispering, as she looked into the backseat. Rosa sat behind Lucas, her head resting on her arm, on the open window, her short raven ponytail flipping in the wind.

"I'll bring her in," Lucas whispered back with a nod.

Pulling up to park next to Maya's minivan, the headlights sweeping across the windows, they climbed out of the car to find the door was now open. There, outlined by the low light of a lamp and the television, stood a most welcome sight.

"Sammy?" Maya blinked, taking off at a jog a moment later.

She hugged him with enough momentum to lift him up his feet for a moment or two, giving no mind to how he had gone and grown to stand a good eight or nine inches taller than her. She had seen him, the day before they'd left, and he still felt taller. To see him now, with all their emotions in turmoil, it was the first time it all hit, and she cried. Sam kept on hugging her back, and it was really the fact that he knew, more than most people she'd seen today, what it was like to lose someone. GiGi may not have been her blood, but she was family, no doubt about it.

"What are you doing here, you're supposed to be in Tucson…" Maya looked up to her brother's face, that sweet, smiling face… Oh how she'd missed that face.

"I heard about GiGi, and I wanted to be here when you got back. I've been staying at your mom and dad's the last three days," he explained. That got him another hug.

"I will deny it if you say this in front of any of the other boys and girls, but you're my favorite, little brother," she whispered.

"I won't tell them if you don't tell them the same," Sam vowed.

Lucas had appeared a moment later, and the brothers had a heartfelt embrace of their own. His surprise at seeing Sam there had lasted all of a millisecond, and then it had felt more like 'well, of course he would here.'

The newlyweds followed the newly returned Sam and their temporary roommate/decorator into the house. By the looks of it, Sam had been awaiting their return with takeout, a movie, and his latest comic creation. One look at the containers made Lucas turn back to his brother.

"Cecilia get home okay?" he casually asked.

"I drove her back two hours ago," Sam confirmed, using the need to look at his watch to give him a reason to break eye contact.

"Must have been happy to see each other after two weeks apart," Lucas went on, trying not to smirk. It wasn't as though he would have had her come over for anything more than a very tame hangout while he was staying over with Katy and Shawn and the kids.

"Yes, very," Sam nodded, and Lucas swore he'd been about to call him Sir.

Messing with his younger brother for a minute, it had felt like any old day, and that had been good. Of course then they'd all started moving about toward going to bed for the night, late as it was, and then the day weighed on some more. It came back to him as he found Maya had stalled on her way up the stairs, staring at a framed photo on the wall. It showed their little group of six, her first summer in Austin, her first time at the Babineaux party. And there, sitting like a queen on her throne while they surrounded her, was GiGi with that smile of hers… It was impossible not to feel happy or loved when she smiled at you like that.

"I wish we would been able to see her again, to say goodbye or…" she looked back to him, still sniffling.

"No one really got to do that, not really," Lucas pointed out, looping his arms around her waist. From where he stood, one step down, they were almost the same height.

"I know," she let out a breath. "Our last conversation was as good as we could ask," she went on, likely her point from the start. "We did just like she told us to do, and she was so right. We never got to tell her about it though…"

"You want to paint right now, don't you?" he guessed, pressing a kiss to her shoulder.

"So much," she confessed. "First thing tomorrow," she added after a beat, as though she had gone and made a silent deal with herself, to go and get some rest now, rather than to completely wipe herself out.

"Your breakfast will be served in the attic, Mrs. Friar," Lucas promised, leading her to carry on climbing up the stairs toward their room.

For all he'd said about her getting to sleep, Lucas ended up staying awake for some time after Maya had successfully dozed off. He'd been thinking about what she'd said, about the last time they'd spoken with GiGi, the night of the wedding.

Maya was sad about not having had the chance to say goodbye, but then it was as she'd said. They _had_ gotten so much out of the things she'd told them, to really enjoy their trip, not to always be taking so many pictures that they would miss it all…

For years already, he and Zay and the others had gotten used to the way GiGi would tend to see them off in such a way as to suggest that she was saying her bit in case it was the last time they saw her. At first it had been a bit weird, sure, but after a while it had almost become a bit funny. They wouldn't laugh at it, or at her, but it became something familiar to them. They could almost believe she would live forever, that it would never come to pass. And then as she'd surpassed a hundred years, year after year, well… maybe she _would _keep going.

He had lost people before, lost both his grandmothers. But he'd been a kid then, and his understanding and his experience of death had been different. It wasn't any easier, it was more just that… it made him contemplate things in a whole other way. It confronted him with the passage of time, made him think about other people in his life coming along with age. That wasn't the only way people could be taken from them, he knew, and they had very nearly seen that happen after Sophie had nearly been lost to them, but it still became much more of a factor. His parents, uncles and aunts… his grandparents… It was coming on three in the morning and he really wanted to hug them…

Maya woke with the sun. She only had a vague recollection of it now, but she knew she'd dreamed of GiGi. And as much as she had said that she was going to paint as soon as she got up, when she left the sleeping Lucas and stepped into the hall, it wasn't up into the attic she went but down, into the kitchen. Rosa was sleeping, on the couch, and Sam wasn't up yet, or at least he hadn't come down the stairs yet. Without a word, she started to grab what she needed from the pantry, the fridge, the cupboards… She didn't think she'd made these on her own enough times to know the recipe by heart, but right then it felt as though her hands knew what to do, and so she let them do it. She was sliding the first tray of unbaked cookies into the oven when Rosa came into the kitchen, dragging her feet for being not quite awake yet.

"Cookies?" she asked, practically prying one eye open with all her might.

"Still just dough," Maya informed her. Rosa gave a light grunt as though to say 'I'll take it anyway.' "How about coffee instead?"

"Mkay…" Rosa turned toward the table, then paused and turned back to go and hug her friend. Maya smiled, hugging her back.

"Glad to have you back, too, Shorty. Are you awake enough to keep an eye on these?" she asked, indicating the oven. Rosa nodded. "Okay, Sam will be up soon anyway," she told herself as she got the second tray in.

"I got it, I got it," Rosa promised, and so Maya made her way back up the stairs. Peeking into their room, she could see Lucas was still asleep, and so she continued into the attic, there to find that her brother was not in his room as she'd assumed, but here, asleep in the beanbag. Their father's gifted telescope in its spot next to him, she wondered if he had come up here last night, to look at the stars, before falling asleep on the spot.

She didn't wake him, telling herself she knew exactly what would have brought him up here the night before. It was part of what had brought _her_ here, too. Where he'd expressed those feelings by using the telescope, she was going to be doing it with brushes, and colors, and canvas. She had plenty of photos on her phone for reference, whether she needed them or not in order to conjure up the smiling face of Geraldine Babineaux, their GiGi.

In one of the drawers on the desk, she kept a spare pair of headphones, for needs of a soundtrack to her art. She plugged it into her phone, pulling up the playlist Nadine had compiled for her, the songs they were to perform at the party. They put her just in the mood to call up the memory of Zay's great grandmother, as though the woman was sitting right next to her, looking on as she began to paint what would become her face and giving pointers about the size of her eyes, or the presence of a mole… She may have been gone from the world, but she had left her mark on the people who loved her, and she would stay with them. Maya counted herself so completely lucky to be one of those people, now more than ever.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	193. Their Circle Around Life

July 11th 2020

_Chapter 193  
Their Circle Around Life_

"Are you sure about this?" Lucas asked. Maya turned from the mirror, where she had been applying her makeup, to find her husband had finished getting ready. She smiled when she saw him. "I mean, it's still a… a funeral," he went on, looking down at himself, and even at her, in her dress. Neither of them wore a stitch of black.

"When _you_ die…" she started, which caused a teeny tiny brain spiral until she added, "… decades and decades from now, you get to decide how the world gathers to remember you. GiGi wanted this, she had it in her will and everything. We are going to go out there today and we are going to do everything we do for her, aren't we?"

"Yeah… yeah, we are," Lucas finally nodded. It wasn't like he didn't know, or didn't want to, but there had still been that instinct in him that, at a funeral, you wore black, and that was that. They were still formal, no t-shirts and jeans or anything like that, but his jacket and pants were a light brown with a beige button-up. "She told me she liked these once," he recalled. "Said it reminded her of a suit her husband wore when he would take her dancing."

"Well then there's really no other choice for this, is there?" Maya smiled, turning back to the mirror to quickly finish up before moving to join him. She had gone for a cream colored dress, accented in light violet and deep blue flowers along the bodice, trailing off into the skirt. It covered nearly all of the new tattoo, save for the edge of the largest flower and the outstretched end of the branch and then the bit of branch on the other end disappearing into her hairline, but then her hair was down and so it was hidden. "Chose this one because it kind of reminded me of the lilac trees outside Susanne's house… GiGi always wanted us to come over and get some of those when they came in bloom."

For a moment, they stood there, looking at one another. Yes, GiGi had wanted a party for today, and that was what they would give her, but just for a moment, they needed to acknowledge to one another that they would have rather had the old woman back, any day. Lucas moved up and embraced his wife, and they stayed this way for near on a minute, until Rosa called from downstairs, asking if they were ready to go.

"So many memories," Maya sighed, thinking of their days living with their temporary roommate, back in Houston. It made Lucas chuckle as they headed down to join her and Sam.

The last couple of days leading up to this had been sort of non-stop, and it might have felt like too much all at once, but really they sort of preferred it that way right now. They preferred to be occupied with something than to be left to sink into any thoughts they couldn't bear.

When they had finally gotten to see their families again, on their second morning back from Paris, it had been hard to navigate the emotion, much as it had been when Sam had surprised them. It was happiness, after having been apart for all this time, mixed with a wave of grief as they remembered that GiGi had gone. They'd wanted to be able to be near all of them as much as possible, and so the Friars – Tom and Melinda – invited the Hunter Harts over, the better to have the returning pair put at ease.

Lucas had pictured his mother rushing up to embrace him the moment she saw him, and to some extent it was that, although it had been the less often seen quiet Melinda which came up to him, with that motherly smile. It sort of went without saying that, whatever stories he and Maya had from their trip would be kept for later, after they had put GiGi to rest, and they were more than on board for that. Tom hugged his daughter-in-law, his one sweet girl returned, and the affection could not have been appreciated more than it was, so very much.

Less subdued, and all for the better, were Maya's young siblings, who only saw their returned sister and their new brother and immediately dashed to crowd around them as they all tried to tell the two of them about what they'd been up to since they'd last seen one another. It was chaos, and it was wonderful. Haley kept trailing after Lucas as they went around, until finally he picked up the three-year-old and kept her in his arm for the better part of the time they all spent at his parents' house that day.

Katy and Shawn had come along like they knew exactly what their daughter would be like in that moment, and they'd come prepared. She was not unlike her little sister that day; she just wanted to keep close to the two of them, short of being in their arms the whole time. She thanked them for taking Sam in when he'd come back early.

They'd all seen each other every day since then, at this one's house or that one's, going to a store here or there… They had done their part, as many others did. GiGi had been in all of their lives long enough that it simply mattered to them to do _something_. And now, finally, this was the day where it would all come together.

In what felt like a repeat, and a very close one at that, of their last visit, here were Farkle and Isadora and little Ada. After having been in Austin for the band's anniversary and sticking around until the wedding, they had gone home, only to be made to return not three weeks later, for GiGi, and then sticking around another week, for Asher and Ray's wedding. Zay and Nadine both had been so touched, knowing that it was for them most of all that they came. They might have said that they didn't have to, not for this, but to the travelling Minkus family there had been no doubt that they were needed here today, and so they came.

Asher and Ray, they all knew, had briefly considered pushing back their wedding, feeling it might have been too strange to have the two events so near to one another, but everyone had the same answer, from Zay on down. They needed to keep it on the day as planned. It would be in keeping with GiGi's wishes, as she wanted a celebration for life, not a reminder of death.

The service had gotten to feel like the one moment where they couldn't keep from acknowledging that departure, that loss, and still it had been lighter than it might have been. The memories brought along of dear Geraldine, who had happily adopted the moniker given to her by her great grandson, Zay, when he'd been very little and decided to use his freshly learned letters as a way to call on his great grandma. He was under the impression that this was her name, and he had just been taught his own initials… Little by little, the name had come to stick, and it had continued to do so for the last twenty-odd years of her life.

On the matter of names, it became that this was the day when Maya shared her intentions for her surname with both her parents and her in-laws. It hadn't been planned that way, but then the tale of GiGi's own name shift had reminded Maya of the arrangement on the plane. She would have already started the process if not for the last few days' preparations.

The Friars were happy to hear she was to become one of them, like a new welcoming to the family where she had been welcomed time and again. As for her parents, they had expected the taking of her husband's name, but it was the other parts that touched them. They found it a proper tribute to Kermit for her to hold the Hart name as a stage name. The last part, the short one, the one she'd admittedly been most nervous about… taking on Hunter as essentially her new maiden name, completing the adoption of years prior, even though most of the world would become unaware of it once she took on her married name… On the whole, she had expected Shawn to be happy for it, even if she couldn't keep from being nervous to explain it.

The nerves had gone away as soon as she'd seen the reaction flood across his face. It didn't matter that she'd just as soon become a Friar. She would still carry his name with her wherever she went, and that meant plenty. He'd embraced her, and to Maya it was like a memory from the past, from the day he had officially become her father.

It would have been too odd to gather in Susanne's yard for this party, as they would do again, in a month's time, for their annual party, so they had rented a room. The Babineaux party had been a yearly event of the 'rain or shine' type, for decades, since Isaiah Sr.'s father had been a tiny tot. They had not missed a single year, and they were not about to miss this one now, or else GiGi was bound to come and haunt them, as her grandchildren claimed.

TXNY took to the stage before long, chiming in with GiGi's request of an opener, the song she felt would most embrace what she had in mind for this day. She wanted all of them, family, friends, and acquaintances, to come into the room and know at once that they were here to remember her and to smile for it rather than cry. To look at everyone as they looked to the quintet on stage, she had accomplished precisely that.

"I would dance around for her when she'd play that song," Zay told Lucas as the two of them looked to their wives' playing and singing up there. "It would make her laugh."

"Well, you were kind of a weird dancer back then," Lucas smiled, thinking of little Zay, who would generally go about dancing by leaping up and down, or teetering side to side like a pendulum, or his classic move of sitting on the ground and spinning around… Zay smirked back at him, in complete agreement.

"When I got the call, one of the first things I thought about was… I wish she might have lived long enough to see Nadine and I as parents, you know? Her first great great grandchild…" They hadn't heard anything so far, on the adoption front, but they remained hopeful.

"She would have loved that kid so much…" Lucas nodded along, imagining it.

"She already did, in a way. Every time we'd see her since we told her about all of it, she would ask if we'd gotten a call. Then we'd tell her we hadn't yet, and she'd look almost… affronted, that her letter hadn't gotten us a baby in two seconds flat." They shared a laugh at this, imagining the tiny old woman glaring at the adoption people until they did something for her great grandson and his wife.

When the band took a break from the stage, Maya made her way back to Lucas, so they might go and grab something to eat. All the while, she would have to restraint herself, knowing that the emotions of the day, this affirmation of life, was just on the edge of making her throw caution to the wind, to tell her husband that they should go ahead and try for a baby of their own. The day had to pass, the emotions had to settle. She knew deep down that this was not the time, but oh, today… It felt so very important.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	194. Their Circle Around Time

July 12th 2020

_Chapter 194  
Their Circle Around Time_

With the celebration for GiGi now passed, many of them ended up in the way Maya and Lucas did, the morning after. Asher and Ray were to be married in a matter of days, and while they had freely given of their time in order to help the Babineaux family say goodbye to one of their own, they now had to turn things around, to switch gears. After spending days on the funeral, they now had to give the days to come on to last preparations for the wedding, up in Houston, but not one of them could reasonably be at the funeral one day and then leap into wedding mode the next. So, as they had been leaving the gathering the night before, Asher and Ray had told their friends they would all take a day off, to breathe and regroup, before getting on to that end run, if it was alright with all of them.

For Maya and Lucas, the day became about three things. The first was to finally empty out their luggage, all their bags, after having been back for nearly a week. They hadn't left them untouched all this time, no. They'd reclaimed some clothing items here and there, started to sort out various gifts and souvenirs… When Rosa had spotted the DVDs, she'd burst out laughing. As she told it, the concept for the show had been sold in a handful of countries, and she had seen the Italian version, when she had been learning her father's language.

"Where are you going to put all of these?" Sam asked, when Maya showed him all the posters she'd brought back from Paris. It made her smirk to see how he was absently keeping hold of one in particular. She'd bough that one with him in mind.

"Well, that one can go in your room…" she nodded to it, and her brother grinned at once, looking at the thing like he was already trying to figure out the size so he could then get a frame. "I was thinking we could put one in the basement, not sure which one yet… Not that one," she pulled one away in the next moment. "I kind of want to put it in my classroom," she admitted with a smile.

"You should," Sam nodded.

"We'll see what Rosa thinks when she gets back. Speaking of which…" she moved into the hall, giving out the old basketball call. It was returned a second later. "Are you coming with us?" she turned back to Sam.

"It's okay, I'll stick around here, get those posters flattened up a bit, maybe start on laundry," he told her. "The baskets are overflowing."

"Yeah, well, you know, two whole weeks…" she pointed out, moving in for a quick hug and a thank you before moving to join Lucas as they headed out of the house and up the lane to the Sanderson farm.

Coraline's puppies were three weeks old now, coming on four. Though they had checked in with Missy, who understood why they couldn't visit just yet upon their return, they had not seen the puppies since the day they were born. All Maya and Lucas knew was that all nine puppies were alive and thriving, growing as any pups should.

When they were let in by Missy's grandmother, even as they answered her questions about their honeymoon, they could hear a cacophony of sharp little barks coming from what had to be the basement. Following the sound, they started down the stairs to find one of the small dogs with his or her front paws perched on the bottom step, looking back up at them. Lucas smiled all at once, recognizing the active number five of the litter.

"Hey there…" he went down to meet him. The dog watched him come with open curiosity, his tail wagging as he tried to hoist himself up closer. "I'm coming, I'm coming," Lucas promised. Picking up the small dog, it was wonderful to see how much he had grown in just this short time. He wasn't huge, and he would never be, but compared to the little thing they'd seen on the night the litter was born, it was impossible not to see it. The puppy may not have remembered the last time he'd seen Lucas or Maya, but they remembered him, and the happy spirit he showed here as well.

"That one's Crowley," Missy reported, and they looked over to where she was stepping over a gate installed a doorway. On the other side, they could see a couple of the other puppies attempting to go and see who was there. "I don't know how he keeps getting out."

"Who's a good escape artist?" Maya beamed, reaching to pat the dog's head.

Bringing little Crowley into the other room, they got to see the rest of the litter, as well as mother Coraline, who appeared in complete control of… most of the situation, going by the one escapee. There really was nothing like seeing a whole bunch of puppies in one place, all of them doing their thing, sleeping, or eating, or messing around with one of the others, or exploring the room, or rolling around, playing with one of the toys… When they saw the people, it was like a signal went off, and then there was a mess of little barking faces at the gate.

"Make way, come on," Missy worked to nudge them back so they could climb in. "I tried to open the gate once, just to get in, and then it was puppies everywhere," she revealed.

"Doesn't feel like a bad thing," Maya beamed, barely in the room and already with a number of postulants for arm holding. To look at them and to recognize them from the day they'd been born was really the best thing they could have asked for, maybe on even footing with getting to hold them. "So you did stay with the naming idea, huh?"

"Yeah," Missy smiled. "I know we might not keep them all, and if they get taken by other people they might get a different name, but I wasn't going to leave them nameless until we decide. So I have…" she looked around at the puppies, pointing out each one in the order of their births. "Una," she nodded to the firstborn. "And then that's Lupescu," she nodded to the one laid out in Maya's lap. "He's Shadow, and then she's called Door," she went on to three and four, who vaguely recognized their names already.

"Door?" Lucas repeated.

"Lady Door, if you please," Missy nodded. "You already met Crowley," she indicated the one who now perched to Lucas' knee as he'd done the bottom step. "That one there is Bod," she indicated the one quietly sitting by his mother.

"Short for Nobody," Maya smiled.

"Yes," Missy smiled back. "And then… there's Charlie," she added, after locating the one hidden behind her. "Not calling him Fat Charlie, he's a tiny pup. And then this one, she's Zorya, and the very last is called Liza."

"Nicely done," Maya told their young neighbor.

"So you haven't decided what you'll do with them then?" Lucas asked Missy.

"Not yet, no," Missy shook her head. "I wish I could keep them all, I think I could do it, but I know my parents and my grandparents don't exactly want to have ten dogs in the house on top of everything else. I don't want to separate them, they're family."

There was little they could do to resolve Missy's issue, especially as Maya received a text to let her and Lucas know that Rosa was back.

"Hey, want to help us do some painting?" Lucas asked.

One quick change later, the three of them were headed back to the house, where they found Sam and Rosa waiting out on the porch. There were many options of what they might do with this day, but when it came down to it, after the unpacking and the visit with the puppies, the biggest thing they wanted to get done was the basement guest room. The sooner it was done, Rosa wouldn't have to sleep on the couch anymore, and she could have herself a bit more of a homey place to stay until she got things settled.

She needed to get the last of her things out of the old apartment. She didn't _have_ to. Dylan and Riley were still there and would be for a little while longer until they found their house and were able to move in, but Rosa wanted to just get going already, and much as they would have wanted to convince her to stay with them until she'd found a new apartment, they understood why she'd gone; it was really just her way of dealing with things. She'd told them that this was her allowing them to get a head start on living together, just the two of them, which was not exactly a lie either.

"We brought a recruit, oh Great Decorator," Maya intoned, smirking at the amused look on her friend and bandmate's face. "Observe, she has long arms, excellent in extending paint rollers…" she thus continued. Missy bit back a laugh before giving a demonstration.

"Excellent, step into my lair, let's make magic," Rosa declared in her best posh decorator vibe.

Maya and Lucas had left the whole thing up to their friend, though she had still consulted them on any preferences, and any things they would not want to see. Her instincts had been pretty good, good enough that there really hadn't been cause for them to categorically turn down any of her choices. In due time, they had gotten the walls painted, the five of them together. They wouldn't get to finish it all today, not while everything had to dry properly, but they could still put together the furniture so long as they kept away from the walls.

"Is it weird if I want to put my own sheets on here while I'm sleeping here?" Rosa asked as she worked with Maya and Lucas to assemble the frame, as Sam and Missy put together a dresser.

"No, of course not," Lucas told her. "Kind of figured you would want it, I mean I still remember how specific you were with that back in Houston."

"Yeah," Rosa bit back a laugh. Sometimes those memories of Houston would come back around, and more often than not they would be good ones, great ones… some of the best. Rosa and her bedding issues fell somewhere in the category of hijinks and bonding moments.

"We could go and get your mattress, put it on here instead," Maya added.

"And miss the chance to break in a brand new one?" Rosa shook her head.

By the end of the night, after Missy had gone back home, they sort of had something like a room. The furniture was not placed exactly where it would go, and nothing that had to go on the walls had made it yet, but already it was hard to look at the space and recall what it had looked like when the instruments had been here, or even when it had been empty earlier that day.

"Maybe we should have taken things easy today, with how busy the next few days are going to be…" Maya pointed out as the remaining four looked around.

"No, this was good, wasn't it?" Sam looked to the others.

"It was," Rosa put her vote in.

"Really good," Lucas agreed. Something about expanding on their home's layout felt like exactly the thing to do, as they passed from one ruling emotion toward another, from parting with a loved one, to seeing two more begin a new chapter in their lives together.

"The posters!" Sam blurted out, remembering. Maya gasped, turning to Rosa and hurrying her out of the basement.

"Come on, you need to help decide which one will go down here."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	195. Their Circle Around Happiness

July 13th 2020

_Chapter 195  
Their Circle Around Happiness_

"Rosa, come on, time to go!" Maya called down the basement stairs.

"One minute!" Rosa called back. "You guys come down when I say so!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Hey!"

"Yes, oh Great Decorator!"

"Better!" Rosa replied, and Maya started to move away, until… "Okay, done!" She moved back to the door. "You guys can come now!"

"I will let the menfolk know!"

After having given the walls a day to dry, Rosa had been working to put the finishing touches to the basement, first the night before, in very carefully moving the furniture in its 'final position,' and now this morning in finishing up the rest of the room. They'd been hearing her working away down there since the rest of them had been having breakfast. The benefit of their location, as Sam would tell it, was that the noise could only bother the three of them at the table, which had made Lucas laugh.

Sam had already taken off to meet Cecilia and Dora, so he would have to see later on. For now, Maya went and found Lucas, bringing him to the basement door to find Rosa waited midway up the stairs, phone in hand. As expected, she'd taken the chance to grab some photos of her finished project.

"So, you wanted something not too out there, something that would feel like home but also welcoming to any guests you might have, which, being one of those right now, I have to say, I feel pretty welcome," Rosa smiled up at them. "Welcome to Hotel Friar."

She had accomplished exactly what she'd promised. They'd had no doubts of her abilities, having seen her at work, with the apartment she'd shared with Riley and Dylan the past two years, and then even back in Houston, in her room, at the bookstore… The basement here had the benefit of her growing experience and knowledge, and really she deserved to be proud.

"Thank you so much for this," Lucas told her, and oh how happy she looked. It wasn't as though she didn't know that they had asked her to do this in part to help her deal with the sudden disruption to her living situation, but it didn't mean she wasn't grateful.

"I think the poster really brought it together," she nodded, turning to Maya.

"I'm pretty sure that was you, but I'll take it," Maya grinned, side-hugging her bandmate.

"We really need to get going," Lucas looked to his watch. "According to Sophie, Asher is turning into a bit of an intense groom."

"One of us was bound to crack at one of these," Maya sighed as they left the basement.

Lucas drove, allowing Maya and Rosa in the back to work away the two-hour drive into a song the band was putting together for 'the Messrs. Garcia-Choi.' All throughout there was the occasional call or text or video call to one or another of their bandmates, all of them also on their way to Houston by their own means. Dylan and Riley were coming up along with Asher's parents, while Zay and Nadine were driving in with Kayla, and with Ray's cousin, Min, the great rescuer of his remaining mementos.

"No one else from Ray's family is coming then?" Rosa asked, after they'd come off from a call with the Babineaux car.

They didn't know for sure. To be honest, they'd sort of been tiptoeing around the subject all along, not wanting to open up any old wounds for their friend. He'd been out of touch with his family since he was eighteen, in the middle of his senior year of high school. Seven years later, all he had to show for it, other than a renewed – if covert – connection with his younger cousin, herself all of seventeen, were a handful of awkward run-ins and confirmations that he had been and remained a branch lopped off from the family tree, tossed on to a flame and turned to ash.

"Asher is only really inviting his parents, and his brother, his aunts and uncles and some cousins, his grandparents…" Maya told her. "So, we decided that the rest of us would sit on Ray's side. His blood family may not want him, but he's got another one. He's got us, whole bunch of brothers and sisters." Rosa smiled at this, easily on board.

For what was shaping up to be a small affair, they arrived at the grooms' new home to find what felt like the preparations for a gala with a guest list six or seven times larger than the Garcia-Choi wedding. As much as they would tease Asher for his borderline 'groomzilla' tendencies flaring up, they understood where it came from. He had been blessed with a family who had accepted him from day one upon learning that he was gay, but Ray was not. He'd been kicked out, shunned, and they all knew that it affected him more than he let on at times. So, Asher wanted this day, their day, to be the best that it could be, the most wonderful celebration of the love that brought them together. As the day was drawing nearer however, it really only served to make him more stressed, and thus…

_"No, no, listen, they need to be here in three days! Three! Where is your warehouse, I will come and get them myself if I have to! I will pay you to borrow your truck!"_

"When he goes off in Spanish like that, he reminds me so much of Isabel when the restaurant was packed," Maya whispered to Lucas.

"Hey, come on, I've got you set up," Ray appeared on the steps, motioning for the trio to follow him upstairs, leaving Asher to his 'negotiation.'

"What's he trying to get?" Lucas asked.

"I have no idea, he's on the phone so much that every time I go and see what he's doing it's another thing," Ray shook his head, giving the impression that he'd gone ahead and decided to just go with the flow. "He's promised to take a break for lunch."

With only a few days to go, and still so much to do – according to Asher – it had been decided that it would be better for those of them intent on helping through that last sprint to just stay in Houston. It would save them so many hours on the road, also saving on gas, and buying more time for them to work. Not all of them had that option, like Nadine, who could not so easily get away from the hospital, so she would have to go back and come over when possible. After a sort of rock paper scissors decision, Maya, Lucas, and Rosa had been drafted to stay with the guys, while Dylan and Riley would be back at the house across the street, with Sophie and Chiara.

"Four years we stayed out there and it never dawned on me how our house and the Shaws' was built the same," Maya remarked, as though she had been in her friends' new home for the first time that day, which was not so.

"It's those giant bushes they had out front," Ray pointed out. "And they had the roof redone the year before you all moved in over there. Otherwise, yeah, it's the same model. Ash and I were thinking of getting one wall taken out downstairs, we still need to look into it.

After they'd dropped off their bags, they'd gone back down the stairs, just as Sophie, Chiara, Riley, and Dylan came through the door, likely having just done the same thing they'd done. The Garcias had come here straightaway upon arrival and were now showing something to their son which looked to be a family heirloom. When Riley looked to Maya and Rosa, they could practically see 'I had an idea about the song' written on her face, and they shushed her as discreetly as they could. The song was meant to be a surprise.

"Has he eaten at all?" Chiara asked Ray, as though this had been a constant thing between the girls and him in the last few days. "I will go and make him something," she decided before getting an answer, and she was soon off to the kitchen. Rosa dashed after her, eager to assist as she did when they all lived together.

"That's two helpers gone," Sophie turned to Ray. "Where do you need us?"

They worked for a while at figuring out the setup in the backyard. Though she had 'retired' from party planning, Sophie continued to be a strong asset all around. Maya and Lucas asked how things were going for her, being back at work. It was a common question, and one they'd asked even before the incident and her extended leave, but since she'd gone back, first at a desk and now back on the streets, it felt as though they wanted to know more than ever that she was safe.

"Hey, look who it is, it's _a_ groom! He looks familiar, but he usually has a phone stuck to his face, hello…" Maya smirked, hugging Asher when he stepped out to join them. He smiled, hugging her back. "Please come and sit for a while? We will all work extra hard to compensate for you taking five whole minutes to breathe."

"I'm not _that_ bad, am I?" Asher asked as he followed her, only to be bombarded with various confirmations from the others in the yard. "Wow… Fine, okay, I'll take a break."

"You're about to get food shoved in your face when Chiara gets out here," Sophie laughed.

"I can do the shoving by myself, thanks," Asher gave a sufficiently sheepish smile, recognizing his having gone just a bit off the rails. He passed this smile toward his husband to be, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that for all his running around, the one thing that truly mattered in the end was that the two of them would be married, on their way to spending the rest of their lives together.

The aforementioned food was brought along, and as usual Chiara displayed this ability she had of putting together sufficient amounts for all of them to dig in, though she did make them wait until Asher had served himself first, as he'd been the one going around without eating all morning.

"The night before the wedding, they want one of us to go stay with them," Ray informed their guests, nodding over to Sophie and Chiara.

"It's tradition," Sophie insisted, in what they swore was a perfect imitation of her mother. It certainly made them laugh.

"I said we could take flashlights and send each other messages in Morse code," Asher revealed.

"How do you know Morse code?" Dylan asked, baffled. "Who even knows Morse code?"

"That was kind of the point," Ray smiled, recounting how they'd just sort picked it up, when they wanted to be sort of discreet about their communications.

"That's why you kept tapping your foot under the table in the cafeteria?" Riley recalled now, and all of them who'd been in high school with him at the time remembered all at once how Riley would sometimes yelp and Asher would apologize, taking a look around.

"No flashlights, or else we're sending one of you to Austin and then you'll be late to your own wedding," Sophie pointed to the grooms.

"Like we would let that happen," Lucas shook his head.

"Fine, fine, we'll behave, we promise," Ray told Sophie, stealing a look to his husband to be, who responded by tapping his finger against his cup.

"What did he say? What did that mean?" Rosa pointed at him. Asher only shrugged innocently, leaving the others to ponder his answer, with only Ray able to know what he'd said.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	196. Their Circle Around Love

July 14th 2020

_Chapter 196  
Their Circle Around Love_

"Hey, are you awake?" Maya whispered, poking her head through the crack she'd opened in the doorway. She got her answer when she found Ray Choi sitting on his bed with his laptop. He motioned for her to go ahead and come in, which she did. "We have known each other, what, like eight, nine years? All this time, I have never seen your hair all… sticky uppy like that… I like it. Makes you look like a normal person," she smiled.

"As opposed to?" Ray laughed, absently reaching to push his hair a bit more into place.

"King of the Good Hair Brigade?" Maya shrugged, sitting at the foot of the bed as he nodded appreciatively. "Hey, you're getting married today," she pointed out, nudging his foot with her own.

To see that smile on his face, overpowering his ability to respond with words, she knew exactly what that feeling was, remembered it from not so long ago. It also made her realize that they were just days away from her and Lucas having been married a month already, which just felt impossible.

"Been awake long?" she asked, nodding to the computer.

"A movie and a half," he confessed, showing her the screen. He'd kept it on mute, with the subtitles on. "I woke up and I couldn't get back to sleep," he added with a shrug, his eyes traveling to the other side of the bed, which she guessed was Asher's side.

"You could have woken us, we would have kept you company… There might have been candy."

"It's alright, I like the quiet," Ray told her, shutting the laptop and setting it aside.

Maya had come to check on him, in part because she was awake and Lucas was still asleep, but also because she wanted to make sure he was alright. In the last few days, it had been difficult not to see that, as much as he put on a good show of not being affected by the constant presence of Asher's family, while his own was nowhere to be found, save for Min, who could hardly make the trip every day without raising suspicions.

She was still a minor, and Ray didn't want to get her in trouble when she wasn't the one who'd been shunned by the family. Whatever their thoughts on him and his sexuality, Min needed them, and because _he_ needed to keep _her_, too, they had to be careful. Her trips to Houston had been carefully planned, thanks to a budding friendship with Sarah Hillard, who she'd met while her family had been out looking at colleges out there. Sarah and Evie both had made fast friends with her, and would have gladly helped to fake an excuse for her to be around for her cousin's wedding, but Ray had insisted that Hank and Tanya Hillard should be made aware of the situation, so they would not be caught in the middle of this. Thankfully for everyone involved, they had been on board at once. Everything now hinged on the rest of the Choi family not finding out about the wedding. They'd be able to put two and two together, and then…

With all this weighing on him, Maya and Lucas and the others had done their best to focus on the good things, encouraging Ray to think of this happy day and little else. Now though… Now the day had come, and he was bound to let his mind wander. So, he needed his family, the one he'd made for himself, which included her.

"It's about to get real unquiet in here, you know that?" Maya smiled, and Ray nodded, his own smile showing a mixture of butterflies in his stomach and just a whole load of happy anxiousness. "Today is about you and it's about Asher, and that's what you're going to remember," she told him, infusing all her confidence into her hands as she pressed them to his shoulders before pulling him in a brief hug. He held to her like he was trying to imprint the words in his mind for the rest of the day. "Alright, let's go."

The group in the Garcia-Choi house had breakfast, all the while keeping contact with the other group, over in the Zvolensky-Mantovani house across the street, via texts exchanged between Lucas and Dylan. In the spirit of how those four of their friends had become so close in the last two years, they were having the ceremony in the girls' yard, before moving to the guys' for the reception.

"I don't want to say it too loud, but that is one beautiful blue sky we're having today," Maya informed the others as they cleared up the dishes.

"Would it be too on point to want it to rain? Just a little? Just so there'd be a rainbow up there?" Rosa smirked, tracing the arc in the window.

"Wouldn't mind it," Ray chimed in, the amused look on his face bringing the rest of them back to the previous afternoon when, after they'd finished all they could possibly do and right before Asher was taken off to the girls' house, they'd all sat in the yard together. The conversation had risked taking a turn down the absentee family road, which had sent them all instead into trying to conjure up the image of 'the gayest wedding' they could possibly have, in defiance of those who had rejected them. They could barely breathe for how much some of the ideas would make them laugh in the end.

"We can always turn on the sprinklers," Lucas suggested, finding the glint of ideas in Maya and Rosa's eyes.

When it came time for all of them to go and get dressed for the day, it got to be like something of a relay race, where they would want to go ahead and make sure that there were at least a couple of them with Ray most of the time, instead of leaving him like he was on his own. It wasn't as though it took him all that long to get dressed and fix his hair, and he got all that done by himself, but then all that really mattered what he got, which was support, from his friends, his family of some years.

Lucas had known him the longest, of course, the two of them having been in school together since kindergarten, up until seventh grade, when Lucas's suspension had taken him one grade below. Over the years he could count both good and bad things to have come out of his suspension. Then there were those things existing in the middle, like where the day's grooms were concerned, if he had not been suspended and had remained in the same graduating class as Ray. He would still have been friends with Asher, so the two of them may still have had that connection existing as something like an ice breaker. He liked to think that they would have found their way to each other no matter what.

"You know what, all of us guys in suits, you pull it off the best," Lucas told Ray with a confident nod as the groom finished doing up his buttons. Ray laughed. "I mean it!"

"Oh, I know, I'm not denying it either," Ray turned an equally confident grin his way. "Maya told me this morning that I was the 'King of the Good Hair Brigade.'"

"She's not wrong," Lucas laughed. When he'd woken up and found no sight of his wife, he'd just known she would have gone to check on Ray.

"You know you don't all have to do this," Ray told him after a beat. "I'm good, I'm… I'm better than good."

"I know," Lucas assured him. "And don't think for a second that any of this was a lie. We are every one of us man enough to admit it: you're the best looking one," he nodded firmly, getting a hearty laugh out of his long time classmate and friend.

When it finally came time for the group to cross over to the girls' house, they spotted Ray's cousin waiting outside on the front steps, with a box in her lap. They went inside, leaving the two of them to talk in private, though they did happen to look back in time to see Ray, with the open box in his other hand, reach his arm to embrace his cousin.

"Hey, what do you think, is this okay?" Dylan came up to Lucas and Maya, drawing their attention away from the cousins outside.

"Is what okay?" Maya asked.

"I mean do I look… official enough?" he motioned at his clothes, his hair…

"Depends, an official what?" she couldn't resist teasing, but then that was kind of the way to go with Dylan, as it would make him relax at once. "You look great," Maya told him now.

"Okay… Gotta go practice my speech," Dylan nodded to himself before moving off again.

"I just started thinking about whenever he'd have to do presentations in school," Lucas watched him go.

"Yeah, I just got it, too," Maya covered her mouth to hide her laugh. "He'll be fine, right?"

"I think so… Yes…"

"Want to try that again?"

There had been very little question as to who Asher and Ray might ask to stand as their officiant. If any of them stood to be like the family Ray no longer had, Dylan would be as good as his brother once he was married. That was what he had been to Asher since the two of them had known one another, and he eagerly awaited the day he could do the same with his best friend's husband. Now, he would get to be the one who went ahead and joined them. To look at Dylan, you would think they had decided to name their firstborn after him.

In the girls' yard, they found most of the guests already in their seats or near enough. There were all the Garcias, Asher's parents, and Joey, Uncle Fernando from the diner with his wife and kids, Aunt Isabel from the restaurant with her husband and kids… There were some absences, those few who hadn't taken to Asher's coming out so well and over the years had drifted away, but the mantra for the rest of the family was that it wasn't up to them to turn those minds around.

They had the usual suspects, of course, their group cultivated through years in Austin, New York, now Houston, in school and at work… Bolstering their numbers that much further were the old basketball teams, boys and girls both.

Back in high school, Ray had been one of those, by virtue of having been in the eleventh grade when the teams were disbanded, who had never gotten to play for them again before graduating. That didn't matter. For all of them who'd gone through those two off years, the rule was set: the school could disband the teams but it could not disband the players. And today two of their own were tying the knot, so where else would they be? Some of them had to travel in from far across the country, some from overseas, and they'd ended up making a home vacation of it, with the other team wedding of the summer just a few weeks past.

The added grace of the day, without a doubt, was the presence of Thomas and Melinda Friar, right up front. Ray may have been thrown out by the parents who'd brought him into the world, but all those years ago, on the worst night of his life, it had been the Friars who'd finally taken him in, looked after him as good as if he'd been their own. And today they were here, to see him wed, as they had seen Lucas earlier that summer.

When they'd come to stand before Dylan, the grooms were both of them floating, their hearts feeling like hummingbird wings. And looking at all their guests, all these people who had happily come to see them wed, they couldn't find anything or anyone lacking. It was all exactly as it should be. They turned back to their officiant, a grin on his face as he extended a fist to each one. With a chuckle, Asher and Ray had responded to the requested fist bump.

"Yeah, that's right," Dylan pressed his hands together, pulling his face back to as serious as he could get it. "Here we go."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	197. Their Circle Around Family

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!_

* * *

July 15th 2020

_Chapter 197  
Their Circle Around Family_

The migration of the Garcia-Choi wedding guests from one house to the other must have looked so strange to anyone on the street or looking through their windows at the time. Certainly, those cars who were left to wait until they'd all gone by must have been left to wonder, and there was no telling if their honks were 'hey, congratulations!' honks or 'would you hurry up already?' honks.

But finally they had all gone through, and around the house they'd gone, into the yard where the last of the set-up had been done, adding flowers all about, and here at least they had that bit of rainbow touch Rosa had sought in sunlight and rainfall. The newlywed Asher and Ray had wanted this day to represent the life and the love ahead of them and how bright, how colorful it would be. They had achieved a lot of this with the flowers, of so many colors, here and there over the tables, the yard itself… It brought that exact spirit to life for all of them as they arrived.

"You're going to have to stop me from taking it next level," Rosa told Maya and Lucas as they took it all in.

"What's that?" Lucas asked, not following. Maya smirked, pointing out one centerpiece after another. Red roses here, orange tulips there, yellow marigolds, green chrysanthemums, blue daisies, purple hydrangeas… "Oh, got it," Lucas nodded.

"We could make crowns, you know? At the end of the day, press them, preserve them…" Maya suggested to Rosa, and she was on board at once. "Speaking of which, you know who would be really good at those?"

"A lot of people," Rosa slowly nodded, her few words carrying others as well, like 'I know what you're doing, and I'm not going to fall for it.'

"Like…" Maya did the same, _her_ secret words going 'I haven't said a word since before the honeymoon, I gotta know…'

It was Rosa's own fault, wasn't it? She had been the one, when Asher and Ray had been preparing for this day, to mention how her friend/very complicated crush Jenna's mother was a florist, and Jenna had taken her to her shop before, where she also worked, and it had been so beautiful. The guys had gone and checked it out, and in the end they had put in their orders through her. She had really delivered nothing short of a heavenly garden.

"I was going to invite her," Rosa finally sighed. "As my… well…" she frowned to herself for how she struggled to speak the word. "I had her come over to the house a few times while I was sitting for you guys, you know, just to hang out. She helped me with colors for the basement." She paused, made small by words just on the tip of her tongue. "I… I like her so much…" she finally admitted. "I mean, I finally get… all these things… It's like I've been going around needing glasses all this time and now I have them, but they're still new, and my eyes haven't adjusted so I'm just tripping over myself a bit."

"But you haven't told her any of that," Maya guessed. Rosa shook her head. "What about her? I mean… where does she stand, do you…"

"Hasn't exactly come up?" Rosa almost winced in answering. "I just didn't press on the subject too much, or… at all… I'm not ready to find out, if it's not… if she doesn't…" She let out a breath, and she looked so much like she had already said way more than she'd intended to. Now she just wanted to move on to something else, having nothing to do with her feelings for Jenna.

"Ready for the ball toss?" Lucas tapped her arm, pointing to the basket, where some of the old teams had already started to cluster, along with some of their dates, boyfriends/girlfriends, or spouses, and some of the Garcias.

"Yeah, let's do that," Rosa moved off to join them, while Maya turned to her husband. She had a look in her eyes like she might have been cooking something up in her head, and she needed him to either talk her out of it or help her bring it to reality.

For now, they could only go and join their friends for the game. Somewhere in all the planning – Asher would swear it to have been born out of one of those late nights when there had been a few drinks in all of them while they had been deciding on how to organize the yard – the ball toss had been conjured up. They weren't even sure which one of them had said it, possibly it had been an amalgamation of a few smaller comments and ideas, but there it was. Asher and Ray had fallen in love, all those years ago, in great part for their being on the basketball team together. And one of the staples of the teams' gatherings would be shoot-offs. Well, there was a net in their yard, naturally, and they weren't about to have any bouquet tosses at _this_ wedding, so what if they sort of combined the two? They'd have a shoot-off, but with the added twist that the players would have to toss the ball while facing away from their target.

As expected, the whole thing was a bit more chaotic than their regular shoot-offs, though it had to be handed to the old teammates, a lot of them did pretty well for themselves, and it really kicked off the party in a great and lively way.

"Do I look that concentrated when I go?" Lucas asked Maya after she'd taken her latest shot and succeeded in getting the ball through.

"Yeah, you do," she laughed, imitating his face. "As competitive as we all were when we could actually see what we were doing, it's even worse now." Looking around though, she looked suddenly conflicted. "This would be perfect for me to get away and make that call though…" she whispered.

"You don't want to throw the game though, do you?" Lucas guessed.

"I could win this!" she tugged at his arms, conflicted.

"What if you say you have to go to the bathroom, and you appoint me to take your shots until you get back?" he offered.

"Like a shared bank account," Maya sparked at once. "Okay, good, yes. Aim well, husband, I'll be right back," she kissed him before dashing for the house, telling the others that Lucas would shoot for her until she got back. Zay called after her that she could do that and Nadine tapped his arm with a smirk.

Snatching the card from the kitchen counter as she passed through and headed to the upstairs bathroom to 'maintain cover,' Maya put in the number for the flower shop. She had expected to find herself speaking with Jenna's mother, after which she would have had to find a way to be put in touch with the woman's daughter. Instead, she'd only had to say the girl's name that she was told to hold on. And seconds later…

"Hello?"

"Jenna?" Maya blinked. It was. "Hi, this is Maya…" She almost said 'Hart,' then stopped herself. Technically, she still was, but it didn't matter right now.

"Oh, hi," Jenna replied with recognition. "Are you guys missing something out there?" It took her a moment to realize that, oh yeah, she would know that the wedding was today. She might have used that as a means to an end, but it wouldn't have been the right one.

"No… No, I just… Are you working late?"

"I'm making deliveries for my mother today. I just came back to fill up the van again, two more to go," Jenna revealed.

"Right, well, here's the thing. We were thinking of making some flower crowns at the end of the day… It was Rosa's idea," Maya added. Technically it was _her_ idea, but it had started from Rosa's rainbow goals.

Returning to the yard, Maya only remembered they had been in the middle of a shoot-off as she landed back in the kitchen and heard the cheers from outside. She stepped out to find Lucas taking the next shot… and missing.

"Was that yours or mine?" Maya asked as she moved to join him.

"Mine," he passed her the ball. She caught it swiftly, but rather than turning for her shot she instead squinted at him.

"Was it really? Or are you just being good ol' Huckleberry right now?" she inquired. He responded only by indicating the net and stepping back to rejoin the others, who were now calling for her to take the shot. After giving her husband the 'I've got my eye on you' gesture, Maya turned her back to the net, taking her aim before throwing. At the sound of the swish, she smiled and moved to Lucas. "You didn't have to do that, you know?" she told him, locking her arms around his waist.

"You would have lasted longer than me anyway," he shrugged, doing the same with her. "Figured I'd give the household its best shot." She couldn't deny that. "So, how'd it go?" Lucas asked, whispering.

"We'll see," she whispered back.

The shoot off had gone on long enough that, by the time they all had to get to their tables for dinner, they had only gotten it down to the last few players, in this case Asher and Ray both, along with Nadine, Dylan, Maya, and Nathan and Julianne Shelby, this one holding steady at nearly six months of her first pregnancy.

"Hey, you alright?" Lucas asked Zay, sitting at his side at their table. Somewhere in the middle of dinner it had gotten to feel like his best friend had started to appear just on this side of lost in thoughts. By the look on his face, it was unclear if these were good thoughts or not.

"Yeah, just thinking about GiGi," he explained. "She would have been out there, you know?" he nodded over to the table where Lucas' parents were chatting with Asher's. It hadn't even occurred to the rest of them, but now that he said it, they knew that yes, of course, she would have. GiGi had been notorious for loving weddings, to the point where she bordered on qualifying as a wedding crasher. She didn't actually crash them so much as she only needed to hear about a couple anywhere in her social circles to end up scoring an invitation. The wedding of her great grandson's friends? She would definitely have been right there to see it happen.

"She would have," Riley smiled, nodding along with the others.

"She was so mad when she heard about Ray getting kicked out, she probably would have talked Susanne into taking him in if the Friars hadn't done it," Nadine recalled, making her husband smile, remembering it as well.

"She nearly gave them a piece of her mind, too," he went on, and one look to the rest of the table, save for Nadine, told him that they'd never heard about this. "Oh, well, you know, she already couldn't get around on her own back then, and she'd get my cousin to drive her around. She'd just tell him where she wanted to go and he'd drive, no questions asked. So one day, she tells him 'let's go,' gives him an address, and they're off."

"Oh, no," Rosa laughed quietly, knowing as the others did exactly where this was going.

"If Aunt Susanne hadn't called him and figured out where they were going, they might have made it out there and Mr. and Mrs. Choi would have gotten called out by a tiny… ninety-nine-year-old woman," he had to count back. "Would have been legendary…"

"Like her," Maya beamed. Before the end of the night, they would raise a toast to the dearly departed.

With dinner behind them, the opening of the dance floor had been preceded – because they really couldn't leave a competition half done – by the end of the 'ball toss' shoot off. When Asher had gone and missed one, Julianne Shelby had volunteered to sit out and let him keep going in her stead. The next thing they knew, when Ray had missed, Nadine had been next to take this loss for her own and let him carry on. This had gone on until, in the end, the only left were the new Mr. & Mr. They had called it a tie, right then and there, and they were off for copious amounts of dancing, friends and family all together.

"So, who do you think would have won if everyone hadn't let us keep going?" Asher asked Maya when the two of them met on the dance floor.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Maya innocently promised.

"Uh-huh," Asher smiled. "But…"

"Oh, Dylan, no doubt," she responded with confidence, making him chuckle.

"Thought so, too," he told her.

"Yeah, but this is better, I think."

"Probably… We get to keep it in the family," Asher went on, with a happy little smile that suited him so, so well, thinking of how he now had a husband. For her part, Maya received the words and just as quickly had a thought, not for her friend here but for a potential solution for another not present on that night.

"Maya!" Lucas came up to find her just then, nodding across the yard, where she was able to turn her head just in time to spot the arrival of a young woman. She scanned her surroundings like she was looking for someone in particular, and that someone saw her now. Rosa looked surprised for all of a second before a smile won out as she went to greet her friend. It wasn't going to take long that she found out exactly what had brought her here, and the look she turned to Maya felt like a shrill little alarm of 'what did you do?' Maya smiled, waving back at her with a covert 'woman up, Shorty.' Rosa took a deep breath, turning her smile back to Jenna as she led her through the yard.

The night was not yet over, and so until the time came for those remaining few to get their craft on with some rainbow flower crowns, Rosa asked Jenna if she might like to dance, which she did. Whatever came of this night for the two of them, they had loads of fun, and anyone could see it. Maya and Lucas both agreed that maybe, just maybe, this night would have enough power in it, for being the celebration of one couple, to bring two more hearts closer to one another.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	198. Their Art of Summer

July 16th 2020

_Chapter 198  
Their Art of Summer_

The last few weeks of summer felt as though the world acknowledged how much had already happened in recent times. After two weddings and a funeral, the month of August came and went with very little in the way of big excitement.

Alright, it wasn't to say that the month had been boring, not by a long shot. Fall was on its way, and it would bring plenty for them to be looking forward to. Lucas was eager to get back to school, to start his penultimate year, and Maya… well, she was so very close to kicking off her first year as a teacher. After two years of waiting, the time was nearly upon them.

August had also been the month of Maya Hunter. Right after Asher and Ray had gone and tied the knot, Maya had finally gone and started the process which would take her from one name and to the next, before eventually changing it once more, one last time. All month long, she had been happily introducing herself whenever she got the chance, the better to let the name have its day in the sun. It had become something of a game between the four of them in the house, as Lucas, Sam, and Rosa would come to greet her with something like 'hey Hunter' or 'well if it isn't Maya Hunter.'

Rosa was still living with them, her apartment search so far bringing up nothing but disappointments. The issue, of course, was that for the time being she could not afford anything on her own. Well, she _could_ afford an apartment and all it would entail, provided she got some minuscule place or what could only be called a death trap. She needed a roommate, and she had no desire to go and hunt down what would likely have to be a stranger to live with.

"You can stay with us as long as it takes, okay?" Lucas had told her, after she'd returned from another failed search.

"I know," she'd sighed. "I appreciate it, I do." But she needed her space, needed to feel like she had her own home again and not loads of boxes she couldn't unpack.

"We can ride to school together when the semester starts," Sam chimed in, and Rosa looked like this was both good news and cause for further despair over her situation.

As bad as she felt, Riley and Dylan still felt so bad about it, about how they had essentially put her in this position. They had finally found their house, bought it, and were in the process of fixing it up before they moved in. They had not known at first how to ask her if she might want to assist, as it might sound like they were only doing it because they felt bad. Rosa had seen through it, and she was helping them. It was as good of a way as any to help clear the awkwardness hanging over them.

"Thirty-three minutes!" Riley had declared, coming up the lane one morning. Maya and Sam had been in the attic, doing their own thing, and Sam had looked out the window, only to see someone walking up from far away and think it looked a great deal like Riley. When Maya had gone to look, she had found that, yes, it _was_ her. The siblings had gone down through the house and made it on to the porch as she came walking up.

"What's thirty-three minutes?" Maya asked.

"The walk from my house to yours," Riley had happily revealed. It had made Maya laugh, pulling her oldest friend into a hug before fulfilling her request for a glass of water. Their lives had come to be like a succession of relocations, taking them further and closer and further apart again. Had it been up to them, they could have been neighbors, across the street like their friends in Houston or across a fence, like Riley's grandparents and her father's old teacher. Thirty-three minutes on foot seemed to please her, and Maya felt the same. Thirty-three on foot, seven by car, as they found when they first made the ride out.

Riley and Dylan were not the only ones to test the distance.

After they had returned to Austin, and gotten through GiGi's loss, and Asher and Ray's wedding, Maya and Lucas had gotten in touch with their new friends from Atlanta. They had responded to the notice of their safe return, expressing their own return but also the reason why they might not hear from them for a little while. By the time they had finally called one another, it felt as though they could have talked for hours, and they did. Over days, they called, and they wrote, and they were all very happy to find that this budding friendship of theirs might actually have a fighting chance at taking root rather than being an open and closed book.

And when Maya had mentioned how TXNY was going to have a few gigs through the month, Caleb and Talia had decided to journey out to Austin, to see her and Lucas again, and to witness one of these shows for themselves. They were driving out, taking in the landscape as they went, and finally arriving in mid-evening the day before the show. Much as they had wondered what it would be like to see each other again, out of the context of Paris, there was really nothing for them to worry over. They were all thrilled to reunite.

The next evening, TXNY had taken the stage, and it had been as electric as ever, if not more. Even though she wasn't going around announcing her name to the crowd before her, Lucas could just see the moment when Maya thought about how, in that moment, she was a Hart again, the name she'd kept for the stage.

"That was unbelievable," Talia had told her, all smiles as Lucas had taken her and Caleb backstage after the show. Maya had taken them to meet the rest of the band, both sides having heard of one another enough times now that they were all glad to finally meet.

Caleb and Talia had stayed in Austin one more day, hitting the road again the morning after that. While they were still in town though, to no one's surprise, Maya and Caleb had 'fallen into an art hole' as their respective spouses had come to call it. If that wasn't enough, this time they also had Sam, turning the duo into a trio. Lucas and Rosa had taken the opportunity and given Talia the tour of the city.

That series of shows had happened, in some part, the better to anticipate how they would all be so busy for the rest of the month. For Maya, a lot of it had been about preparing for the school year. Yes, her first day of teaching would come with the start of classes, but she had been going to the school now, meeting people, doing what needed to be done ahead of the big first day. At the same time, she had to start figuring out this new schedule, balancing the school with the theater without falling flat on her face and letting down one or both sides.

Coming home at the end of the day, it felt like she landed right in the middle of being exhausted and happy to be home or just satisfied with her day… and happy to be home. It wasn't hard to be at peace out there, with her husband, and her brother, and her their friend, and so… _so_ many dogs… Well, six of them at least.

They had Trix and Lou, and they had Archer, and while Rosa stayed with them they had Peanut. Now, as of just a couple days ago, they had two more in the house.

Knowing how much of a difficult choice it was for Missy Sanderson to make, about what to do with Coraline's litter, Maya had been very happy to present her with the idea she'd had. It had still been too early to take any of the pups away from their mother at the time, but they lost nothing by thinking ahead. The plan was simple: Keep it in the family. They had been hearing, from the day the puppies were born, how several of their friends showed interest toward adopting one or more of the little ones. So, what if they did that? If all the puppies went to people who were part of each other's lives, then even if the fluffy siblings were separated it would not be forever.

Missy had loved the idea immediately, and so it all started, as they went about figuring out who was interested. By the end of it, they had takers for eight of the puppies, the ninth being one that Missy wished to keep along with Coraline. And because she knew both the people and the puppies very well, she was the one to decide who went where. She was keeping the ninth and last born, Liza. Three of the pups were Houston bound, with Shadow going to Sophie and Chiara, Bod to Asher and Ray, and Zorya to Willow and Lion. Here in Austin, 'the Lady Door' was to move into Dylan and Riley's new home with them, while little Charlie went to Zay and Nadine. The firstborn, Una, had been something like a belated eighth birthday present to the Hunter twins.

Finally, the last two were at the Friar house on the lane, one of them temporarily. Rosa hardly had to ask if her friends minded her having one more dog around here while they hosted her, and so she welcomed jolly Lupescu as her second dog. To no one's surprise, Lucas and Maya found their fourth in the shape of the hyper Crowley, coming along like a friend you had to keep watch of, in order to prevent them from running off a cliff when they weren't looking.

For a moment, when he was awakened by something thumping at his shoulder, Lucas was certain it was the puppy. How he would have managed to climb on to the bed, he didn't know, but… He opened his eyes, finding not an eager puppy but an eager wife.

"What's happening, what time is it?" he mumbled, blinking as he tried to get a look at the clock.

"Early," Maya told him. "But I didn't get to show you yesterday, and I have to go in to the theater today so I wanted to make sure, before I go in and start officially changing a few things, that you knew about this… officiality…"

"Is that a word?" he gave her a look like 'you're the teacher here.'

"Do you want to make jokes right now?" Maya countered, putting a sheet of paper in his line of sight. It took him a moment to focus and actually read what it said, but as he finally did he started to sit up. He took the paper and read it again, and his face… oh, he didn't know how much it would make him smile to see it. "Now, are you glad I woke you, Mr. Friar?"

"I am very glad you did, Mrs. Friar," he pulled her close, making her laugh. He kissed her now, many times over, on her lips, her forehead, her cheeks, wherever he could.

"I've been practicing some new signatures, want to see?" He didn't have to say a word. His face said 'show me all of it.' He had never been so happy to share his name with another person.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	199. Their Art of Morning

July 17th 2020

_Chapter 199  
Their Art of Morning_

Maya opened her eyes that morning, and the first thing she saw was her new bag, sitting on top of her dresser. It had been a gift, from her parents, for her to take along as she started her very first teaching year. She saw it now and it reminded her… this was it… Today was the first day of school. Today, she was officially a high school art teacher.

She was thrilled. She was terrified.

She had not felt this particular mix of feelings since… oh, she couldn't even say that she ever had. This was her future, right here, opening up ahead of her. What if she messed it up? It had taken her so long, just to get this one shot, and if she lost it, she didn't see herself getting another for a long time… if ever at all. What if… what if…

No, no, she wasn't going to do this to herself. She'd done _that_ before, of course she had, because that was just the kind of nerves she'd dealt with for the better part of her life, this belief that good things happening to her were just too good to be true. She'd gotten so much better at managing it, but today… How could she expect anything else? She wasn't going to let it take hold though. She had worked for this, for a long time. And she was going to be a great teacher.

Now that her nerves had been dealt with, she realized that she was alone in bed, with no big spoon at her back. It was barely five in the morning, and even though he had started his semester already, today was his bookstore day, and he really had no reason to be up and about already… Well, he'd have _one_ reason.

Walking out of the room, Maya found little Crowley at the top of the stairs, sniffing at the gate preventing him from going down the stairs. These had been installed, at the top and bottom, after the adventurous dog had very nearly taken a dive and just barely been rescued by Sam. So far, they had been effective, even if Crowley showed a distinct dislike for them and continued to look for ways around.

"Foiled again, huh?" she asked, as the puppy saw her now and came barking up at her in greeting. Maya picked him up, giving some good smooches as she unlocked the gate and headed down. They were awaited at the bottom by both Peanut and Lupescu. So many dogs in the house was, at this point, an acceptable chaos, as far as they were all concerned. "Hey there, hello," Maya opened the bottom gate, careful to come through and shut it again before anyone else had any ideas. She set Crowley back on the ground, and the puppy took off for the kitchen with a bark, shortly to be followed by his sister and her new friend, the better to find the others, human and canine both.

She'd been certain to be the first one up that day, that she would come down to the kitchen for a quiet cup of coffee, looking over everything for that day as she had a quiet breakfast, finding no other human until after she was out the shower and started to get dressed. Instead, she came along to find her husband, her brother, and her bandmate, them and all six of the dogs presently calling this house their home, awake and awaiting her arrival.

"Shouldn't you guys be asleep?" Maya couldn't keep from smiling. They were all looking at her like they had pulled off some master plan.

"What, and miss this?" Rosa asked, snapping a photo with her phone. "I'm on chronicling duties."

"Noticed," Maya reached up to check her hair, as unkempt as it was bound to be.

"Breakfast is almost ready," Sam reported, holding out a cup to her. She accepted it, giving her brother a shoulder bump before turning to Lucas. He stood there, one hand behind his back and a very specific grin on his face, all of which suggested…

"You have an apple for me, don't you?" Maya stared up at him. Without any shift at all, he pulled the fruit into view, all shiny and red. "You are such a nerd," she hummed, accepting and returning the kiss he gave her. "You had one of those on your first day of school, didn't you?"

"If you mean that my mother insisted I bring my teacher one and a bunch of other kids laughed when I did it, then yes, I did," Lucas told her, and Maya had to laugh. Every now and then he would pull out a story like this, something she had never heard in all the years they'd known each other, and it genuinely felt like he would still have some of those to spring on her, years and years from now.

"You really didn't have to get up for this," Maya told him, her face saying she was very touched regardless. "I'm just going to work, and no one should be up this early if they don't have to."

"Too late now, we've committed," Lucas told her. "Besides, if this is 'just going to work,' look me in the eye and tell me you haven't been freaking out over it since you woke up."

"I…" Maya started, but there was really no use trying to get around it, so she sighed and kissed him again before taking her seat at the table.

After breakfast, Maya hurried up for a quick shower before getting into the process of picking out her clothes for the day. Part of her had wanted to pick everything out the night before, leave it hanging in wait, but in the end she'd decided against it. She was going to decide this morning, basing herself on whatever she was feeling would fit her mood now.

"Should I hide the tattoos or leave them in the open?" she asked, catching Lucas' reflection in the mirror as she tested out one combo in front of herself. "Does it say 'I'm trying to make a good impression' or 'I think people won't like me if I show them' if I hide them?"

"Well, they'll be there whether you show them now or not," Lucas shrugged. "And you didn't get them to pretend like you didn't have them, did you?"

"I would have put them somewhere people couldn't see," she turned to face him, showing a smirk as she left him to decide where those places might have been.

"Me, too," he simply told her, holding up his arm, where he had those same two tattoos she had on her own. "Just wear what you want to wear."

"Right," she agreed, tossing him her previous pick before turning back to the closet.

Picking the right outfit had really taken no time at all. As she went about dressed, Lucas went ahead and started getting ready for _his_ day of work. He could have waited a while longer, but it was really better off if he started now. He had a feeling some other 'crisis' would present itself when it came time for Maya to decide how she would do her hair, up or down… She'd already started the familiar 'up/down' match in the mirror. She made up her mind on her own though, and he watched her pull her long hair into a high ponytail she then twisted into a clean bun. When she was done, she turned on her heel to face him with 'well?' in her eyes.

"I think I'm ready for some remedial art, Teach," Lucas smiled.

"You've got husband eyes, I can't use you," Maya waved at his face with a laugh. "Sam!" she called out.

Once he had been able to get up the stairs without causing a puppy pile-up, her brother had confirmed Lucas' appraisal that she had picked well.

"You sure?" Maya asked him.

"I'd listen to you if you stood in front of my class," Sam declared.

"Like you haven't paid attention to every one of your teachers growing up," she pointed out. "Rosa!"

"How many people are you going to call into our room before you believe us?" Lucas laughed.

"She's definitely got the authority thing down," Sam told him, his grin righting itself into a polite smile under his sister's squint. "See?"

"What's up?" Rosa appeared, with Crowley and Lupescu under either of her arms.

"Tell her she looks fine already?" Sam told her.

"Hey, let her decide," Maya shooed her brother off. Rosa motioned for her to turn around, and Maya did so.

"Again," Rosa told her, and she turned again. "Gold star from me."

"Great, okay, thanks," Maya went on to finish. Lucas and Sam looked to Rosa, who gave a self-satisfied smile and marched off with the dogs.

With the rest of her look completed and Sam gone off to his room, Maya picked up her bag and turned to Lucas. He could just see that bit of nerves still coursing through her, mixed in with trepidations for what she was on her way to do. This day had been so long coming, and much as they would go around and tease her about it, Lucas knew that they shared an understanding, too, of how important this day was for her. She had gone from a girl who struggled to thrive in school to a woman eager to become part of the education of student upon student for years to come. She had gone from someone who could hardly see a future for herself to now knowing right where she was going and making steps day after day to make it happen.

"Can I drive you to school?" Lucas asked, and oh how those words, in that tone, could take them both back to days when they were both bound for that school, as students…

"I don't know, can I pick you up from work?" she inquired. He could grab the bus from the high school over to the bookstore, and as she would be done with work before he was…

"I like that plan," he agreed.

After allowing Rosa to take a picture of her on her first day of school, Maya hugged her and Sam both before getting in the car with Lucas. On top of any number of reasons why she would be glad to have him along for the ride, Maya decided maybe it was a good thing that he was the one behind the wheel this morning. For all she knew, she could have ended up nervous/excited all the way off the road. Probably not, but… well, better safe than sorry, yeah?

When they pulled up to the school and turned into the parking lot, Maya was very happy to show that she had her own reserved space.

"Do you have to go inside already?" Lucas asked.

"Hey, it's me, I'm early," she pointed out.

"Right, what was I thinking?" he smiled. "Come on."

They found their way over to their old bench, where they had spent so many mornings waiting for their friends to come along, for the time when they had to go into the building, to get to class…

"Does it feel different to you, too?" Maya asked. "Not bad, just… different."

"Kind of does, yeah," Lucas nodded. "We started sitting out here, maybe exactly ten years ago now," he pointed out, which made her sit back, reflecting on the notion.

"Nine years ago, we found out they disbanded the teams…" she recalled.

"So eight years ago..." he started but didn't say the rest, didn't need to. The accident… It still felt like yesterday sometimes.

"We got the teams back, the year after that," Maya told him, bringing them away from the bad memory and into a good one.

"Then there was that six-year gap…"

"… and now we're back," Maya nodded, with a smile made for being kissed. Right in that moment, she had never been more ready to get started.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	200. Their Art of Growth

July 18th 2020

_Chapter 200  
Their Art of Growth_

Lucas had left while she remained on the bench. He would have gone inside with her, but she'd asked to be left to it on her own, so he'd kissed her and wished her a great day, and he'd walked away. Maya watched him go all the way out beyond view before turning to look at the school again. She took a deep breath. She may have been back on the old bench, the way she would be throughout her high school years, but she wasn't a student like she'd been back then.

She still felt like a student, in a way, felt like a kid trying to be an adult. It was so far from the truth, and she knew it, she did. She had been working down at the theater for nearly two years, held her own with no uncertainty. She guessed it was this place, stepping back into the place where she had been a student that went and reawakened that feeling in her, like she was fifteen all over again instead of twenty-five.

"Alright, Friar, pull it together," she breathed to herself, standing from the bench. In that moment, calling up her husband's name, _her_ name now, she had a feeling he might have gone and pulled that old trick of theirs once again, the same he'd pulled the day they were married. Sitting back on the bench, she opened her bag and searched through it until, in the small inside pocket, she fished out the watch, filled with so many memories and so much meaning over time that to hold it now… It really felt like he was here with her.

Finally, she stood again, and she walked into the school. In her mind, it felt just a bit like she'd gone and hit the reset button. She was walking in here like she was setting down the very first words of a brand new chapter.

The first time she'd walked into the art classroom, knowing it was now _her_ classroom, she'd had to take a deep breath to keep from really just… spazzing out in front of the principal. That would have been too much, yeah? Yeah… She might have shut the door and quietly had it out when he'd left her alone though. She'd taken pictures of the room from every which way she could, so she might figure out what changes she might want to bring to the set-up, and she'd gotten a look at what supplies she had and might need to get hold of… All of this had been seen to ahead of today, when she would receive her first students.

"Stood on stage in front of hundreds of people how many times? You can handle twenty-something teenagers," she told herself as she set her bag down and turned to face the room. She imagined all those stools occupied with her students, and to feel the excitement it gave her, there was no doubt: she was right where she was supposed to be. She took a deep breath, let it out. Really, the wait was the thing that would do her in, waiting for the students to come along, the bell to ring, the class to start…

She was drawn out of her thoughts by the sound of a camera shutter. Maya looked to the open door.

"Dad, what are you…" she laughed, trying not to look so flustered by the surprise.

"What, I had to see you in your class," Shawn shrugged, walking into the room proper. "I would have waited until you had kids in here, but I didn't want to embarrass you on your first day of school."

"Thanks for that," Maya held back a smirk. After a couple seconds of their just standing and looking at one another, she beamed and moved up to hug her father. "And for being here. Now, you need to go," she looked at the time. Students were bound to start walking the halls any minute. "If you guys want to come over for dinner tonight though, I get to tell you all about how it went."

"Done," Shawn agreed at once. "I'm buying," he pointed at her as he backed out of the room.

"Go say hi to your bestie there," Maya waved him down the hall.

She had a feeling that picture would soon be making the rounds among her various parents and grandparents. She could have felt like it would be weird, but then why should she? They were proud of her, all of them, and really that was something _she_ was proud of. Getting to this point in her life, becoming a teacher, it had been her goal for years now. She'd gone to school for it, trained for it… and then two years after that, she'd made it.

Was there a part of her that wanted to get here for them, for her family? Yes, very much. They would not have been any less proud of her if she'd just kept on with the theater, abandoning 'the original plan.' The only one who would have been disappointed about that, the absolute only person in the world would have been her. She had done so much already in two years at the theater, and if that wasn't enough, well she had her contract, the songs she'd already had come out, by Ree Forster, and the Violets, and Marika Marsden… Ree was due to come down to Austin in a matter of weeks, so they could get started on her new album, and she had another song in the works for a new artist, what was to be her fourth single. And she had the band, ten years strong and still going…

All these things she had achieved, and still she ended up here, relieved that a picture should make her family proud, that it would show that she had made it, that she had… that she'd followed through.

_That's not why I'm here…_

She had been a rudderless child. Her father had gone away, left her to a mother who herself needed something in her life she had yet to find. She didn't blame her for this, not in the slightest… not anymore… But Maya had been going into the world with potential building up inside her and no notion of how to access it, to make something out of it.

She'd always liked to draw, had quickly started to get better at it without really thinking much of it. The moment that went and started to turn the tide was the move, when her mother had told her they were going to leave New York. As she'd been forced to say goodbye to everything she'd known, she'd taken it upon herself to draw as many of those important things as she could. She wanted to take them with her. She could have taken pictures, sure, but it wouldn't have been the same. The pictures just could not collect details in the same way _she_ could, with her pencils. If she drew them, she was committing it all to paper and to memory both.

If not for her doing all of those, for her mother noticing it and stopping to buy her that sketchbook and those colored pencils, on the road to Austin, she might not have continued to expand the way she'd done, found the first notes of her own voice, emerging from deep within. She could 'say' things with her art, things she could not express with words. And beyond that… The deeper she had delved into this world, it was like she had learned a new language, and it existed in her eyes.

Art had taught her about herself. It had not been alone.

Lindsay Alcott, Cory Matthews, Patty Robinson… They were only three among many, but they were the three at the top of that hill.

Miss Alcott had been there, at the beginning of her start in Texas. Maya had arrived in this city, feeling like she'd lost her whole world. She didn't know who to be anymore, and she was afraid of making a bad impression around these people who didn't know her. But there had been this young English teacher, and looking back on their interactions in that first year, Maya could just see it now, how she would have been compelled, how she would have seen a way in. All she'd needed was the right key. In her case, it had been a book, just the right one to be the first step in nurturing a new openness to knowledge.

And Mr. Matthews, well… He had been in her life a long time before he'd been her teacher, and even then he had only been that for a very brief time before she'd gone and moved away, hadn't been that again until a year after that, when the family had also relocated to Texas. When he had finally become her teacher in earnest, he had found a girl very different from the one he's last seen in New York. In one short year, she had developed a whole other outlook on the world. He had found this, and he had continued to nurture it, that year and then all through high school, after he'd transferred up there from the middle school. He hadn't been that to her for six years already, not in the strictest sense of the word, but then Cory Matthews was just the kind of guy who could not 'turn it off.' The man had been her teacher for… nineteen years and then some, and he would continue to be that, for as long as she could need him. She might need him for the rest of their lives.

Patty Robinson had just come into her life, her first day of college, like a whirlwind. If she hadn't already come to the point in her life where she knew what she wanted to do for the rest of it, she would have known it the moment she saw that white-haired woman. _That_ was the aspiration, _that_ was the goal. She didn't want to turn into Professor Robinson, not like that, just… She exuded so much self-assurance, self-awareness, and when she spoke people listened. Maya couldn't say what went through everyone's minds as they listened to her, but she knew she'd get them all thinking, the way she got _her_ thinking. She had such a curiosity for the world, and it was infectious in the best possible way. It was no wonder Pappy Joe had fallen for her the way he did. Now, by virtue of two marriages, her own and her former Professor's, the two of them had gone and become family.

Maya stood before her empty classroom that morning, ready to welcome her very first students, and she was so ready. It had been a long road, from there to here, stretching back the whole of her life, in Austin, in New York… She wasn't out here to find 'the next Maya,' in need of direction. Not everyone was like her, and not everyone would find their answer in the same place, but… She believed she could be someone for these kids. Her impact could be monumental like it could be near to insignificant, she didn't care. They all had their own stories, and she couldn't wait to meet them.

Out in the hall, she could hear voices buzzing, laughter, and locker doors. The soundtrack of a high school morning, the first day for everyone else… Maya resisted the urge to go and spy on them. She went instead to open up her bag and prepare for her first group. She had lists of names. Back home, she had a box of files and notes from her predecessor. She hadn't opened it yet, as had been suggested. She was supposed to meet them for herself first, get to know them just a bit, and now she was about to.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	201. Their Art of Beginning

July 19th 2020

_Chapter 201  
Their Art of Beginning_

"Maya," a voice whispered. Turning around, she found it belonged to August Matthews. The boy stood planted just inside the door, almost lurking.

"Welcome," she grinned, feeling almost relieved at the thought of his being the first of her students coming around.

She would be starting her day with the seniors, and she remembered enough of her experience _being_ a senior to know she might be coming up against a tough group, with how they were both the eldest of her students, but also the ones nearest to her own age. She was still known to get carded in some places, and she knew how some of her former classmates tended to behave around the younger teachers. But August… She'd known him since he was a baby, which really felt strange to think about, especially right here, as he stood aged seventeen, one year off from going to college.

"I need a favor," August told her, still keeping his voice down.

"Sure, what is it?" Maya asked.

"Can you pretend like we don't know each other?" he requested. Maya blinked. "It's nothing against you, I'm happy that you're here," he quickly added. "But it's bad enough that my dad is a teacher here, if they find out about you…"

He didn't really have any friends left out here, she knew that. His best friend had moved back to Canada a couple years back, and after that he'd had Michaela and _her_ best friends. But they had been a year ahead of him, and now they were all gone, leaving him on his own. She'd never needed to inquire or intervene, but now here she stood, his teacher… She looked at him, and already without asking a thing he gave her plenty in the way he stood, and looked back at her. He got good grades, she knew that, but it was the rest that was the problem. He was on his own, sort of awkward… a target.

"I won't lie," she told him. "That would make things worse, trust me. But I won't treat you any different than the others. I wouldn't have to begin with. Good?" August looked around for a moment, gripping at one of the straps on his bag.

"Okay," he finally nodded.

"Great," Maya smiled. "While there's no one here, I was going to say I'm really glad you're in my first group. It's reassuring. That'll be our secret." August nodded, with a small smile that showed his resemblance to his mother, before moving to take a seat. He stalled and looked at her. "Oh, anywhere you want, there's no assigned seating," she told him, and so he went to take a seat at the second station near to the window.

After August's arrival, it was no more than a minute of awkward silence before more students started to trickle in. They would already know about there being a new teacher, with how her predecessor had left ahead of the end of last year, but whether you knew it was coming or not, a new teacher was bound to be a topic of curiosity. Everyone who came into the room now did the same sort of routine. They walked in, and they spotted her standing there, looked at her for a moment before moving to take a seat, where they looked at her some more.

The reactions varied, and Maya was not surprised in the slightest for how the divide primarily existed between the boys and the girls. The boys… well, there no other way to say it. They suddenly found themselves with a teacher forty years the junior to the one they'd last had. There were some shy ones, who looked like they'd have trouble saying so much as one word to her. There were the over confidant ones, who'd think it would be so funny to make a move on her… Whoever was left in the middle would be those ones who had seen her and now wiled away the time to the start of class. Meanwhile, where the girls were concerned, it really felt like most of them were trying to figure her out, to see where she'd stand, whether that was so that they'd feel at ease to open up or so that they'd know how much they could get away with.

The one other thing she soon was left to take note of was a buzz of voices floating across the room, as some of the students looked at her and had that familiar look to them, of recognition. There was just going to be one at least, whichever group she was dealing with at the time, and that was all it would take in order for the word to spread to those 'not in the know.' A few of them were taking their phones out now, showing them to their friends.

"I'm telling you, that's her," she heard one girl tell her friend, just as the bell rang.

_Here we go, class is in session._ Luckily, if she could call it luck, they were already giving her a reason to speak.

"Okay, good morning, hello everyone, phones away please," Maya pressed her hands together as she addressed the room. "My name is Maya Friar, and I will be your art teacher," she introduced herself, doing her very best to keep contained everything she felt in saying those words. "I've been looking forward to meeting all of you for a while now, and that's what today is going to be about: getting to know each other."

Much as she'd wondered if her age would come and be a hindrance in some situations, she was just as aware that it would be an asset in others. For one, it had helped her get a vague idea as to who she'd be dealing with. Now, it helped her spot out one boy who looked like he was about to make some kind of comment on the possibility of getting to know _her_ and get ahead of it.

"I'll start, because I have a feeling a few of you have already figured out a thing or two. I was born in New York, moved to Austin when I was in seventh grade. This was my school, and this room right here was one of my favorites. The other was the gym. I was on the basketball team, captain in my senior year. And, for ten years now, I have been in a band called TXNY with a handful of my friends. Before I was hired here as a teacher, I started a program at the Silvan Hughes theater called Stage Ready. I still work there, sharing these two passions in my life, the performing arts and the visual ones, too. So, that's me. Now, I'd like to hear about all of you. I'll leave it up to you to raise your hand when you want to have your turn, but I would like to hear something from each of you before the period's over, so do I have any volunteers to start?"

There were about two seconds of silence after she finished, not enough for her to become concerned that no one would raise their hand, before a girl sitting at one of the front row stations answered the call.

"Yes, alright, what's your name?" Maya smiled.

"Milena Janacek," the girl replied, and Maya recognized her as the one whose voice she'd caught just before the bell. It was right there in her eyes, too. She was a fan of the band. To her credit, she answered the question rather than to turn this into a Q&A about the band. "I'm sixteen, skipped a grade," she started, which immediately brought a boy at one of the back stations to scoff. "That would be my brother. He's salty about it," Milena threw a look back to her brother, who frowned in response. "I'm deaf in one ear," she pointed to the left one like she wanted to get that fact out of the way. "I've lived in Austin all my life. I'm on the swim team, tried for basketball a couple of times but didn't make it. I have a cat called Muffin, and an overprotective dad, and an annoying but lovable older brother. That's about it."

"Great, thanks for that," Maya smiled back at her. "A rebuttal from annoying but lovable?" she called to the boy in the back, making the others laugh quietly. Thankfully, Milena's brother took it in stride.

"Antonin Janacek, people call me Tony," he introduced himself. "Just turned eighteen a week ago. I work at my dad's shop, we fix cars. Captain of the basketball team two years running," he revealed, and the impressed look on the new teacher's face possibly earned her points with the boy. "Mostly get by in most classes. I like to draw, started doing it because… well, my mother was an artist," he revealed, and while Maya had guessed from his sister's response that their mother was no longer in the picture, Tony's confirmed, in tandem with the look on Milena's face, that she was no longer living.

"I can't wait to see what you'll do in here then," Maya told him with an appreciative tip of the head, calling no more attention to the unspoken truth than was necessary.

After the Janaceks had done their part, the other students went ahead and started to take their turns. It was a lot of information for Maya to take in, but she handled it well enough. She could look at all of their faces and recall every detail big or small. As more and more of them took their turn, it was getting harder and harder not to look toward August, wondering when he would raise his hand. Here was this boy she had known all his life, and suddenly, in this setting, it felt like maybe she didn't know him at all. He was not shy like this, not any time she had seen him, and she saw plenty of him. This version of August Matthews felt like how it would be to compare Asher and Joey, or Nellie and Gracie, except he was just one person. He had long felt like a little brother to her, and now…

"Yes?" she nodded, trying not to sound so invested, when he finally raised his hand, third from last.

"August Matthews," he stated. "Seventeen. I moved to Texas when I was six." His pause here showed how he was having to work extra hard to edit out any connections that might establish their knowing each other. "I have a bird, a parakeet, called Daisy. She was my girlfriend's, but she went away to college this fall, so I said I'd look after her." One of the boys in the back gave an audible chuckle, only to get a warning tap to the arm from Tony Janacek. Maya stared back at the pair of them with a warning of her own. She turned back to August, picking up some more information from the pause stretching on. Finally, he started up again. "I don't know what I want to do next year," he admitted, looking back to Maya and nearly giving himself away now for the look he had when he remembered who he was making this statement to.

"Well, you've got time," she told him, holding his gaze until he quietly nodded.

By the time the last of the students had said their part, they were a minute off from the bell. Just like that, her first class was ending. She thanked them all for sharing with her, and soon they were all getting up, filing out of the room and on their way to their next class. Maya watched them go, all of these boys and girls who had been names on a page not too long ago. Suddenly, they were so much more to her. She would only have a year with this group, but she looked forward to seeing them through it as much as she did her freshmen.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	202. Their Art of Discovery

July 20th 2020

_Chapter 202  
Their Art of Discovery_

"Well, here she comes. How's day one treating you?"

Maya had barely stepped into the teachers' lounge that Mr. Matthews was standing from his table and signalling her over to join him. She had interacted with the whole of the faculty, here and there in the last few weeks… some of them in past years when they had been her teachers. This was the first time she was coming into the lounge though, the first time she joined them as one of their peers, over lunch. There was no telling how long it would take her to chase away that feeling of walking among giants, so she'd just have to go around as though she had stilts until then.

"Oh, you know, I'm just trying to get to know everyone," she told him, taking a seat at his side. Already at the table with him sat science teacher Daniel Brett. He was one of those who had come along in the time since she had graduated. _Her_ science teacher had been Mrs. Brown, who had finally retired a few years back. She had been here long enough to have also taught Mr. Brett, who had been teaching across town until the position opened up. "Met your daughter," Maya nodded to the man. "She's a trip," she chuckled, finding the sentiment on fifteen-year-old Daphne Brett echoed back on to her colleague's face.

"She's the picture of her mother in every way," Mr. Brett informed her.

Looking around, it was hard not to pinpoint the mix of teachers who had been Maya's own teachers back when she'd been a student here and those who had been hired in the last six years. It wasn't as strange for her, maybe, as it might have been for someone else like her, just starting out in the same place where she had been a student. Hanging out with teachers outside of teacher/student context, well, she had done that for years now, with Mr. Matthews. It wasn't _not_ weird, just… less. She only had to look around and see those others of her former teachers to know the bar had not quite come down.

After Mr. Matthews and Miss Alcott, there were a handful of teachers who had either been hers or prominent enough for her to recognize. She knew Mr. Castillo, the Spanish teacher, though she had not been in his class. His hair had gone to gray since she'd last been a student here. She also knew Mademoiselle Rousseau, the French teacher, and she could not wait to tell her about her honeymoon in Paris. She'd already said hello to Kelly Anderson, who alternated Algebra and Geometry, more than once today, as their classes were just about across the hall from one another's. Mrs. Anderson had welcomed her like a neighbor dropping in to see you after you'd just been away on a trip and wanting to catch up.

There were a number of new faces for her to start at ground level with, like Mr. Brett, and she was really happy for it. The gym teacher was also new, mostly, starting his second year. To hear him though, he would not be here very long, as he expected to get called up to a university position. The only other thing she could say about him was that he was somewhere about thirty, and had just the looks to him to make a portion of the student body very eager to attend gym class, the better to stare and giggle. Maya also met the basketball coaches, both of them having replaced those brought along after the teams had been reinstated. They may have come along after her time, but they had known her immediately for having played for the school, and Maya had loved hearing about the previous season, and what they were looking to find once try-outs kicked off. The other highlight for her had been the new music teacher, quite literally, as she was also starting this year, both at the school and as a teacher on the whole. If their being in close-knit fields, and being newbies, hadn't been enough, she was also aware of TXNY, as well as her song writing, and Stage Ready, too, and it had set the two of them in a few long and excited conversations.

Maya's mornings saw her with her twelfth grade class in first period, and then her tenth graders in third. It had left her with a break between her two classes and then between the second and lunch. She'd stayed in her classroom over second period, just sort of processing everything, taking notes on anything the students had said which she might want to recall. Little by little, it felt like they were becoming a part of her world, even if they had barely spoken to her for a minute or two each. She would be following their progress all through this year, she _would_ get to know them.

Once she had finished with her notes, there had been not so much time left until her next class would come around, so she'd spent that time tinkering at the new song she'd been working on, the better to occupy herself and make the time go by. She'd been so wrapped up in this that, when the bell rang at the end of second period, she stood up and started gathering her things for several seconds before she stopped and remembered she wasn't a student here anymore, hadn't been in a while.

"Well the good thing is no one else saw that," she'd told herself before getting ready for the arrival of the tenth graders.

This group, two years younger than the previous, was in a lot of ways different from the one she'd had earlier. There was the curiosity over the new teacher, and then the rush of recognition floating from ear to ear… One of the boys had demanded that she sing something. She'd told him to go first. She did not have to sing.

With her morning classes behind her and time to kill until lunch, she'd left her classroom and gone back outside, sitting on her old bench to add the new group to her notes of the day. When she was done, she'd just sat there, breathing the air in and letting it out… She was already looking forward to the next day. Yes, this was day one, but they hadn't really started, had they? All they were doing today was talking, sharing. That was important, too, naturally, but now that she was getting to know them she really wanted to give them something to do, to get to know them in this other way.

_Maya: Dad stopped by the school this morning. I invited them to dinner tonight._

_Lucas: Rosa said she's making dinner, I'll let her know._

_Lucas: How's it going?_

_Maya: Getting to know a lot of people today. You might need to quiz me._

_Lucas: I am good with a flash card._

_Maya: Thanks for the watch._

_Lucas: Anytime._

_Maya: 366… a lot._

_Lucas: I 366 you, too._

She could have told him how nervous she was to walk into that teacher's lounge, as ridiculous as she felt for those nerves, but she already knew what he would tell her, and she took those unspoken words to heart. Now, here she was, with Mr. Matthews – who told her she could call him Cory, now that they were colleagues, even though she refused it – and Mr. Brett. Not long after this, they were also joined by Lindsay Alcott, who'd been delayed by the need to speak to one of her students.

She was eager, much as Mr. Matthews had been, to hear about her morning, her first classes. It didn't take long that Maya was reminded how her students were also all of theirs, too. One of them would bring up this sophomore, or that junior, and then the others would nod in recognition. It was like they were all playing a card game, and they all had part of a set in their hands, part of a story, a student. When they would bring up one of hers, those she'd met in the morning or those she still only knew from a name on a list, Maya would listen intently, the better to fill in her own picture.

"Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?" she asked Lindsay as they left the lounge together.

"Yeah, sure, what's up?" the English teacher asked as they moved down the hall. Some of the students were standing here and there, at their lockers, or coming out of the bathroom. There was still just under ten minutes until the bell would call everyone to class.

"How do you draw the line, when you have someone in your class that's also another teacher's kid? At what point do you go from consulting a colleague to informing a parent?" Maya slowly asked. Lindsay looked at her for a moment, soon parsing through the question.

"You had the seniors this morning?" she asked, and Maya nodded. "Is this about August?" She could only tip her head, showing how the fact that Lindsay could put it all together this way could only mean that she wasn't making a mountain out of a mole hill but a mountain out of a mountain. "Right, so here's the thing. On the one hand, you can say that if it has to do with his schoolwork, you're speaking to the teacher, and if it's to do with him as a person, then it's the parent. But then, any one of us might speak to another, swapping thoughts on how to proceed, in no way that would require us to get in touch with the parents. Add to it the fact that up to a certain point you need to respect that something may have been told to you in confidence."

"I don't know if I'd call it that, it's just something… I observed. And, yeah, in this case, part of it comes from the fact that I know this boy, and I've known him all his life, except… not like this."

"No, I've seen it, too. I might not have known him all his life, but I've worked with his father on and off for years now, I've seen him before ever being his teacher."

"And Mr. Matthews, what does he say?" Maya asked. It was so strange to find herself in this position, being let in to a facet of these family friends she had never been aware of until today. It felt almost like she was invading their privacy, but then what other choice did she have?

"He's… aware, to a point. August and him, being in this school together, it puts him in a place where his intervention might only make things worse. And August won't let him in, not as far as I've seen."

Maya didn't know what to say. Much as they both had some things they kept to themselves, she was roughly certain that Riley had no idea there was anything going on with her younger brother, or else she would have told Maya, especially now that she was about to be his teacher.

"I think, personally, if you want to speak to Cory about it, then you should," Lindsay finally told her, and Maya breathed out. It probably wouldn't be today, too much going on, but yeah…

"I will," she told Lindsay. "Thanks."

"Anytime," Lindsay smiled back at her. "I have a feeling you are going to fit right into this faculty."

The words sent Maya back to her classroom with much needed warmth. This small detour into her concerns for August Matthews had briefly derailed her from the spirit of this day, but now she needed to center herself once again, to prepare herself for two more classes, and so many new stories to learn.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	203. Their Art of Teaching

July 21st 2020

_Chapter 203  
Their Art of Teaching_

"Afternoon, Mrs. Friar!"

Maya turned around to find Missy Sanderson standing in the doorway, Kai Avelino just behind her. Seeing the excited look on her neighbor's face, she had to laugh. She'd been going on about how it was going to be so weird not to just call her Maya, when she'd been doing it for two years already, and would continue to do so when they weren't in school. In the end she had decided to stick to Mrs. Friar for the last week, the better to get used to it.

"Afternoon to you, too, both of you," she motioned for them to come into the room proper. They were in her ninth grade class, both of them, on this first period after lunch. As they came along, Missy reached into her bag.

"From my grandma," she held out a clear plastic container, holding a piece of pie. Missy's grandmother was practically renowned for her pies, competed across the state with them and generally came back with the top prize every time. "I forgot about it earlier or I would have brought it to you before lunch."

"Nothing wrong with some afternoon pie," Maya hummed with a smile. "Thank you for bringing it to me," she told Missy. "I told Coach Langford about you," she turned to Kai.

"You did?" the boy's eyes widened at the mention of the boys' basketball coach. "What'd you tell him? What did _he_ say?"

"Only good things," Maya promised. "He is looking forward to see you get out there." This sent him off to find his seat – at the same station as Missy's – with a nervous smile. "Hey, so, anything I should know about…" she started to whisper at them, before pulling back at the arrival of some more students.

"No way…" one of the girls stalled when she saw Maya, nearly causing a pile-up before the others behind her forced her to keep moving, all the while stealing looks back to the new teacher. It hadn't been lost on Maya that she was wearing a TXNY shirt and had clearly not been aware when she'd put it on that morning that her new art teacher would be one of its members.

"Good afternoon, everyone," Maya swung back into her start of class introductions for the third time now, the notion fuelling her smile and her energy. It could have started to feel repetitive after going through those facts over and over, but it was almost like a 'choose your adventure' kind of thing, where she started in the same place, with her introduction, and from that point on the road went and split into one, two, now three, and soon four different paths, as she would now be treated to the tales of a new group of students.

These ones, her ninth graders, would be the first group of kids she would get to see through the whole of their high school days, in her class, in the school… They were just starting here today, same as her, and she pointed this out to them now. When she asked who would like to go first in making their own introduction, it was to no surprise that she found the first hand belonged to…

"Missy Sanderson… Does it say that on your papers or Melissa?" she diverted at once. "I asked if they could change it." Maya cleared her throat. "Right, that can wait. Anyway, I'm fifteen, I live on a farm with my parents, and my grandparents. I am a ballet dancer, and I love zombies," she grinned, sharing a look with Kai. She might have said plenty more about herself, but Maya suspected it was hard for her to come up with much else to tell her, as none of it would have been new information to her teacher right here. Mostly her eyes spoke of how thrilled she was that _she _was here as their new teacher, out of anyone in the world. Maya smiled.

"Thank you for sharing, Missy. Who would like to go next?"

Much as her reflex might have been to let Kai take his turn after this, his hand had been beat in ending up in the air, so she had signalled that he would go after the one who'd gotten there first. This one had been a boy who generally gave the impression of volunteering now solely in order to get the exercise out of the way and be able to sit quietly the rest of the class. Maya did not push on, instead turning to Kai so they might continue on with the other students.

"Hey, I'm Kai Avelino, I'm fifteen now but I'll be sixteen next month," he started, looking immediately like he was coming up against the same issue Missy had done, in that she pretty much knew already what there was to know about him, so he ran through it anyway, each statement sounding like 'which you already know' was tacked on to it. "I'm a basketball player, like my brother and sister. They went here, too, they were on the teams. My brother taught me how to play. My sister got me into zombies," he recalled fondly. "My mother is the best cook I know… I'm really not. And my father, he grew up on beaches, surfing. He kind of sticks out around here, and some people think he's weird, but they just don't know him."

"I played with your sister, my senior year. Your dad in the stands was kind of the best to get everyone cheering," Maya recalled, and Kai laughed. "Alright, who wants to go next? You?" she acknowledged the next hand that came up. The girl it belonged to froze, blinking back at her for a moment before speaking so quiet that Maya could not understand a word. "Sorry?"

"Bathroom," she finally caught. "Can I go, please?"

"Oh, sure, sure, the pass is there by the door," Maya pointed, and the girl stood from her seat at the back station by the window, rounding around to the front and taking the pass on her way out. "I should have asked her name," Maya mumbled to herself before turning back to the others. "Who's next?"

After one boy who tried to get smart with her and came up short against a flare of New York Maya, and a girl who sounded primed for becoming a future entertainment correspondent, the next hand that went up belonged to the girl with the TXNY shirt. Maya kept her apprehension on the inside before calling on her to introduce herself. At the same time, her eyes kept ticking to the empty stool and wondering about her unnamed pass user.

"I'm Phoebe Munroe, sixteen years old," the girl in the shirt announced, in a cheerful voice that reminded Maya at once of Riley, in her own way, and it made her smile to hear it. "I'm really bad at drawing, but I love doing it so I do it anyway," she revealed. Maya gave her a confident nod. _Good on you._ "My brother says someone should put me in a padded suit because of how clumsy I am and it shouldn't be up to our parents to keep up the band-aid business." _Okay, I take it back, she's Riley and Dylan in one._

"That bad, huh?" Maya asked. In demonstration, Phoebe lifted up her arm and bent it to show her elbow, which had been covered in a couple bandages to cover a sufficient area. "When did that happen?"

"Like an hour ago?" Phoebe cringed.

"Right… I'll keep the first aid kit stocked then," Maya breathed.

"Oh, I bring my own," Phoebe informed her. Maya blinked, holding back a smile. She may have had a soft spot for this one already.

"Preparation, that's good. Anything else?"

"I saw you when you sang at Ree Forster's show last winter," the girl informed her, and Maya wondered how she'd react if she told her about the album they'd be working on together.

After Phoebe had her turn, and one of the boys had gone, too, Maya really couldn't just let it wait any longer, and she asked Missy to go check on the girl in the bathroom. Three more introductions later, Missy came back, stopping at the door and motioning for Maya to come to her.

"She won't come," she whispered. "She says she's not feeling well, but I think she just doesn't want to have to talk." Maya let out a breath, nodding in thanks and telling her to go back to her seat.

"I'll be right back, don't get me in trouble on my first day, alright?" she told the class. After stopping across the hall to let Mrs. Anderson know she had to step away, Maya headed to the girls' bathroom.

Inside one stall, she spotted one foot on the floor, conjuring the image of her missing student having the other pulled up, arms locked around her bent leg. Maya thought about how her mother used to tell her how much you could tell about a person from their footwear. If she were here, Katy would see the one boot there on the girl's foot, properly worn but still in good condition on the whole, that its owner knew what she liked and did not see change as an absolute necessity. Yes, it was worn, but it was still a perfectly good boot. The way the foot sat now, Maya knew the girl was aware of her presence, whether she realized who was there or not.

"Do I need to take you to the nurse?" she asked. Seconds dragged on; she had _not_ known it was her teacher this time.

"No."

"Good, that's good," Maya quietly replied, stepping forward. "Can we do this just you and me? I told you about me, now you tell me about you. There's no one else here." The second foot came into view. "Let's start with a name?" A few seconds went by.

"Stella," the girl finally told her. Per the list, Maya could fill in for herself that this was Stella Buckley. She was a ninth grader, there was nothing in Mrs. Yang's box about her for Maya to look through later on. Maybe if she'd been in middle school with Missy and Kai…

"Nice to meet you, Stella. You're… fifteen?" Maya guessed. She was. "Have you lived in Austin all your life?"

"We moved here when I was ten," Stella revealed. "I grew up in Los Angeles before that."

"Wow," Maya replied honestly. "I've never been there. Do you miss it?"

"No. I like it better here, less noise."

"Yeah, I grew up in New York, I get that," Maya nodded. "Any siblings?"

"Five older sisters."

"Woah…"

"They're all in their twenties, they don't live at home anymore. I was a surprise baby."

"I've got eleven brothers and sisters all together," Maya told her. "Oldest's seventeen, youngest is just a few months."

"Woah…" Stella echoed her earlier response and Maya chuckled.

"I know." A few seconds later, the latch was heard and the door slowly swung back, revealing the quiet girl, her hair in a low ponytail that reached down her back, face sprayed with a multitude of freckles, subdued eyes a light brown bordering on gold. Her hands were barely visible coming out of her sleeves, but what she could see of her fingers showed color… paint. It felt so instantly familiar to her that she had to smile. "Tell you what, I'm not giving homework today, but I would like you to get ahead on what I'll ask everyone to do next time, yeah? I want you to introduce yourself, not with your words but with your hands. Can you do that?"

The smile she got right then, revealing a row of braces along Stella Buckley's teeth, may have been Maya's favorite memory from that first day.

"Yeah? Good," she smiled back. "I'll get back out there, come back on your own time, just not _too _much time, alright?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	204. Their Art of Learning

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!_

* * *

July 22nd 2020

_Chapter 204  
Their Art of Learning_

As Saturday morning rolled around, Lucas woke up with the express desire to let his wife sleep in. They had spent enough nights and mornings next to one another for him to know when she was fast asleep or on the brink of waking. Today, his early bird was curled up deep in her dreams and he could have pulled his arms away and left her there, but he didn't want to. He knew that as soon as she woke up she'd be as joyously alive as she'd been all week, ever since the school year had started.

On Monday morning, when he had left her on that bench outside the school, he could just see how she was still trying to shake away some excess nerves as she prepared to lead her first classes. He had spent all day working at the bookstore feeling that part of his brain was back there in that classroom with her, and he couldn't wait to hear what was likely to be a very long and very animated story. As promised, she had arrived at the store, shortly before his shift ended, to drive them both back home where her family would be joining them for dinner.

"You look like you had a good day," he'd smiled, finding her stepping off the escalator with such an air about her of just… release. She was floating.

"It was kind of perfect, and I'm just reminding myself that it was real," she'd told him, all the while setting herself to clip his pocket watch back at his belt loop and slipping it in his pocket when this had been achieved.

She had started telling him all about it as soon as they'd gotten in the car, and by the time they arrived home she was not done yet. And then there were Shawn and Katy and the kids, and Sam, and Rosa, and the tale was started again, though she kept most of the things she'd been telling him about this student or that student out of it. Later, after their guests had gone away and they had been readying for bed, she had picked up from where she'd left off at the car, back to telling him about her students. She was well at ease sharing these facts with him, he understood. She wouldn't go and air out everyone's business with other people, even if they were family, but then with him it was something else, very much essential to her at the end of the day.

"This morning it was just you and me, now tonight it's you and me and your seventy-six kids?" he'd asked, and she'd answered with a beaming nod. "I did always envision us with a big family," he'd reflected. Maya had laughed and, oh, how she looked ready for the next day.

In the morning, in this new normal of theirs, with the earlier sounding of the alarm clock, Mrs. Friar was up and about with an energy defying the hour. For his part, Mr. Friar was off to school, so they parted ways for the day as they walked out of the house and to their respective vehicles.

Lucas arrived late on Tuesdays this semester. As had been the norm, the others had waited for him before serving dinner, and he drove up to find Maya sitting on the porch, writing in the journal she had started the day before, adding to her notes, now that the day was done, with observations and ideas for the days and weeks to come.

"Hey," he stepped up to join her, leaning to kiss the top of her head.

"How was school?" she asked.

"Long lectures, good ones," he told her. "Gross ones, according to some people. I won't tell you why," he gestured toward the house as a way of saying 'since we're about to eat.'

"Thanks for that," she smiled. "I talked Mr. Matthews, about August?"

"Yeah? What'd he say?" Lucas asked, sitting next to her. She sighed, running her hand through her hair.

"Basically, he told me how he doesn't have the full picture, but August has had problems with some of the other kids, pretty much since the beginning, since they moved out here." Lucas didn't say anything here, but he didn't have to. He had never tolerated bullies, to the point where he'd been suspended after stepping between one of those and Zay, half a lifetime ago. "But he was coping, all this time. He had his friends, he had Michaela…"

"And now they're all gone," Lucas shook his head.

"And he's all alone, exposed," Maya bowed her head. She'd loved that kid for all seventeen years he'd been alive, loved him near enough like her twelfth sibling, and the idea of anyone causing him pain, physical or otherwise, left her with a twisted feeling in her gut.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'll talk to Riley, see if she can't pull anything else out of him. I just don't want him to think that we've all been talking about him behind his back and now it's not just his big sister trying to talk to him but actually his big sister the psychologist suggesting there's something wrong with him."

She hadn't had the chance to get in touch with Riley throughout the rest of the week, though Lucas knew she intended to get to it over the weekend. They were due to stop in at the house to see how she and Dylan were settling in. Until then, all she'd been able to do was to keep doing what she'd been doing, teaching her classes, being there for August while doing her best to maintain this distance like he was any other student and not her best friend's kid brother she had known since he was that thing that kicked inside his mother's belly.

It wasn't so difficult to keep things spread out like that, not when she had all those other kids to attend to, giving them their own share of her attention. Day by day, it got to be that she learned more about all of them, some more than others.

For one thing, she had gotten to understand a bit more about her timid ninth grader. After both Missy and Kai told her that they hadn't known Stella back in middle school, or elementary school, Maya had been left to wonder where she might have gone. As it turned out, the answer as provided by the school secretary was that she hadn't gone anywhere. Up until this year, she had been home schooled, making Monday her very first day in an actual school.

On Wednesday, she'd asked her about it. After the first day, Stella had started out arriving in her classroom ahead of everyone, to the point where Maya would return from lunch to find her sitting by the door, waiting to be let in. That third day, Maya had found her still in the process of eating her packed lunch, which suggested that she had come straight here after her previous class.

"Have you gone to the cafeteria at all?" she'd asked, while the girl collected her things.

"I went on Monday," Stella informed her.

"Too noisy?" Maya guessed, and she nodded. After a moment, getting the door unlocked, she turned to the fifteen-year-old with a thought. "Tomorrow, I'll wait to go until you get here, so you can go in instead of sitting out here, okay?" Stella nodded, at once appreciative. "I heard you were home schooled before?"

"I was," Stella confirmed, moving to put her bag down at her place before turning to her teacher.

"Go ahead, finish your lunch," Maya smiled, nodding back to her belongings. The two of them ended up sitting on a couple of stools.

"When I was going to start, when I was little, we were away from home for almost a year, for my mom's job, so I had a tutor. Then we came back, and it just sort of stayed that way. When we moved out here, my parents asked if I wanted to go to an actual school, and I said no."

"What made you change your mind now?" Maya asked, as Stella took a break and had the rest of her sandwich. She gave off the impression of not being in the habit of talking for very long at a time.

"They did. They kept saying how it could be the perfect time now to give it a shot, if I was going to." One look at her said plenty on how much and how little she was adjusting to the change.

Since that day, as promised, Maya waited in her classroom for Stella to arrive. Once she did, and she settled at her place, Maya went off to the teachers' lounge for lunch. She would return to find the girl either doing homework one day, looking out the window the other. As little as she spoke unless spoken to, Maya was getting to know her in other ways, in the things she did during class time. Her 'introduction' piece had been like a conduit right to the heart of her.

Stella Buckley wasn't the only one to show herself in her art. Regardless of how any one of them would classify their skills, Maya would look at all of it and pick up on what each of those kids had to say in the way they worked. She'd look to Phoebe's work, and she'd see a lot of what she'd said, how she loved to draw but found her skills lacking. What she'd mostly see though was someone who applied herself deeply, regardless of what the results might become in her eyes. She also saw a girl with a head full of ideas, just yearning to bring some of them out into the real world.

Daphne Brett, in tenth grade, was 'all her mother,' as her father had said. This had been shown to her art teacher in the first week. Her father may have been a man of science through and through, but Daphne herself was devoted to creation, to imagination. She was a writer, and she called herself and her father 'science and fiction.' One day, she claimed, the two of them would put their heads together and create 'the greatest space opera the world has ever seen.' Maya believed her.

Of that same group, she could look to someone like Dakota Day. The boy came off as very aloof, and more than once Maya had needed to repeat his name when she would call on him. But then as distracted as he came off on the outside, she would see what he put down on paper and find maybe it wasn't so much that he was distracted but that pulling together the pieces of his mind required that extra time. Once he accomplished it, what he achieved was sort of remarkable.

When Maya's calls to spacy Dakota did not do, it would then fall to stationmate Ariel Su to tap him on the arm until he looked up. The way she told it, she had been named for how she had first kicked in her mother's belly while she was attending the Broadway production of the Little Mermaid. If she could be said to share any other characteristics with the mermaid girl, it would be her curiosity, her need for discovery. She could not leave something incomplete, no matter what. A couple times over the week, whether in Maya's class or another teacher's who then told her about it, she would be on the tail end of reading a chapter of the large novel she carried around as she walked into class, and would be found bent over it and reading as fast as she could when the bell rang.

Maya had finished each day of this first week with the junior class. They were her smallest group, but she saw this as a benefit. It meant she got to spend more time with each of them. Whether she meant to or not, each of her classes inevitably presented her with a few standouts, in one way or another. With her last group, no exception, it came to a pair of boys.

On the one side, in what really felt like a face off, sat Leon Morales. He gave Maya vibes of Lucas' classmate and friend, Bishop Nicholas, for how physically impressive he was. Tall and built like a linebacker... a gentle giant. To see him at his station, balanced on that stool, he really stood out. And then, on his drawn introduction, she would find a lot of what he had said on that first day. He was an athlete, yes, and he also liked to draw. It was peaceful to him, the best way he knew to relax and clear his mind.

On the other side of this was Derek Boggs, who was by no means a small guy, though stood next to Leon could be pinned with a nickname like Pipsqueak. In some ways, this one reminded Maya of Tyler, the boy from Shae's class back in Houston. He had something of an attitude, that could not be denied, and Maya had a feeling that sooner or later she'd have to send him to the principal, or give him detention. But for all of it, what she saw from his work, even from his words, she could almost see it, see the seams of this facade of his. Whether or not he'd ever let her see underneath it in the next two years remained to be seen.

Still, with her seniors, it was hard for her not to be focused on August Matthews, but then the rest of the class commanded her attention all the same. She would look to the Janaceks, who easily infused the room with their connection as brother and sister and the fact that younger Milena's presence would sometimes leave older Tony feeling like his kid sister was encroaching on his world. As much as he'd look quietly annoyed, he clearly loved her more than just about anyone else in the world.

The other thing she saw from them, along with Tony being a remarkable sketch artist, and Milena being a self-proclaimed color fiend, was the beginnings of what might be a new circle forming around lonely August. Tony would always intervene when someone teased him, and this in kind brought Milena to pay more attention to the Matthews boy. There was no telling how this would all resolve itself, but for now... there was promise, hope.

"Morning," Lucas spoke quietly, as Maya began to stir in his arms. He kissed her shoulder, just as she turned toward him. "Happy to sleep in?" he asked, smiling for the smile she gave him.

"I was having a really good dream, now I guess I know why," she nodded. The last week had been so much about the school. Now, these days were for him and her.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	205. Their Autumn For Days

July 23rd 2020

_Chapter 205  
Their Autumn For Days_

"I can go sit outside," Stella stood from her stool when Maya walked back into the classroom accompanied.

"Oh, no, it's alright," Maya told her. She practically had to go over to her and physically stop her from packing up her lunch and the rest of her belongings. "This is Lily Florescu, we work together at the theater," she introduced the woman presently looking around the classroom like she'd been dying to see it. "We're going to be talking a while, are you good?" Stella nodded, sitting back down at her place and opening out her lunch again. "Great," Maya smiled, grabbing a chair from the corner and bringing it to her desk, so Lily might sit with her.

"In a few years, my kids will be coming here," her assistant stated as she took her seat.

"I know," Maya nodded. "I've been thinking about that. I've got three right now in my classes, and a bunch more of the younger ones who aren't here yet. I'm basically counting down the days until my sisters get here," she laughed. Sure, deep down, she was also glad to keep them as little girls, but they'd get here sooner or later, wouldn't they? Seven years to go, just under…

Siobhan had given her what boiled down to two weeks off, letting her get the handle of her new job without having to divide her attention too much. In that time, Lily had been holding down the fort back at the theater. Today, she'd come along to catch her up on everything she'd missed, the better for them to work out how they would go from here on out.

Maya had been so wrapped up in the school these past two weeks, but now that Lily was here, and she was starting to catch her up on goings on back at the theater, it made her realize how much she had missed the place, and the people, and just the work she did there. When she had been offered the position at the school, even if it had been her goal all along, she couldn't bear the idea of leaving the theater, and Stage Ready. But Siobhan had been right there for her, and if she wanted to find a way to do both then that was what they would do. Maya was not about to put either side in peril, and if she couldn't keep up then she would step away from the theater. She knew Stage Ready would be in safe hands without her, as much as she'd prefer those hands to remain her own.

"So, the last thing," Lily told Maya, after they'd gone through everything else from actual Stage Ready matters to the occasional deviation into 'how's so and so' or any other happenings back at the theater.

"I've been waiting on that last thing, yes," Maya grinned, sitting up straight. "The Fall Festival?" she guessed, and Lily nodded.

Once again, Lindsay would be in charge of things as she had been the year before. Maya would once again be seeing to the theater's side of it, though of course this time around she would have much easier of a time coordinating with her colleague and former teacher. It would be one of those situations where she would be giving a larger share of her time toward the theater than she might do on the day to day, though it would really not be so difficult. She had two free periods every afternoon through the week, and she would be able to drop by the theater from time to time when she needed to, or go out and run this errand or that one.

She had always looked forward to the Fall Festival, every year, for what it represented to her, going back to her first year in Texas, but this one sort of felt that much more important. It wasn't lost on her how the previous year's festival, with how she'd found herself reconnecting with Lindsay Alcott, and eventually helping her on other projects, had led her to be sitting right here, finally working at the job she'd wanted to be, all this time. Going back to it now felt like her way, her chance, to say thank you.

After finishing up with Lily and seeing her out, Maya returned to her classroom, where Stella went on sitting as though no time had passed. She'd finished her lunch and was now bent over what appeared to be her algebra homework. Maya just let her be, quietly moving around the room to set up materials for the ninth graders' class after lunch.

"Can I help?" Stella asked after a minute. Maya looked back at her, sitting back there at her station and looking at her with interest.

"Well, I wouldn't want to stop you from doing your homework," Maya pointed out with a smile.

"Oh, this isn't my homework, I finished already. This is the next chapter, I just wanted to try it," Stella shrugged.

"Okay, then, come on."

After just about two weeks done, she was really coming around to the point where she'd feel as though these people who had been strangers to her were now so far from that. These kids here, all but three of them strangers to her until so recently, were now just so much more than names on a list. She was still getting to know them, but she already had spent so much time with them, had already gotten to learn so much about them, that they had reached that level where she could not recall her life before them.

"I like the festival," Stella commented as she trailed along, setting things at each station along with her teacher.

"Yeah, me, too," Maya smiled at her. "The first year when I moved to Austin with my mother, I went there with some kids from school. We were just getting to know each other back then, but we became friends soon enough, still are… and I married one of them," she held up her hand. Stella gave a great smile at this, and Maya was really glad for this interaction, and those others she'd had with her young student. When they were in class, with everyone else, Stella was just so quiet as to be nearly invisible. But then she would be here, over lunch, and she would open up enough to feel like a whole other person. Maya wished she could get to a point where she was able to be this way with other people, with other kids in her grade and beyond, but for now she had to be contented with these small steps and to hope that in time she would allow her world to expand.

"Did you move here because your parents' job, too?" she inquired.

"Sort of," Maya nodded. "It was just me and my mother back then, and she was trying to make it as an actress, back in New York."

"She's an actress?"

"She wasn't for a while. We moved here because she ended up getting this job at the theater, not for acting. For years, that's what she did, but then a little while back she auditioned for a role in a play, and she did that, then she got another part, at a theater up in Dallas. So she's basically keeping her options open right now, to keep on acting when she gets the chance."

"Can I tell you a secret?" Stella asked after a few seconds of silence, back to their supplies. Maya turned to her. "You can't tell anyone, okay? No one here."

"I promise," Maya traced a cross over her heart.

"I was in a commercial, when I was like three years old. I don't really remember doing it, but then my parents will show people the video sometimes," Stella told her, showing without saying it how she wished they would not do that and embarrass her, even if they just thought it was cute.

"Was it national or…"

"Oh, yeah, and they played it for a few years, too. It was a yogurt commercial, around Halloween actually." She'd barely said the words that it triggered a memory and Maya gasped. "Yeah," Stella nodded, guessing she'd figured it out. "My mother says I was a natural, but then I didn't want to do it again, so she let it go."

"See, now that you told me, I can just see your face and that pout you had when there was no more yogurt cups," Maya chuckled.

"When my mom shows the video to people, they always ask me to make the face. I never mean to, but then I get annoyed and it just happens."

Maya wished she could tell her she would not pull up the commercial that night to see it again for herself. She'd probably end up showing it to Lucas, too, as he was the one she'd allow herself to trust with the secret. He was back in school, too, of course, back on his daily drives to and from the university. Now that he was on the back half of this second stretch of four years, it was really something of a routine, making the distance feel so much shorter than it used to feel. He was back to swapping driver duties with Ramona, and the way things were going with her and boyfriend Ben, he suspected it wouldn't be long the two of them would be moving in together, which would likely see a change in the itinerary.

The previous Monday, back on his bookstore day, he'd shown up at the school and surprised Maya at lunch. He'd brought her an order from Ma Maggie's, and the two of them had shared the meal in the classroom. Knowing that they would have 'a guest,' he'd brought along an extra smoothie for Stella, letting her pick from the flavors he'd gotten. She'd thanked him and gone back to her stool, drinking from her straw as she went on reading her book for English. The room had smelled like syrup for the rest of the afternoon, keeping Maya in a good mood. Now they were looking to make this a weekly date, depending on what day he was at the store in each semester.

The memory of that lunch date, mixed with the earlier conversation she'd had with Lily about the kids eventually landing at the school, in her classroom, reminded her of how Lucas would be done with his own schooling, at long last, in a little under two years. After that, thanks Marianne Sullivan looking after her grandson from beyond the grave, he had his job lined up at the stables. Unlike her with the school and the theater, it would likely mean the end of _his_ other job, down at the bookstore. She didn't know why, but the idea almost made her a bit sad.

"Hey, so, before I put it out to the rest of the class, I might as well ask you right now," Maya looked to Stella as they'd finished the set-up. "Would you be interested in helping with the festival? You know, making decorations, and signs, and all that?"

"I could do that, yeah," Stella responded at once. There was a just barely noticeable twinge in her face after she said it, like she worried she might have gone in on something that would challenge her issues. No matter what, she had said yes, and she wasn't backing out. Maya hoped that this would all lead toward Stella finding her way. The world deserved to know this girl she was getting to know here, one lunch period at a time.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	206. Their Autumn For Decoration

July 24th 2020

_Chapter 206  
Their Autumn For Decoration_

"_That's_ your brother?" Ariel Su blurted out. When Maya turned to look at her, the sophomore girl appeared to remember herself, and the fact that she was speaking to one of her teachers. "I-I mean he seems nice…" she stated now, before quietly bending back over the banner she and a few others were working on, along the gym floor. Maya chuckled, getting up. "How come he doesn't go here?"

"Because he's a big smartypants and he's in his third year of college," she told her student before moving to greet Sam. For Ariel's sake, she would keep private the fact that she found him cute. "Hey, thanks for coming," she told him. Just at the same moment, they both sort of stopped and looked at each other like 'do we hug?' and decided against it.

"Where do you want me?"

"Can you go see how the seniors are doing with the scavenger hunt?" Maya pointed to the table where a handful of her class were bent over a map and arguing. Sam looked at them, turning back a moment later to where he'd seen August Matthews working on signs for the maze with the freshmen.

"Shouldn't he be over there with them?" Sam asked his sister.

"Nothing wrong with some mingling between classes. Come on, off you go," she nudged him off toward the scavengers. Once he'd gone off of his own volition, Maya sighed and looked back to the maze group.

She'd talked to Riley about August, the weekend after her first week. Her best friend had been so eager to hear all about how it went for her at the school, beyond the brief reports she'd gotten over texts. Maya had been happy to fill her in with as many details as she felt able to provide. All the while, she kept thinking about the thing _she_ had been wanting to talk about, trying not to feel like she was pushing it back again and again, like it didn't matter. Finally, Riley had been the one to open to the door for her as she'd gone on to ask about how her brother had been as a student.

"He's great, you know, he… Well, he's less about purple cats than you were," she smiled, and Riley laughed. "He's… He's different than at home," Maya went on.

"What do you mean?" Riley asked. Maya hesitated for a moment.

"Like… a bit closed off? Or just… _not_ like August. And sure, I get how high school can be, we've been there. But I look at him, and it's just coming off him in waves, like… he doesn't want to be there, but he has to be. His father's a teacher there, so he doesn't want to let him down…" _Now I'm there, too._

Riley had taken all this in, and Maya could see how her thoughts existed in two places. She was his big sister, and she loved him and had cared for him all his life, even if they had gone through their share of sibling issues when they were younger. She was also a trained psychologist now, and everything she was told now was bound to be clicking through her head, taking paths forged through her years in school, and all her training, until she would get to the end with two possibly opposed responses. Whatever the psych side had to say, Maya was not surprised to find the sister side was the one to gain voice first. If she could help it, that would be the only voice any of them needed.

"I had no idea…" she'd said, sounding at once so deeply saddened to realize it. This was her kid brother, and he'd been having troubles without her seeing it. But then her sadness was twisted with confusion, with just a bit of upset. "Dad knows about this? He has to, he…"

"Him and your mom, yeah," Maya had to confess. "I think they just didn't want to put that on you, too, or… I don't know… Right now, what I'm most concerned about is I have a student that's also like one of my brothers, and his problems have to do with the school, somehow. I can't just sit by, but I don't know how to approach it. If I handle this wrong, he'll shut me out, and he won't let me back in so easily."

"No," Riley replied, agreeing. This much she knew to be true about her brother. "Maybe if you sort of… play 'hide the vegetables' with him?"

"Where the vegetables would be… helping him," Maya slowly stated. Riley nodded. "No matter what's going on with him, your brother is still clever, more than most," Maya reminded her. "What if he sees through me?"

"Hide them real good."

All she'd been able to do over the second week of class was to feed him the occasional 'veggie.' It wasn't as though she wouldn't have done it anyway, but until she knew how to go about things with him, it was all she could do. She continued to hold by his wish for her not to 'reveal' her connection to him outside school, even if she could see the flaw in this plan like the inevitable undoing. It went something like 'many students know about the band' followed by 'if they know the band, they know Riley is part of it' and then 'if they know Riley and August are siblings, then obviously he has to know me, too.' So far, it hadn't come up.

"Watch it!"

Maya had heard that tone shift a number of times by now, and she turned to where she knew she would find Derek, from her junior class. His group was tasked with making some of the smaller signage, for the festival itself, and also to advertise it, around the school, in certain spots in the area and at the park… Last she'd seen him, he'd been zoned in on his own offering to the effort. Someone had very nearly spilled paint over it, and Derek looked ready to either leap at whoever had done it or to just trash his own work and storm off.

"Pete, can you clean that up?" Maya tried to sweep up to the table and defuse the situation as casually as possible. The boy moved off to get paper towels, while the others carefully pulled everything away from the spreading stain. "Did any of it get on some of your posters?" Maya asked the table. It hadn't. "Good, alright," she smiled, looking at everyone's work. "Looks like you guys have a plan going," she added after noticing the common sort of aesthetic they had going, making the whole thing look like a blackboard with an ornate fall-themed frame before adding the text to look like chalk. "You know, we could do one of those around the board in the class," she suggested, indicating the border around Derek's poster as an example. "Maybe the other teachers would like one, too."

The students around the table agreed one by one that they liked the idea and would be up for doing a board somewhere if it came to be that the others were okay with it. When it came down to Derek being the last one to pronounce himself, Maya turned to him. Much as he'd go and present himself like a big talker, he was on the whole as respectful as they came when it came to her, or any of the teachers she'd seen him interact with.

"I can do that, yeah," he spoke quietly, like he was still coming down from his flare up, but didn't want to land so abruptly as make it feel that he had been deflated.

"Great, keep it up. I'll let you know about the classrooms, but just so we're clear… Mine goes first," she declared, making a few of them laugh.

Moving about the gym, checking on this group and that one, Maya felt what Mr. Matthews, and Lindsay, and then Lucas back home, had in one way or another referred to as her 'new teacher glow.' Where her colleagues were concerned, there was just a hint of this coming with a warning, like it might wear off, though she didn't hold to that idea too long. Meanwhile, where Lucas was concerned, the 'accusation' generally led to a bit of kissing and some other affections, so really she welcomed it whenever it came up. It was all true, after all. After a little over two weeks of this, she still felt something like giddiness in her for being here, and she was going to hold to that for as long as she possibly could.

She'd already filled several pages of her first 'teaching sketchbook,' one of the slowly shrinking pile gifted to her around the wedding and of the same batch as the Paris travel log, with some of these giddy feelings of hers. If she ever thought she had started to lose any of those, all she had to do was browse through the pages again. She'd started a series of portraits now, one each to all of her students. She couldn't wait to get to the point where she had some of these in complete series, from freshmen to seniors, all her kids evolving before her eyes.

"Phoebe, how did you even…" Maya stopped and stared at the girl currently sitting on the ground while Stella put the first aid kit to good use and applied a band aid to her classmate's forehead.

"You know, I think it all gets a lot easier if I stop asking 'how' and just go with 'figures.' Ow!" she winced, making Stella startle.

"Sorry, sorry!" she mumbled. "I'm done," she promised, stepping back. Phoebe reached up to feel at her forehead.

"Thanks," she told Stella with a smile, as the other girl let out a breath and nodded before gathering the bits of wrapping from the bandage and scurrying to throw them in the trash.

Maya tried not to look at August any differently from any of the others in this group, though under these circumstances it was kind of hard. Here he sat, with Missy and Kai nearby, those two having their connection to her right there for anyone to know, and then Phoebe Munroe, back again with one of her TXNY shirts. August's eyes kept flicking to it, like it was only a matter of time before someone put together how they knew each other. As happy as he always said he was that she was here as his teacher, sometimes she had to wonder if he really saw it as her making things even more complicated for him. There wasn't much she could do about that.

"Hey, how's it looking out here?" Maya asked the seniors and Sam as she approached their table.

"It's starting to look less like a scavenger hunt and more like a road trip," Milena Janacek reported, looking to her older brother. Tony looked like he was developing a headache. Sam was just casually and very efficiently showing some of the others his techniques for making realistic paper leaves.

"You know the area we're meant to cover, just stick to that," Maya laughed, leaning on her forearms to look across their growing map. "Bring it in, yeah?" she told the group.

"We're going to need a clean map," Milena nodded. Tony went ahead and laid his head on the table top.

"It's going to be great when it's done," Maya declared with confidence, tapping the boy's shoulder before moving off to chat with Lindsay Alcott. The Fall Festival was really coming together. It was really getting to be like the kickoff to her favorite part of the year, and she couldn't wait for it to start.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	207. Their Autumn For the Festival

July 25th 2020

_Chapter 207  
Their Autumn For the Festival_

"Look under there, Haley," Gracie pointed to a bench. The three-year-old did as her sister told her, crouching and twisting about until she could look under the bench.

"Do you see it?" Nellie asked, standing with her twin. A moment later, the youngest Hunter stood up again, brandishing her treasure.

"Leaf!" she went and handed it over with a proud smile. Nellie took it, reading out the clue for the others to hear before turning to her parents and her older sister and brother-in-law. When she was done reading, she passed the leaf to MJ, keeper of the clues.

"What does it mean?" Gracie asked.

"I can't say," Maya shrugged innocently. "Inside information," she whispered, making her siblings laugh, whether they understood this or not.

"Hey, I think you might know this one," Shawn told his younger daughters. "Remember that time we went and saw that statue, when we picked up your mom's birthday cake last time?" The twins shared a look, while MJ nodded, and Haley imitated him. Soon, they were back on their scavenging, with the twins leading one each of the little ones by the hand to keep them from wandering off, while the rest of the group followed them.

Now in her second year of being involved in the Fall Festival, Maya was really getting to feel more and more like it was a part of her, just as she had the Stage Ready camp for the summer, and how she and Lucas had Halloween at their house... It was getting to be one of those staples where the event returned year after year, but it was always different every time, enough that it never got boring or repetitive.

This year, to be going around and to spot some of the work her students had made, or to meet any of those kids themselves, to see their families here and there... It was wonderful. Her favorite part may have been whenever one of them would call out to her, like 'Hey, Mrs. Friar!' for how the others would react. Her family, her siblings especially, had not quite gotten used to the name change yet. And Lucas, he could not keep from smiling every time, like the big Huckleberry he was.

"Well hello, fellow educator," a voice called, and they turned to find Zay and Nadine were headed their way, or as they were known around Haley Hunter, Zaz and Naynay. The moment her hand would be released, she would dash over, stopping still when she came to stand before Nadine before lifting her head and her arms in a clear request her sister's friend was all too happy to fulfill.

"I don't know what is giving me the most effect, the realization that you're the 'Mr. B.' I've been hearing some of my kids' younger siblings talk about, or that you got them calling you that," Maya responded to Zay's greeting.

"I had nothing to do with that, I'll have you know. Happened all on its own," Zay insisted, then, "So they talk about me?" he asked with a grin, scanning their surroundings for any of his current and former students.

His first ones would be in the fifth grade by now, as he started his second group of fourth graders, and Maya was curious to think of the day when some of his might become some of hers. Zay would take this one further, wanting Dylan to end up as a middle school gym teacher. If that happened, the three of them could follow some of their students' progress from elementary school all the way through high school graduation.

"That is going to take a while," Maya had laughed upon hearing it, though Zay only nodded happily at the thought.

Whether or not this would happen, they would have to wait a couple more years at the least, until Dylan finally finished his degree, late starter as he'd been.

"So, are we scavenging, too?" Nadine asked of the girl perched in her arms.

"Leaf," Haley nodded, pointing to her brother.

"You can't look, that's cheating!" Nellie warned the new arrivals. Zay stared down at her and was given back such a stare as to leave no doubt this girl was Maya's sister.

"You are going to be a hoot in class next year, aren't you?" Zay poked the top of her head. Nellie batted at his arm to make him stop even as she laughed.

"You don't know what class we'll be in," Gracie replied smartly. Zay turned his poking finger toward her head.

"I don't, huh?" he asked as she squeaked and stepped back.

"Well, we'll have to go back to the start of the hunt and catch up with you guys, won't we?" Nadine declared, turning a smile to Haley, who received this as her cue to be set back on the ground and instead clung to Nadine. "You want to stay with me?" she tipped her head to look the toddler in the eye.

"Yeah," Haley whispered.

"Go ahead," Katy told Nadine and Zay. "I'm sure she remembers where the clues were."

So, Zay, Nadine, and Haley took off, leaving the others to continue on. There was a feeling like they might as well slow down, to give the trio a chance to catch up before too long, but the twins and MJ all wanted to keep finding clues, so they had to move along.

"Hey, Mrs. Friar!" Stopping to look for the one who'd called out, Maya spotted Daphne Brett coming along with a younger girl who looked enough like her to be her little sister, Stephanie. She was in the fifth grade and had been one of those in Zay's inaugural class the previous year, as they had quickly discovered in chatting over the first week of school.

"Hey there," Maya smiled as the girls came up to them. Daphne introduced her sister to her teacher, who reciprocated by introducing her husband, parents, and siblings. The twins and Stephanie recognized one another from school, two grades apart as they were. Nellie and Gracie being for the most part identical had a way of making them memorable. "Where are your parents?" Maya asked.

"They're doing the maze, we didn't want to go," Daphne stated, though the likelier answer, in looking at the girls, was that Stephanie had been too scared to go, so her big sister had cooked up an excuse not to go.

Their group had diminished some more as the Brett girls and the twins had gone to check out one of the stands, lined with various flavors of popcorn.

"Look who forgot the scavenger hunt all of a sudden," Shawn waved after them.

"Should we keep going?" Lucas asked.

"You guys go ahead with MJ, we'll catch up," Katy told him and Maya.

"Alright, you in?" Lucas looked down to MJ, who nodded. "Want to get the look of the land?" Another nod later, Lucas had hoisted the boy just a few months shy of six and planted him on his shoulders. MJ locked his arms around Lucas' head, his stack of leaves passed to his sister.

"Like you weren't tall enough as it was," Maya shook her head to her husband, which made her brother laugh.

"If anything, I might be shorter now," Lucas pointed out the fact that he sort of had to bend his head down in order to keep his passenger balanced.

"If you say so," Maya hummed, looking back down to their latest leaf to remind herself where they were headed. "Speaking of tall people, there's one of mine," Maya told Lucas as she waved back to Leon Morales, walking along with who she had to guess was his mother.

"He's a junior?" Lucas blinked. He had easily matched the boy to Maya's tales and notes.

"Yup," Maya laughed.

"He's really tall," MJ decided, from up on his perch.

"He is that," his sister agreed. "And he's really nice, too."

They kept walking until they came upon what they guessed to be the next location of a clue. Well, Lucas had to do the guessing, as Maya already knew, and MJ was five and not quite old enough to work out the instructions himself. He was set back on the ground, the better to go find the leaf as Haley had previously done.

"I found it!" he stood back up, flashing those baby teeth with pride. Even with as many clues as had been made, they would have to be replenished every once in a while, some of the kids from school having volunteered to run them back after they'd been returned at the end of the hunt. Just now, one of those came around, a basket under her arm.

"Oh, hey!" Milena smiled, recognizing her teacher.

"I didn't tell them a thing," Maya promised, shaking her head and pointing to the reunited stack. "That's my brother, MJ, and my husband, Lucas," she introduced them.

"Hi," the senior girl laughed. "I'm Milena," she told them, shaking Lucas' hand when it was offered and stretching to do the same when MJ did the same.

"Lots of people finished already, huh?" Lucas guessed, looking inside the basket.

"There's a lot of families going around right now, yeah," Milena confirmed. "I asked Tony to help, but Dad's got a stand going near the garage and he's got him helping. So, August went instead."

"August Matthews?" Maya asked, surprised. On top of Lucas' shoulders, MJ looked around like he expected to find the boy, though Milena didn't notice.

"Yeah, Tony got him helping at the stand, too."

"That's great!" Maya replied, a little more enthused than she'd intended. "I mean," she cleared her throat, "That's nice of him, both of them."

"I should get back to this," Milena held up her basket, and after waving each other off, the trio continued on.

"I'm thirsty," MJ informed his sister.

"We should pass by the juice place on our way to the next clue... I think," she added, as though she didn't actually know.

They stopped with their juices on a bench, finding a break and a drink to be not such a bad idea after all this walking around. MJ quietly busied himself at looking through his leaves, checking that the numbers were in order. He knew his numbers and would let anyone know if given the chance.

Maya and Lucas shared a look here, no words needed to set them both on the same line of thought. Sitting here, in the midst of the festival, taking a break for some juice with little MJ, the whole thing was just the kind of cosy that left them with that familiar feeling, familiar thought. They supposed it would he as good as the real deal until they got around to having a kid of their own.

By the time they were ready to get up and start walking again, they were rejoined by their fractured group, as well as Zay and Nadine and the now sleeping Haley. The twins wanted juice, too, and Zay went to get some for them and the rest, while the twins extended their small bags of popcorn for their siblings to try and say which flavors they were and which was best.

"They taste good when you take one of each, too," Nellie informed them, like she was letting them in on a very important secret, only because they were family.

"Do they?" Maya played along. When both twins nodded, she reached in to both bags like 'alright, I trust you, let's try it.' "Hey, not bad," Maya smiled, while Lucas gave it a shot, too. MJ was hesitant, though once Lucas had tried it and agreed, he did as he'd done.

"I think you're going to need more popcorn," Maya told the twins, who pointed to their father now. Shawn had two large tins, one under each arm. Maya had to work very hard not to tease him for being an easy mark for his kids' wishes. The festival did that to people all on its own.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	208. Their Autumn For Students

July 26th 2020

_Chapter 208  
Their Autumn For Students_

It had rained all day, a steady but unhurried autumn shower from morning up to now, as she climbed into the attic that evening, tea in hand. She had been waiting on this moment for some time now, no denying it. She had promised herself that she would wait one month after the start of classes for her to open Mrs. Yang's file box, all the things she had collected in teaching for the final three years of her time at the school. She had been told to wait, to get to know her kids on her own, and she could truly say that she had done this.

Today had marked one month since the start of the school year, one month since she'd started teaching.

How the time could have slipped by so fast, honestly, she couldn't say, but then again when had time ever felt like a real thing? The novelty had worn away, and now it was just natural, going into that school, early every day, seeing her seniors, her sophomores, her freshmen, and her juniors... The novelty may have gone, but the feeling of happiness, that... That part had not gone away, not by the smallest fraction of an inch. It might only have increased, now that the whole thing wasn't just an idea in her head but a reality, undeniable.

Setting her cup well away from potentially being spilled, Maya went and opened the box. There would not be anything to do with her ninth graders, of course, though that did not mean she couldn't have said anything about them. With no disservice to the others, this group would always be very special to her for being the first graduating class she'd see go through all four years. This year, all of them being new to the school like her, she could remember so well what it had been like for her and her friends, going from middle school over to high school.

Pulling out the first large folder, she found this one stacked with several smaller folders, each identified with a name, along with the years and grades included within.

_Brett, Daphne - 9th ('26-'27) _

Maya smiled, opening the folder to find the first item was a painting Daphne had done last year, of a planet's surface from high above, with plenty of detail. She suspected that, as invented as it was, she would have tried and done her research to make it realistic, maybe calling on her father. Beyond this, Mrs. Yang's notes coupled with every other piece of Daphne's work included here presented her much as Maya had come to see her. She was optimistic, very much so, and she had so much creativity in her as to not know what to do with it except to find a way to express it. In a lot of ways, Maya could understand what this was like.

_Day, Dakota - 9th ('26-'27) _

The first item in this folder was a drawing, and for having seen how the boy worked for a few weeks now, Maya had to appreciate how he had clearly improved since the previous year. Still, she could look at this and see the boy she had seen through all these mornings in her class. She could see him working on this, his whitish blond hair swooping down like a curtain, following the motion of what came off on the whole like he wasn't paying attention, hiding the fact that he was doing all of what they'd eventually find on the page. From what she'd heard of the other teachers, he was this way everywhere, and when they would call on him, thinking they might catch him out, he would just go and give them nothing but correct answers. He was shaping up to be at the top of his class, whether he presented that way or not.

_Su, Ariel - 9th ('26-'27) _

In one month, Maya had lost count of the number of novels she'd spotted Ariel reading, sometimes in the very first minute or two after the bell called her class to session. The variety had been as wide as the number, which felt on point. Even here, in Mrs. Yang's file, she could see work that spoke of Ariel's breadth of exploration, of tasting from many a plate. Of all the things she found there though, the thing which drew her attention the most, like proof of what she had surmised about Ariel so far, was a note written by the girl herself. In her clean, looped writing was a request for her to redo or at least complete an assignment which had been collected before she could properly finish it. By the looks of the file, she couldn't say whether this request had been granted, though she had a feeling it wasn't. Ariel's grades may not have suffered for it, but the girl likely had.

_Boggs, Derek - 9th ('25-26) - 10th ('26-'27) _

When she had finished with the first stack, she'd grabbed the next one, finding here the past two years of her juniors chronicled, in folders twice as thick. Finding the one belonging to Derek, she had to admit, she had been curious. Would he have been the same complicated boy two years ago as he was now? He was actually a very talented artist, enough to tell her he hadn't just signed on for this as a throwaway class to fill his schedule. His file, in the half dedicated to his freshman year, she saw more evidence of his love for art, and she knew this was his work, it had his style. There was something different about it though. She couldn't put it into words, more into feelings. She could see what he was trying to say, to some degree, and she took a breath. As someone who had walked the world with a mask for a long time, she felt a new tie to the boy.

_Morales, Leon - 9th ('25-26) - 10th ('26-'27) _

Her gentle giant may not have had the kind of imagination the likes of Daphne Brett or Maya herself, but his work had been on the whole very polished. He had a fine hand, the kind most people would not expect from someone of his stature. In the past two years, his style hadn't evolved so much, though this didn't mean he didn't grow as a person. What she'd seen of him suggested he mostly liked to keep his school life and home life separate. He had his goals settled, and he was here to make them happen. Why art had become part of this, she couldn't say, but she would do her best to make it happen.

Lifting out the biggest folder, for her seniors, after getting through her juniors, she started going through these as she'd done with the others, finding what had to be the most in-depth stories as of yet.

_Janacek, Milena - 9th (-) - 10th ('25-'26) - 11th ('26-'27) _

Maya had known it would be her file by how it had been significantly thinner than the others, covering two years instead of three. What she found in the oldest pieces filed away here was the Milena of two years ago, freshly promoted from 8th grade straight into 10th, thus starting her high school days among a brand new group of kids than the ones she'd been with from the start, a group who had already had time to settle into this new school by now, unlike her, and also a group that included her older brother. What her art showed was how she'd felt very out of place in the beginning. It was like her hand couldn't hide it, no matter what she did. It had changed, in time, steadying until she became the girl Maya knew now. There were still the smallest signs of that old discomfort here and there, and she hadn't known to spot it until now. It was another eye opening moment on this rainy night.

_Janacek, Tony (Antonin) - 9th ('24-'25) - 10th ('25-'26) - 11th ('26-'27) _

A lot of the time, whenever she'd look at any of Tony's work, she would remember him telling the class about his mother being an artist, on that first day. By now, Maya knew that Mrs. Janacek had indeed passed away, when Tony had been ten and Milena eight. What Tony's file showed Maya was how he had already been very good as a freshman, but every year since, he'd been honing those skills, under Mrs. Yang's tutelage. As she'd reached the end of that folder, she was ledt with this thought of potentially putting Tony in touch with her new pal Caleb Stamp, letting him and his extraordinary sketching skills bond with those of the Janacek boy. It felt like a match made in art heaven.

_Matthews, August - 9th ('24-'25) - 10th ('25-'26) - 11th ('26-'27) _

She had been waiting to land on this one all evening, no way around it, so much that she'd set it aside when she'd reached it, keeping it for the end. How many times had she almost gone to the box in the last month? She wanted to get just his file, but she knew that the moment she opened the box she would want to look at every file, not just the one. So, she had forced herself to resist. But now...

Here she had this timeline, three years strong, to help her help her student, her almost brother. August at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen... She looked at the very end of it, found that familiar cloudiness. She looked to the beginning, and oh there was that bit of sunlight she had grown to love in Riley's little brother. Whatever had changed him, it had happened, somewhere between the start of freshman and the end of junior year, clearly. She almost felt like she couldn't look, like it would have been an invasion, even though this wasn't anything like a diary, nothing private.

Maya spread it all around herself, contextualizing this timeline of August Matthews. It wasn't as though it would be right there, like slowly darkening skies, but... she could see it. There was a sort of... wobbliness... as ninth grade progressed, but then somewhere in tenth, there was a noted shift, and from there it became more of the same. What this told her was that it wasn't just that he had kept on a steady decline, no. There had been an incident, a moment, and from there, he'd been walking the school halls with that weight forcing his head down.

"Auggie..." Maya whispered to herself, breathing out. Maybe 'hiding the vegetables' wasn't going to be the way to go.

It wasn't until she'd gathered everything up to put it back in the box that she noticed there was one more thing at the bottom. After the emotions she'd been facing since she'd opened the box, this might have been just the thing she needed.

_Hart, Maya - 9th ('17-'18) - 10th ('18-'19) - 11th ('19-'20) - 12th ('20-'21) _

"Wow..." she'd laughed to herself, opening up the folder.

So much of it felt like someone had cracked open her memories, ones she'd have believed lost until she saw these pieces of paper, some now ten years old, and suddenly it could have been just yesterday. She would experience that a lot when she would flip through her old sketchbooks. She had so many of them, and it was no wonder. They were the best way she knew to store this bit of herself, her past... the good and the bad. In many ways, she had been an only child when this file was started, and by the end... She had discovered what it was like to love someone the way she loved Lucas, in those years...

Before putting the files away, she decided to go ahead and tag them with this new year just started, to see that her kids got to complete their timelines. When she was done, she went and found some empty folders, some labels, and a pen. Seventeen folders were identified, including the likes of...

_Avelino, Kai - 9th ('27-'28) _

_Buckley, Stella - 9th ('27-'28) _

_Munroe, Phoebe - 9th ('27-'28) _

_Sanderson, Melissa (Missy) - 9th ('27-'28) _

In four years, they would be spilling over with who they would all become, and their art teacher could not wait to see it unfold.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	209. Their Autumn For Halloween

July 27th 2020

_Chapter 209  
Their Autumn For Halloween_

"How long does it take for pumpkins to grow?"

Those were the first words Lucas heard out of his wife, on Saturday morning, midway through October.

"You've been awake a while, haven't you?" he guessed, his voice stretching into a yawn. Maya turned around to face him.

"Not that long," she insisted. "I'm serious though, do you know?"

"Not a gardener," Lucas pointed out. "You could ask the Sandersons, maybe. Or you could just look it up." If he was hoping for any prolonged holding to ease into this weekend morning, his suggestion broke his chances, as Maya immediately went and sat up to grab her phone, leaving his arms. Lucas went ahead then and sat up, rubbing at his eyes before leaning to kiss her shoulder as she tapped at her phone.

"Okay, so that might be doable... We'll have to wait until next year though..." she told herself, setting her phone back down before turning to her husband. Catching a bit of that disrupted morning in his face, she smirked, very nearly tackling him back down. "Morning," she whispered, while he smiled, brushing hair from her face as she leaned in to kiss him.

"Morning," he echoed once she pulled back a bit and settled her chin to her arm as it lay across his chest. "Pumpkins?" he had to ask.

"I was thinking what if we grew some. It takes at least four months or something, and if we timed it right, we could have our very own pumpkins for next Halloween, and other Halloweens after that... Depending on how many we'd get, we could have some to decorate and some to eat."

"Pumpkins..." he repeated, contemplating. "So we have until spring to figure this out, whether we do it or not."

"Yup. It's a no pressure plan, really. We can take months to decide."

"I like those," Lucas nodded, making Maya laugh. "So, I have a question of my own," he smiled and locked his arms around her.

"Ask away," she replied.

"So, in a couple of weeks, it will be Halloween, which means the morning after that..."

"November 1st," she smiled.

"And our tenth anniversary... dating, at least. And married or not, that is not a milestone we can just ignore..."

"I think we already agreed on this, didn't we? Can't have one without the other? Wouldn't be married if we hadn't started dating and all that?"

"No, yes, we did," he confirmed. "I'm just trying to figure out what it will mean for this one, this year, assuming I'm back to planning that one."

"Hey, we started out this morning with me asking you if we should grow our own pumpkin patch, and you followed this up with anniversary talk, clearly our roles have been established right here," she pointed out. Lucas laughed, nodding slowly.

"Got it."

"So, what are you thinking for this... Anniversary part 1 of 2..."

"I'm not sure yet, it's like I said, I'm still trying to figure out what these... Noversaries..."

"Nice..."

"... should look like." For a few seconds, they both lay there, quietly thinking it over.

"You know, it's going to be a Monday this year," Maya pointed out. He nodded. "And we have our lunch dates..."

"We do," he nodded again.

"And not so late bed time on account of having to be up early the next day for school." Another nod. "That's about as much as I can give you, the rest, dear husband, is in your planning hands," she informed him, making him beam with love as he reclaimed her to some more kissing.

"Now, about your part," he stated afterward.

"Halloween," she breathed, laying her head down in contemplation as she listened to his heartbeat.

Oh, she was always excited for the day to roll around, the day and the whole 'season,' too, but every year had a way of making the approach feel special in its own way and this one...

It would be their third at the house, and much as they were now plotting for pumpkins in what would be their fourth, this year was to see the fruition of Maya's previous wild idea, on their previous, second Halloween here.

"How many bales are we going to need for this?" Lucas blinked as he was shown the plan for the maze.

He didn't have to ask if it would fit, as they had gotten permission to use the land across from their house, which belonged to the neighboring Oswald family. The plan may have been to put the maze behind their house, but now with the studio out there...

"I am so ahead of you on that, you will fall ever deeper in love with me," Maya informed him with a lifted grin.

"Always new heights, huh?" Lucas chuckled. "Hit me."

"Well, when we were doing the festival, and we had the maze there, I talked to the guy who supplied the 'walls' there and he agreed to let me have them for ours, too."

"Wow," he conceded to her previous claim. She had been right.

"This also means that, so long as the festival has theirs, we can have ours, every year."

"I am both impressed and a bit terrified about what our parties are going to look like in five or ten years," Lucas declared. Maya laughed, thinking of what else they might have after the maze and the pumpkins.

"We can have someone up in the attic, to keep a lookout on what's going on inside the maze, and if someone's lost. Maybe we can build fake walls, hide some 'creatures' to pop out and scare people as they go by..."

"Okay, easy there," Lucas gave her a look.

"What, the festival maze was all homey and fall like. This is Halloween, we need some spooks... gross stuff..."

"You're saying that, but you're giving me the cute face," he pointed back at her.

"Is it working?" she asked sweetly.

"What do you think?" Lucas laughed, and his giddy wife turned back to her plans, looking for where to construct their fake walls. He was the one who eventually resolved the issue in suggesting they instead stack their walls with some blind spots, the better to simply have their creatures spring out cleanly and unsuspected. This meant some edits in Maya's plan, but it all worked easily enough in the end.

Later that day, they found themselves walking through the mall together on Lucas' lunch break from the bookstore, the better to get their Halloween errands dealt with. They still had to decide what they would do for costumes this time around. They had sent out the invitations to their guests in the house party portion of the night with the call for no theme other than to come as they would see fit. For Maya, the day had turned to days, with additional stakes.

As much as she had decorated her office at the theater the last couple years, the school was a whole other matter. She had her classroom this year, and she had big plans for their Halloween there. The day itself would fall on a Sunday, but that would just mean that they celebrated a couple days early, on Friday. Her memories of those four years she'd spent as a student there, along with conversations she'd had with others in the faculty, allowed her to go all in. She would turn her classroom into some haunted place, calling on her old vampire friend from long ago. Serafina, the Crimson Menace, had been about as menacing as her teenage self could envision, which admittedly had been plenty, being who she'd been.

Now, ten years had passed, and it did feel right that she should unearth her undead friend throughout her day at school. When it would come to the party at the house, two days later, that still demanded some thought and consultation with her partner in costuming and overall life.

She had asked her students if they planned on coming to school in costume that Friday. Some said absolutely, others no way. Everyone else was sort of a middle ground potentially swayed one way or the other.

The most unintentionally amusing response to this had been Stella's. After the class had ended, she'd slowly picked up her things, allowing the others to depart before she could approach her teacher and ask what kind of costumes people would be wearing out at the school. The way she'd said it, her tone just plainly said 'I want to do it but also people might laugh at me so maybe I don't actually want to. Maya had not known what to tell her, but then there had been Phoebe, who must have been waiting for Stella. Ever since the festival, she had almost been coaxing the shy Buckley girl into friendship, sensing her uneasiness and diving in regardless. Now, she would walk with her to their next class.

Having overheard the question, she had taken it upon herself to help Stella find just the right thing. Stella looked so happy and terrified all at once, she couldn't have known how to say no if she tried. So, off they had gone, with Phoebe leading Stella down the hall, and Stella redirecting Phoebe so she wouldn't walk into the janitor's bucket.

"I really am not a fan of this question I keep asking myself about whether they're too old for this thing or that thing, like it's been twenty years since I was in high school instead of six," Maya told Lucas as they considered the various types of candy on the shelves, picking one and another, adding them to their basket.

"Do you still love candy?" Lucas asked her, holding up one bag which made her eyes go round. "See? You're fine," he tossed the bag in with the others. Maya coughed. He picked another of the same kind and added it to their stock.

"This whole image I've got going, it's hard to keep it intact, you know?"

"What, the cool teacher?" Lucas asked, with a smirk that suggested he'd had another attribute in mind, too.

"I know you're going to tell me I'm just being myself, and on the whole I am, yeah. As long as I'm there, with them, I'm good. It's the other parts, like this one, where I get all stuck up in my head."

"Do you think any of them are going to show up at the house on Halloween night?" Lucas asked as they later loaded up the bags in the minivan before he had to get back to work.

"Well, I didn't exactly advertise that bit, but obviously Missy will be there, and Kai, so maybe some of the ninth graders will have heard about it. Don't know about the others. Should I tell them?" she wondered now.

"It's up to you," he shrugged, which was his way of telling her he was on board if she chose to do it, yes, but really what it left her with was a choice to make, and she really had no idea.

Did she want all her students knowing where she lived? More than anything, maybe she just knew herself enough to wonder if she would be getting too familiar with them all, when there was this boundary meant to exist between them. It was almost like she'd grown very close to several of her teachers...

"Alright, all set?" Lucas asked as the trunk was shut.

"Yup," Maya nodded.

"When you get home, the candy goes..."

"What's the matter there, Huckleberry, it's like you don't trust me or something," she gave an innocent look.

"I do trust you, I also know you," he smiled.

"Then we should be fine," she smiled back.

"I'm checking the bags when I get home!" he called after her as she got in the driver's seat.

"I love you, too!" she called back.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	210. Their Autumn For Costumes

July 28th 2020

_Chapter 210  
Their Autumn For Costumes_

_Friday, October 29th 2027_

_1st period - 12th grade_

The day before, after the last of the students had gone away, she had gotten to work in transforming her classroom. She had not been alone. She wasn't the only one who was looking to give their room a bit of a spooky twist, so she had gotten help as much as she had given it, so that by the time she left the school, the art class was nothing short of a vampire's lair. This morning, with her costume and other transforming accessories, Maya Friar had gone and become Serafina, the Crimson Menace, as she had once been. Her kids did not know her for the Halloween beastie she was, but soon they would...

"Woah!" The surprised voice had been that of Milena Janacek, or at least the winged fairy that was a sparkly version of her student. Stepping into this room, she looked like the soon to be innocent and unsuspecting victim of the vampiress.

"Good day to you, oh magical one," Maya intoned, fully committed to the role, for as long as she could hold on to it. "What brings you near these parts all on your own?"

"My schedule," Milena nodded, resisting the urge to laugh. "This is so nice," she declared, looking around. "I tried to get Tony to put on a costume, but he said he was too old. Joke's on him, right?"

"What costume do you speak of, child? You may call me Serafina," she gave a light bow. "For centuries I have been known as the Crimson Menace. I don't know why, when I've worked so hard to keep a low profile." Milena went to her station still laughing. She would not be alone in this reaction, as more of the group started to file in.

A number of students would come into her class that day with no costume at all, like Tony Janacek, or with what could only be called a flimsy attempt at a costume. August Matthews fell into that category, as he came into school that day wearing the uniform he wore when he would be out working. He delivered pizzas, although today his big bag did not keep any pies warm, carrying instead little more than books.

"Good morning, sir," the Crimson Menace very nearly became Maya Friar again, struggling to maintain her character.

Every time she saw him now, it was a constant reminder to her that she still hadn't done much more in the weeks since she'd opened the box in the attic. She wanted to, but every time she went to try and say something, she would be at a loss for words. She had been so sure that it would be easier to speak to him than if this had been any other student, but then it really wasn't. If it had been another student, would she have even picked up on anything at all?

"Morning," August replied, and for a moment she could see him back there, in the very back of his eyes. He remembered that night, the haunted house, ten years ago. She smiled, resisted the urge to wink.

_X_

_3rd period - 10th grade_

"I caught you spying earlier, didn't I, young explorer?" Serafina inquired of Daphne Brett as she came along, dressed in what felt like a very archeologist-style ensemble.

"You saw that?" the girl asked. In the middle of second period, Maya had been at her desk, taking notes, when she'd happened to catch a brief glimpse of a familiar face turning away, as though it had been peering through the window in the door a moment before. "I was on my way to the bathroom and I saw the room, couldn't help it," she sheepishly revealed.

"I am nothing if not a generous hostess," the vampire/teacher promised, tipping her head to the bowl overflowing with a variety of candies. Daphne beamed, moving to grab one before going to sit.

It was getting difficult for her not to go and break character at times, especially as she would feel a strong urge to ask after their costumes, why they chose them and so on. Every now and then she could end up hearing about it somehow, while other times she would just see someone and, from what she had learned these near two months, she would see them and think 'yes, of course.'

Ariel Su arrived as what could only be described as a modern day Little Mermaid on legs, in honor of her name. Maya discovered, via overheard conversations, that Ariel would come as some variant of the character every year. Depending on who was teaching her class at a given time, she would even try herself at playing up the inability to speak, writing down her responses when called upon. Maya would decide to humor her here, which made the girl very happy.

One of her favorite costumes of this day, would go to the Day. Dakota walked in, putting his pale, lenghty blond hair to good use in the guise of Legolas from the Lord of the Rings, clearly the movie version. It was a clear winner where a lot of the girls in the class were concerned, too, by the way they looked at him. Dakota hardly seemed to notice, to no one's surprise.

"My, my, my, an elf among us..." Serafina declared as he walked along. Dakota looked back at her with a grin, clearly not so concerned as she was with keeping character.

"How do you speak with those?" he asked, pointing to the fangs in her mouth.

"With great care," she let him know, as he went to sit.

She was quite proud of her molded fangs, so much so that she'd been wearing them at home for about a week. It had made things interesting, without a doubt, and especially where Sam was concerned, and Lucas, too. Only Rosa could not be thrown. Even if Maya attempted to jump at her, she would make no sound of fright or surprise, giving instead pronounced laughter and a request for another go.

"Right, please, everyone to your seats," Maya clapped her hands at the three or four still stood at the candy bowl. They scurried to their seats as the bell rang.

_X_

_5th period - 9th grade_

It was the first time Maya did not leave her classroom at lunch as Stella arrived to have her quiet lunch. She had waited a few minutes before finally locking up and heading to the teachers' lounge. When she returned, after what had to be the funniest gathering of the faculty up to now, there was still no sign of her. Had she gotten so attached to the little brunette as to worry over a change of routine? Maybe, a little... maybe a lot.

"Oh, please, can the class stay like this all the time?" Missy declared as she and Kai arrived.

"I don't know, might complicate things for the janitor, all the cobwebs..." Maya chuckled, looking back to take in their costumes. "I don't know why, I thought you guys would be zombies, I mean..." she cleared her throat, catching herself all of a sudden for having broken character. "What manner of living person is this?" she intoned, making the pair burst out laughing.

"We're keeping those for this weekend," Missy eventually told her.

"All the makeup would have kind of made it weird out here, especially at lunch," Kai added.

"So we're like the before picture," Missy smiled, looking at herself and Kai.

"Science experiment about to go wrong?" Maya asked, in her own voice again, gesturing at their lab coats and goggles and other accessories.

"Oh, so wrong," Missy confirmed. Her face had that expression of 'you'll have to wait and see.'

"Hey, you guys saw Stella Buckley this morning, yeah?" Maya had to ask as they moved to their station after a quick stop at the candy bowl.

"Yeah, why?" Missy asked, and Maya felt silly now.

"Nothing, it's just she's usually here at lunch," she tried to play it off.

"Last I saw her, she was getting changed in the bathroom. Phoebe was there, too, to do her hair and makeup. She came plain clothed this morning, I think she was supposed to have her costume on all day but she got scared or something."

The rest of the group soon started to arrive, and as Maya turned back into Serafina, she counted them off, getting to the point where all that were missing were Phoebe and Stella. She was just about to go and find them, maybe back in the bathroom, still, when Phoebe landed, almost like a herald, in her sort of Valkyrie like costume. Later she would say how she had considered carrying a fake sort of spear or something but then decided against it because she was concerned she wouldn't have as many eyes at the end of the day as when she started.

On her heel came a girl made halfway unrecognizable already by her posture, back straighter and head higher than any of them could claim to have seen her before, almost like her respect for the figure counter acted any kind of inclination she might have had for tipping forward into making herself small and invisible. As the Childlike Empress walked to her seat, Maya resisted the urge to smile. She had a feeling some of Stella's classmates were only realizing today that she'd been there at all.

_X_

_8th period - 11th grade_

"Hagrid?" Maya guessed, her smile challenged to remain vampire like as Leon Morales walked into the room. He nodded.

"Figured I'd go with what I have," he gestured to himself, his stature.

"Well done," she tipped her head to him, or Serafina did, at least. He had only nodded back as he seemed to notice the room at large for the first time, and his face changed just a bit. "What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing... Nothing, I just, I, uh... I don't like... spiders, and..." he explained, in a shaky voice so very unlike him as to make his teacher's face battle against a chuckle.

"Spoiler alert, they're not real," she had to tell him after a beat. "The cobwebs? Came out of a bag, not a spider."

"No, I know, I do, but I still..." he moved toward his station, hyper alert in an almost too comical way. Here he'd come, playing to his size with his costume, only to be faced with a situation that defied it

"Halloween must be a real trip for you, huh?"

"I'm more of a Christmas guy," he nodded.

"Good to know."

Maya had been unsure whether Derek Boggs would fall in the category of those who chose against costumes, or those who barely tried, or those who went all in. And then the king of Wakanda had walked into her classroom, helmet and all. When he took this off, he had something of a proud smile on him like Maya had never seen.

"Suits you well, young panther," Serafina bowed her head.

"Made it myself," he informed her, and there was the pride. It was kind of stunning, like it might have rolled off the stage. It must have taken him a while. It gave her ideas for projects in future weeks and months, to tap into that side of him.

"Are you clawed?" she inquired, in her most intrigued vampire voice.

"Not on these," he held up his gloved hands. "I have another pair at home. I didn't think it would fly for me to walk into school with those, and I didn't want to have to walk around with the rest of the costume without gloves."

"No, of course not," Maya agreed, barely keeping it together again, to see him so open all at once. Maybe it was the confidence the costume brought him. Whatever it was, it was one more peek under the mask of Derek Boggs.

The whole day had been everything Maya had wanted it to be. She had always loved Halloween for how it could show you sides as yet unseen in people, how it gave them something like a window of opportunity and they would just jump right through sometimes. This was only part one for her, of course. The big show was coming on Sunday, with the whole setup at the house, the games, the maze, all of it, and then the party after that. Serafina's reign ended, leaving Mrs. Friar to stride off with a grin and a load of leftover candy.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	211. Their Autumn For a Party

_**A/N:** The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!_

* * *

July 29th 2020

_Chapter 211  
Their Autumn For a Party_

"You know when you look outside and you can just sort of tell from the sky, and the wind… A storm is coming?" Lucas asked as their slow Sunday waking had been hurried along by the eager barking of dogs. He and Maya had gone down to find that entire canine host waiting for them. Crowley and Lupescu were like an impossible tag team. The moment you got one of them going, the other was right there, too, which was going to complicate things when the day came that Rosa went ahead and moved out…

It hadn't happened yet, and there were no signs of that changing for a while longer. They weren't nudging her out the door either. Maya and Lucas were both more than happy to have her around, and not just because she held her weight as their roommate. She was one of their closest friends. What else did they need? Besides, with the way things were going, all they really needed to do was to keep hosting her and, in time, she would end up leaving them to go and live with Jenna. The two of them were growing closer as friends, with the girl sharing many a meal or evening with them up at the house, and as to anything beyond that, well, they were still figuring it out.

Until then, they had Crowley, and Lupescu, and Peanut, and Archer, and Trix and Lou, and when they decided it was time for their humans to come around, they were a united front.

"What are you talking about?" Maya looked back to her husband as she stood with the littlest of their pup pack in her arms. "What storm?"

"The Sam-Cecilia-Dora Halloween Cyclone III," Lucas replied, filling the dogs' bowls.

"Oh, that one…" Maya hummed. It could have been a gag between them, but then they'd had two Halloweens here and both of them had involved some kind of… teenage love drama shenanigans. "It should be fine, shouldn't it? Dora's going to a party with her friends from college, and Sam and Cecilia are just… very attached…" she tossed back a look that said 'and let's just leave it at that.' "Can we just enjoy that today is Halloween? Better yet, can we enjoy that it's been ten years to the day since that night at the haunted house?" Maya asked him, approaching in a very menacing/cute way thanks to the dogs.

"That night when we almost kissed, and then we figured we really just wanted to kiss for real and all that?" Lucas asked back.

"And all that, yeah," she smiled.

"Yeah, I guess we can do that."

In what felt like no time, the day was on its way. After breakfast, Maya, Lucas, Sam, and Rosa set off to get the last of the set-up going. This included building up the maze, and that was just going to eat up the majority of their day as it was. They could have built it up ahead of time, but rather than to leave the structure like an invitation for people to come along in the night and mess things up, they had left it to today. The Sandersons had been kind enough to let them store the very many bales of hay up at their farm until they were needed.

For a while, both Lucas and Sam were going back and forth from the farm to the land across from the house, ferrying a new load of hay, which was then unloaded and carefully worked into reproducing Maya's meticulously calculated plan. With the help of Missy and her family, and the Oswalds, on whose land the maze was being built, it all came together. By the time it all became about going through and setting lights and other elements, checking that the map was correct, the hiding spots and potential emergency exits, too, many of them moved to setting up the games and other installations on the grounds outside the Friar house. It was going to be their biggest night yet, and they couldn't wait.

Finally, it came time for everyone to go and get changed. In opposition to her vampire day back at school, Maya had gone for something much more light for their party night, truly in as literal of a way as she could have done. She had cast herself as a spirit of sorts, the embodiment of the sun. She had wanted to go for something a bit more abstract than usual, and really she just enjoyed the opportunity to conjure up her interpretation of this concept. It involved many elements of gold, in her hair and makeup as much as her clothes, and also some light strips and bulbs set in her earrings, her gloves and her shoes, and in parts of her dress. The full effect did not come to be seen until the sun – the one in the sky – started to go down. Once it did, the lights and the gold started to work together, until she really just… shined… there among the rest of them.

She wasn't the only one, not in the end. Almost as soon as the idea had come for Maya to become the sun, it was clear what needed to happen with Lucas and his costume. He had to become the moon.

Both of their costumes were guided by lights, but where hers picked up on accents of gold, his were made to lift from silvers and blues. Whatever scruff had been left to rise on his face had been shaved off, while his hair had been given a decidedly 'sticky uppy,' spritely sort of shape. While her head had been crowned in rays, the top of his costume included something almost like a cape, starting at the center of his back and extending to the cuffs of his sleeves. And when he'd raise out his arms, it would billow out to create a shining crescent moon. On its own, it was really almost too much, but then coupled to everything else, the hair, the makeup… With the lights on him and the darkness around, he was just the moon, and she was the sun.

"Tell you what, we won't lose each other tonight," she'd laughed, giving her skirts a twirl for effect.

For all his fears of 'the storm,' the night would go on without any incidents where Sam and the girls were concerned. Contrary to what Maya had assumed, Dora _did_ come to the party. She'd brought along a friend, and the two of them and Sam and Cecilia together had gone and enjoyed the maze, played the games, and then once the party had moved inside, they would be seen sitting and chatting here, or dancing there… Maya would tell Lucas how this was a sign, that things were going up rather than down. She had optimism in her now that the next Halloweens would prove her right.

"As the moon, which, you know," Lucas told Maya as he extended out his hands to point at the sky, creating his crescent cape. Their guests had gone away and both Sam and Rosa had retreated above and below for the night. "I think it's time we get some sleep, before _you're_ up there in the sky and you have to get to school."

"A valid point, I'll give you that," Maya replied, getting hold of his silvery hands with her golden ones. "However… It's after midnight, November the first, and it's been ten years for us now," she smiled, and he smiled back.

"Minus a few hours," he nodded.

"I was already dreaming about you at this point, I think it counts," Maya assured him, pulling at his arms so he would follow her down from the porch. "Shouldn't we make sure that we don't have any stragglers in there?" she tipped her head toward the maze. "I know the way."

If someone had been up in the attic, looking down and over to the maze on the Oswalds' land, they could well have seen those two glowing orbs of the sun and the moon, weaving through the walls of hay and followed their progress. They would only be missing the laughter in that pair, the feeling in them as though they were that girl and boy who, ten years ago that day, had gone from friends to a girlfriend and boyfriend, as though they were just teenagers all over again.

"Oh, I hope there aren't any zombies this way…" Lucas whispered as he trailed behind his wife. Maya was almost too busy looking at the way their lights bloomed over the bales of hay around them.

"It's alright, we're spirits, they can't touch us," she promised, her voice almost a song.

"Right, right, sure," Lucas nodded.

"Plus, if they try and touch you, they'll have to deal with me," Maya spun on her heel to face him and the smile on her face made one lift over his own. He enveloped her in his arms and in his cape.

"I feel safer already."

"Yeah?" she beamed, stretching up to kiss him.

She'd wanted to come out here, just a little while, and she had a feeling he understood why without her having to say it. They weren't those same kids anymore, they had grown, they were adults, with growing obligations, one of them with a career and the other well on his way to his own. The part where their anniversary landed on a Monday, that was beyond their control, and they were going to have to get creative about marking this double-digit milestone on the day itself. Strolling just him and her, shining spirits in the dark, if for a few minutes… That was a memory they would could hold on to, no matter what they'd achieve later on.

"I don't know who I'd be if I stopped looking at you like all I want to do is tell you how much I love you," Lucas told her, rewarded with a look bursting of that same emotion, like the sun shining on to him.

"But you do say it, so many times, in so many ways, because that's who you are, my good Huckleberry husband. It's one of those many, many reasons why I love you, too. I could stand here with you all night, listing them off, but you know, we really are going to need to get some rest before comes around and we have to become real humans again."

"Such a shame," he laughed.

"I would be happy to tell you at least one, every day. I could do that, for a long, long time."

"Wow, that many, huh?"

"Well, you know, one day it might be 'you picked up your socks,' I mean you can't have zingers every day, otherwise they'd start losing their power."

"Right, no, that's true."

"And then other days, well, they might be the kind I need to whisper, so no one else hears them," she went on, turning a look up to him that lit her eyes with a spark.

"Now I'm curious," he pulled her nearer, and her smile grew.

"But I'll always find them, because after ten years with you, I feel it more than ever. And that's my one for today. I love you for that."

"You can mark me down for that one, too," he declared, catching her in another kiss, this one keeping hold of them for a good while, until they finally had to make adults of themselves and head back to the house to get ready for bed.

"Any chance you'll keep your hair like that tomorrow? I'm kind of not hating it," Maya told Lucas as they went on their way back out of the maze.

"Might not be exactly in line with the dress code at work… and with school, well…" he pointed out, smiling nonetheless.

"Just tell them you're getting in touch with that Jack Frost vibe, now that we've crossed from Spooktober into Extended Pre-Christmas times."

Much as he would have liked to entertain her, Lucas had instead set about washing the silver out of his hair before they headed to bed, while she did the same with the gold in hers, on the reasoning that it would be a nightmare on the sheets and they might end up eating some of it by accident. If nothing else, it definitely eased them off closer to sleep, until Maya's alarm woke them and set them on their way through Monday morning.

It would have been all too easy for Maya to set her students on a period of silent painting, the better to leave her in that dreamy head space she'd been in since the night before. She'd already penned what felt like a solid chunk of a new song for Ree, and she could have kept on riding that wave until the end. She couldn't do that though, wouldn't dismiss what she had set out for her kids that day. At least she was in a ridiculously good mood, and that had a way of bouncing on to those she met, too.

"Thanks, girls, see you tomorrow," Maya smiled to Daphne Brett and Ariel Su as they picked up their bags and headed out of class after helping her clean up post third period. They had barely cleared the door that Maya heard a light knock at the door and found Lucas standing there. "Do you have a hall pass?" Maya asked, finding her smile impossible to rein in, no matter how much she tried to play it cool.

"I have this, does it count?" he asked, lifting up his ring hand.

"Works for me. What are you doing here? It's a bit early for lunch, isn't it? The bookstore…"

"Maeve was kind enough to pad up my lunch break, as was the rest of the staff on the floor today, so that I could show up a bit early and spend some time with you," Lucas revealed.

"That is very nice of them," Maya went ahead and sat at her desk as he pulled the second chair over to join her. "Don't forget to thank them for me."

"Consider it done," he told her as he sat down, looking around the room. He'd been here a few times already, but something about this place always made him want to come back. It was just so much like an expression of her, right down to the poster she'd brought back from Paris, which now hung on the door to the supply closet.

"People just seem to know you're a really good guy, and they like to do things like this for you…" Maya hummed, nudging his foot with hers as he turned back to her. It made him smile. "Call that my reason for loving you for the day."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	212. Their Surprise From November

July 30th 2020

_Chapter 212  
Their Surprise From November_

"You're going the right way toward a guitar collection, aren't you?" Ree Forster smiled as she picked up the one Maya had received from Charlie's father-in-law, custom made.

"I only have three," Maya shrugged, chuckling.

"Most people have one if they have that at all," Ree pointed out. "You get past two and that's when you find yourself teetering on the edge of 'well I don't have one like that.' Then it's all over and you need a room to put them all in."

"How many do you have?" Maya could only ask.

"Now, let's see," Ree paused to think, which already said a lot. "There are eight of them back in Manchester, and I've got eleven more out here… And I have three going with me wherever I go, so twenty-one," she finally declared, laughing at the stunned look on Maya's face. "One of these days, I'll have to take you with me when I go shopping."

"That… That would be great, actually." She wasn't sure where she would put them all if she ended up with that many, but that was a sufficiently distant issue for her not to feel she needed to think it over so much right here and now. As it was, she was plenty busy.

She made it a point to attend at least one of the weekend sessions of Stage Ready every week, even as she and Lily continued to meet and correspond on Fridays. They were drawing ever closer to the holidays, which proved to be some of their busiest times, apart from summer with the camp. So, they were looking to sort of combine the two points, with a shorter winter camp for kids looking to attend over the break from school. It would be the most time she got to spend at the theater since September had rolled around, as of course the bulk of her time was taken up with being at the school.

With what felt like an impossible two months, going on three months under her belt now, Maya could absolutely say she was where she belonged. Oh, she'd known this before, known it right from the start, but then time advanced, and she couldn't help but be made bolder for the fact that the feeling had not left her, the feeling that told her she loved being in the building, in that room, with those kids every day. All the nerves had gone away, and she really could not understand where they had come from anymore.

In all those weeks, she had seen her kids through highs and lows, and she really got to feel like she understood her own past teachers so much better now. There had been some of them who really got to the point where maybe the work had stopped meaning what it had once meant to them, sure, but there were always plenty more who left a mark on her, and on others, too, who had seen her through the stages of her education. Now she was on the other side, and much as she wasn't surprised at her own ease in getting attached to all those students who walked into her class every day, it was really about how much they all came to mean to her. She called them her kids, and even though they were all anywhere from six to ten years younger than her, their futures mattered so much to her, every last one of their futures.

Their present mattered to her, too, right here and now as they walked her high school halls.

Her being the art teacher didn't exactly place her in the same bracket as anything like English, or Algebra, or Science, but then that wasn't a bad thing, was it? A lot of the kids would chat with her when they saw her around school, sometimes when they ran into her somewhere in town. Maybe her age played into some of that, too, she couldn't say.

But as days had turned to weeks, and the pages on the calendar had turned once, and twice, Maya started to see some of her students start and come to her, to talk to her, not just about some curiosity or discovery they'd made. They'd started to come to her when they needed someone to talk to, when they didn't know who else they might go to. One of her seniors had come to her, at the end of the day, because the girl who had been supposed to be her best friend had done something terribly embarrassing to her and she didn't know how to handle it, how to even go home, to show her face back here the next day. Then, one of her sophomores had seen her out at the grocery store one weekend and sort of trailed around a while before working up the courage to approach her. Even when he'd done this, he'd started to turn and walk away, changing his mind, and might have succeeded if she hadn't spotted him about three aisles back. Rosa had gone on with the basket, leaving Maya and the boy to go and talk.

Then, of course, there was Stella, who had adopted her for a sort of big sister from day one, in the bathroom, and had since been a staple of her classroom at lunch. Between her lunch dates with Lucas on Mondays, and her meetings with Lily on Friday, neither of which would take the entire period, the two of them had easily had the most conversations, more than Maya and any other of her students, those she'd met at the start of the school year anyway. A close second was blooming in the form of Phoebe Munroe, almost by default. Stella was still uneasy about having lunch in the cafeteria with all those loud people, but she was finding a genuine and close friend in Phoebe, the feeling mutual between both girls, so how could she not want to share her meals with her?

The two girls had come up to her after class one day, like they were about to go and present a very important project to their boss. They wanted permission for Phoebe to also have lunch in the art classroom every day.

"You're not going to build a whole club in here? Turning this place into Café Artiste?" The girls had shaken their heads at once. "Alright, fine, we can give it a shot," she'd shrugged, and the girls had smiled. "I'm leaving you in charge," Maya had pointed to Stella, who'd given a clean nod. She understood, and she was happy.

So far, the joint lunches had gone well, no incidents logged, which was saying something with the accident-very-prone Phoebe being part of the equation.

On a Friday night date with Lucas at the movie theater, Maya had come upon Milena Janacek working the concessions stand. It was hard not to remember the days when their friends worked here, when it had been Riley standing behind that counter. The thought now had put a thought in Maya's head, and she'd asked her student if she might have a couple minutes to spare. By chance, she was about to go on break, so she'd stepped out from her spot and followed Maya to one of the tables nearby.

"Look, I might be stepping over some lines here, and if you don't think you can tell me anything, you don't have to." Milena had looked confused, like possibly she'd done something wrong. Maya had quickly reassured her that this wasn't the case. "I want to talk to you about August."

Much as she'd meant to be a bit more direct about the whole thing, so far she had not managed to do a single thing. There were a number of factors for it, a lot to do with timing, but she hadn't forgotten. She would still see him, so unlike the boy he was outside of school. She'd seen him, several times since the start of the year, she could witness it for herself, how his smiles would return, and his bouts of mischief, his energy, would be on the rise as well. And then he'd be at school, and all those switches would be turned off again.

"I was looking at Mrs. Yang's files about all of you guys, from freshman year up to when she left last spring. When I looked at August's file, I…" She couldn't go into details, _that_ would not have been right, she knew. She had to keep herself within some parameters. "The two of you weren't in the same classes until a couple years ago, obviously," she stated. Milena would have been a year behind, until she'd jumped straight from finishing eighth grade to starting tenth along with her brother, and August, too."

"Yeah, I met him when we started tenth grade," Milena nodded. "He was the first person to say hi to me and not 'what's this kid doing here, is she new?'" she recalled. "It was really nice of him." She grew quiet after this, like her mind had gone somewhere, and Maya didn't want to appear so desperate, but she knew… Wherever Milena's mind had gone, that was the place Maya needed to go, too.

"Something changed, didn't it?" she'd asked, and the girl had looked back up to her. "Something happened with August?"

"Your movie is going to start," Milena had spoken after a moment, rising from her seat. Whether she didn't want to get into it here, or whether she didn't want to get into it at all, Maya couldn't say, but that had been the end of it, and so far neither she nor Milena had brought it up again. She went on acting normally whenever they saw each other, but whatever had happened in tenth grade never came up at all.

Deep down, all she could hope was that, in time, August would feel that he could come and speak to her, the way the others had done. She really, really hoped that he would, though she wondered if, for him, she was simply too close to home, like pretty much anyone else in this school where his father worked.

"Maya? Are you ready to begin?"

She blinked, her wandering thoughts returning here, to the Hex, to Ree sitting by her side.

"Yes, no, of course, yes," she straightened up in her seat, looking over the sheet for the two songs they were looking to lay down today, the first two for the album.

"Is something wrong?" Ree asked, naturally seeing right through her response.

"I was just… thinking about my kids… my students," she revealed. "There's so many of them, sooner or later one of them tends to pop up," she went on, which was by no means a lie, though it was definitely a misdirection, turning them away from what she'd been thinking.

"I can imagine, yes," Ree chuckled.

"But I'm here with you now, so I'll just put all that aside," Maya promised.

"Are you sure?" Ree kindly asked.

"Sure," Maya smiled. "I'm really excited to see what we can get done today in here," she touched the controls in front of them. She had used them, had the band in here enough that they were able to get a handle on how everything worked, but now, with Ree here, it felt like they would finally get to see these gifts used to their full potential. "You know I've been teaching Lucas to play?" she revealed, nodding over to her guitar.

"Yeah?" Ree laughed, like she believed her a much more patient person than herself at the thought of doing the same with her own husband. "Is he any good?"

"That whole golden boy thing of his, it might not be a catch all, but every once in a while, he pulls things off like you wouldn't believe. He's getting really good," Maya confirmed.

"Might be time to add a new guitar to your stables then," Ree pointed out with a grin. "How about we move up that shopping day of ours while I'm in town?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	213. Their Surprise From Progress

July 31st 2020

_Chapter 213  
Their Surprise From Progress_

Lucas assumed he would roll up to the house and find Maya and Rosa impatiently waiting for him to arrive so they could take off again. He'd just gotten off from his half day at the bookstore and, as they couldn't say how long this second session with Ree in the Hex would take, he was to drive home to pick them up rather than have the girls join him at the store and leave from there. But they were off to Houston that day for dinner with their friends, and they'd all be anxious to get on the road.

There was no welcoming/rushing comity waiting for him just inside the door though, not unless you counted the dogs, who were always the happiest bunch to see them come along. And after a couple of calls out to his wife, brother, or lodger, he found no takers, so he walked across the house, into the kitchen, so he might look out the window and confirm the Hex lights were on. A recent addition to the decor was a light in the windows, and when it was lit that would mean that recording was happening, and anyone that wasn't inside the studio should stay that way as long as it was like this. It wasn't on now, so he went out the back door and along the path to the Hex door.

He opened it to find Maya sitting in her favorite spot, which was to say the floor, right at the heart of the Hex.

"Been done long?" he asked as he approached her, strumming along at her father's guitar.

"Oh, well we finished with the songs... like two hours ago?" Maya estimated, after checking the time. "She left about twenty minutes ago."

"Right," he smiled. "Where are the others?"

"Sam is hanging out with the girls tonight, over at your aunt's house. And Rosa went to see a show with Jenna. I have to let the others know she's sorry about bailing, but the tickets were kind of last minute."

"So, you and me on our own for that drive to and fro, huh?" he asked, his smile showing how much he kind of preferred that in the end.

"Yup," Maya confirmed, setting the instrument down in her lap. "Sit here first," she instructed with a tap of her foot at the floor. Lucas could have asked if she didn't just want to go already, but it would only lead them back here, so he did as he was told.

Once he did, stepping through the open booth door, he spotted a long thin box on the floor, behind the controls. The size was very reminiscent of another box he had previously seen, from when Charlie had shipped her niece the new guitar made by her father-in-law.

"What's that?" he asked, settling on the ground, even as Maya stretched her arm to pull the box toward them.

"Open it," she instructed, with enough of mischief in her as to suggest this was a gift, and she was eager to see him see what it was. It wouldn't take long for him to get to that part, of course, not when the box had already set one good guess in his head. And when he did open the box and found a guitar case inside it...

"When did you..." he asked.

"Ree and I went shopping yesterday, it was delivered earlier today," she informed him. He looked back down to the case, touched it.

Ever since she had started to teach him to play, he had found a clear, new appreciation for what she did, but also for the instrument itself. He had not expected himself to be that good at it, but now...

"This is... mine?" he blinked.

"No sense having you borrow mine all the time, you're getting too good for that. Besides, all of mine are very... me... You need one that's more yours," she told him, a shy smile about her now, showing how her mind had to be an echo of 'I hope you like it' over and over.

Lucas wasn't sure what would constitute the object itself feeling like it belonged with him, not until he flipped the clasps on the case and pulled the lid open to see the guitar resting inside. He saw it, and right away he wanted to pick it up, to hold it and play it.

"It's... woah..." he blinked, lifting it up with near reverence.

He soon found what must have been the thing to make so that it had to be delivered the next day. Along the side of the body, the one he'd see every time he held it and looked down at it, was engraved an owl. Not just an owl, but the very one that was on both their arms and represented her. Next to it, encircled as it also was on their arms, was the number 366, their shorthand.

"Definitely feels like mine," Lucas looked back to his wife and her glowing smile. She'd done good. Leaning over his guitar and hers as well, he kissed her, and she kissed him back.

"One song before we go?" she asked.

"Do you really think we'll be able to cut ourselves off at just one?" Lucas pointed out, and on that she couldn't argue. One would turn to two, and then there would be a third, and then they wouldn't make it to Houston today.

"Alright then, jam session when we get back?"

"You're on," he promised, and she kissed him once more. "Thank you for this. I love it," he told her," looking down to the guitar, tracing at the owl with his thumb.

"You are so very welcome."

The new guitar returned to its case, they locked up the Hex and headed around to the car to start on their way to Houston. A good twenty minutes was put to the discussion of a name for the instrument before they gave it up, agreeing that maybe it should get to be played first.

The lessons and other instances where the two of them had gotten around to harmonize their music together had really been a highlight, especially since Maya had started at the school. With him off to school or working at the bookstore and her doing all those things she had on her plate, it really just felt nice to have this one peaceful thing, this chance for communing as husband and wife in something that made them both this happy. The guitar she had given him now, to be his very own, represented all that. He might not be hitting any stages any time soon, but he had all the captive audience he could ever want.

Sometimes, he would be sitting in class, and he would feel his fingers move along to some ghost strings, accompanying whatever tune was playing in his head. In those times, it always got to feel like he was getting more and more in touch with that side of Maya, and it genuinely made him smile and feel a burst of happiness.

It wasn't as though his classes were having difficulty holding his attention either.

He'd be heading into finals in a couple weeks, putting one more semester behind him, with only three more ahead of him now before graduation. It felt odd to think about it for some reason. He'd graduated twice in the last few years, first from high school, then from university back in Houston, but this one... This was the big one, the last one. Most of his friends growing up had already finished, had careers slowly coming along. He was still waiting, wouldn't hit that part of his journey until he would be twenty-eight.

At least he knew where he was headed. He was going to work at Sullivan Stables, just like his grandmother had ensured he would before she died. He already did some work out there, the days he could, the better to familiarize himself ahead of time on how things worked on the day to day. He had asked of Juliet to be honest with him, wanted to get to the point where, on the day he had his diploma and was able to come aboard full time, he wouldn't just be handed the job because a paper said to. He wanted to have earned it from his accomplishments. If Juliet didn't feel he was there yet, he would keep at it until he was.

He was also shadowing the ranch's doctor. The man was not yet to the age of retiring, and no one, least of all Lucas, would want to see anyone pushed out to make space for Marianne Sullivan's grandson.

Still, he knew he couldn't wait to get there. Maybe it was for seeing Maya and how much she had been loving her job at the school, how happy she was to have made it to the other side of that dream of hers, but he really wanted to go ahead and reach his own. He was crossing all these points in his life, things which once seemed so far away, and things he had not believed possible from time to time either.

The ones that were left, oh, they were coming closer every day. Once he got there, once he and Maya got there, they'd have new dreams to reach. They never ceased to come.

"Mom said she spoke to Juliet, about Nellie's riding lessons," Maya spoke up as they were nearing their destination.

"Yeah?" Lucas asked. "What'd she say, spring?"

"Spring," Maya confirmed. "Nellie is still just as excited, almost too much. She's still trying to talk Gracie into doing it, too, hasn't figured out there's really no point to it. Gracie still tells her she'll be there, watching her, but she doesn't want to get on a horse herself. Nellie is still pretty stubborn about this one."

"Maybe once she sees Nellie do it, Gracie might change her mind?" Lucas suggested.

"Slim chance, very very small," Maya shook her head.

With the thought of his approaching graduation, and now being here in Houston to visit their friends, he also had to think about his other friends, the ones he was in school with at the moment. They all had these small clusters all over the place now, some in New York, Houston, Austin... High school friends, college friends... They all did well enough in keeping in touch so far, the ones who had already graduated. There were plenty of those they had inevitably drifted away from, amicably so, but then even if they rarely got to see each other, they always kept in touch with those tighter bonds in one way or another.

Lucas didn't know what would become of his group now. Bishop, and Simon, and Robbie and Josie, and Ramona... He could see some of them splitting off, not that he wanted them to, but if he was honest, he knew. Bishop had been his closest friend out there, since day one at university here in Houston, now he was engaged to Leona, and she was friends with both Maya and Riley... And Ramona, well, she had lived with them a while, was like the unofficial - and non-musical - fifth member of TXNY. He didn't see her going anywhere either. What about the others though?

"You have a weird look on your face," Maya declared, pulling him out of his thoughts. He stole a look toward her.

"I was just thinking about school, getting closer to the end," he explained. She smiled, thinking about it now, too, and soon enough...

"That party is going to be so good," she decided with ease, which made him laugh.

"Yeah?"

"Oh, yeah. I am getting you that trampoline. And don't you go telling me you'll be too old for it by then," she pointed her finger at him, and he couldn't even go on like he hadn't been about to suggest something to that effect. If anything, being called out on it made him think about it. There was something to be said for how, even though they were fully aware of it, the both of them, it could really knock them for a loop to stop and think how they weren't kids anymore, neither of them.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	214. Their Surprise From Houston

August 1st 2020

_Chapter 214  
Their Surprise From Houston_

"So, what are the teams looking like this year?" Asher asked, as the four of them stood in his and Ray's living room. Maya and Lucas had just barely come through the door and exchanged their greetings when the question was asked. They were waiting on Sophie and Chiara before moving over to the table to eat. They'd be over in just a few minutes.

Lucas could see Ray, as he hung up his guests' coats, privately smirking to himself for the promptness of his husband's curiosities. He'd probably been talking about it as they waited for their friends to arrive.

"Uh, they're good, I mean they haven't done a whole lot just yet, you know?" Maya slowly replied, like she'd been blindsided by the question.

"You saw them at tryouts, you said you would tell me all about it when we'd see each other next, I'm just saying," Asher gestured between the two of them. Maya couldn't keep from laughing for very long.

"Missing the court, aren't you?" she reached over and tapped his arm.

"Think he's got team envy," Ray clarified. "The guys from the gym, they're okay, they're just..."

"Oh, no, I could work with 'okay,' they are not okay, they are terrible," Asher shook his head.

"And you can't whip them into shape? You know, you put on some motivating music in the background, like in a movie, turn it into a montage..." Maya suggested.

"I'm pretty sure if he does that he'll just end up getting us tossed out of the gym. And it's a really good one, too," Ray shook his head.

"Alright, alright, I'll tell you about the tryouts," Maya finally agreed.

She hadn't really meant to sit in on those, really, she hadn't. But then on that day, after having heard from several of her kids about how they were going for the teams, the subject was there on her mind, unavoidable. They all knew she had been on the girls' team years ago, and most of those who'd tried out from her classes had wanted her to tell them about it, to give them tips...

But then classes had ended that day, and packing up her things to head home, she could just hear people in the hallway, and she would catch snippets of conversation that told her they were headed to the gym, for tryouts. It had become like something stuck at the back of her mind, and eventually she just could not ignore it anymore. Curiosity had won.

Peering through the gym doors, it was like she'd been shot right back to the past. The people were different, but it was the same as before, when she had been at tryouts. The faces may have been new, but they were hardly unknown. About every other one she saw was one of her students, and those who were not were still familiar enough from being around the school that they might as well have been. And then there were the coaches, too.

Sandra Whitman, the girls' coach, had spotted her and waved at her. Maya had waved back, briefly thinking whether or not she should go over to see her, when she'd spotted a strange little figure up on the stands.

"Are you trying out?" she asked Stella, trying not to sound like she found this to be the most outlandish idea. She had heard the girl speak more than once about how her very least favorite subject was gym. It wasn't that she despised physical activity by any lengths, but between the clothes, the t-shirt and shorts making her feel very exposed, and the fact that she really could not sit quietly by the way she did in her other classes... Even now, she was sitting there and Maya could just see her fingertips poking out the ends of her sleeves, twisted around her hands as they were.

"What? No, no, I just..." she pointed out to one side of the gym, where Maya saw an eager looking Phoebe, hugging a ball close as she watched some of the other girls run along.

"Oh... Oh boy..." she tried to sound unconcerned, not as though she was picturing any number of ways her accident prone student might come to harm. She turned back to Stella, who was watching her new friend with much the same concerns, and the bonus of Phoebe's trusty first aid kit on standby.

Maya had watched the whole of the tryouts sitting at Stella's side. A lot of it had been standard fare for these things, though as ever there would be the occasional standout. As was to be expected, Tony Janacek was one of those. The captain of the boys' team for the last two years was looking to carry on this way in his senior year. Meanwhile, Kai Avelino showed himself to be as great as his older siblings, if not better. On the girls' side, Maya was surprised by Ariel Su. The girl never gave the impression of being interested by the sport before, but here she was now, and she was phenomenal. As for Phoebe, well, right up until she'd slipped and fallen on her face, she'd been doing very well for herself. But then her nose had started gushing blood, too much for the likes of that first aid kit. Maya had stepped in to look after her, allowing the coaches to carry on.

"I bas goo, uh?" she asked, as her art teacher instructed her to follow.

"No idea what that was, let's just worry about getting you patched up, yeah?"

Phoebe had not made the team, not entirely. Maya had taken what could only be called a leap of faith, talking Coach Whitman into taking her on as an alternate. The trade off was that Maya herself would have to try and rein in those accident prone tendencies of hers. She accepted gladly.

Aside from Phoebe the alternate, a number of Maya's students had made the teams, including Ariel and Daphne for the girls, and then for the boys, Tony, Kai, Derek... and August.

When she'd spotted him in the gym along with the others, Maya had been almost startled. He had never been on the team, not in middle school or high school up to this point. Why he'd decided to go for it now, in his last year, she had no idea. Maybe it was this new friendship he was developing with Tony Janacek. Certainly, Maya herself might never have joined any team if not for Nadine and the boys, and it had all turned out pretty good, no?

For having played around with him at her house or his over the years, she had never seen his skills in this way. He was actually really good. He lacked a bit of drive, but he made up for it in other ways, and Maya swore she had not seen that tiny little bit of glimmer in him within these walls before. This right here, it could be the answer she had been hoping for, for his sake.

"August Matthews, you're serious?" Asher asked, about as surprised as she had been, as surprised as Lucas when she'd told him.

"Dead serious," Maya nodded, pulling out her phone.

"You have videos and you didn't say?" Ray asked, translating his husband's dropped jaw. Soon, they were all huddled around the screen, watching highlights from the tryouts, including Phoebe Munroe's spectacular faceplant, which caused a collective cry of 'woah!' from the guys. If Maya didn't know that Phoebe herself was showing that same footage around, and wearing her broken nose like something of a badge of honor, she would have deleted the file a long time ago.

"We really need to play more often, like we used to," Lucas declared, as Maya's phone returned to her pocket.

"You're always welcome at the gym for our games," Asher told him.

"He really means that," Ray chimed in with an amused smirk.

"I'll see what I can do," Lucas told the guys, and Asher looked ready to hug him for a solid few minutes. "But I mean also just our group, the way we used to, at Dylan's house, or mine, or someone else's..."

"Between the four of us at the house right now, it's getting pretty brutal," Maya revealed to the guys, who grinned at once. "Didn't really start as anything, we were just playing one day, me and Sam versus him and Rosa," she explained, nodding toward Lucas, who was unable to keep from smiling at the memories.

"Rosa wanted a rematch, and then when we won, she wanted one, too," Lucas turned to his wife.

"Technicality, man, we had dogs underfoot," Maya told him, sounding like they had been rehashing this many times over. Lucas looked to Asher and Ray as though she had just proved his point. "Anyway," Maya squinted before looking back to their hosts as well, "It's been going along like that ever since Sam started keeping score. He's got a chart and everything."

"Rosa keeps trying to get it away from him," Lucas added. "Now he hides it, we don't know where, updates it after every game."

"Oh, I totally know where he hides it," Maya declared with a grin, more so at the look Lucas gave her, showing he'd had no idea, especially as he became convinced she was genuinely telling the truth about this. "Not telling you," she shook her head at him with a laugh.

These 'heated games' had really just become a way for them all to spend time together that wasn't just dinners or sitting around the couch to watch television, once they all came home from school, or work, or school that was actually work, as Rosa would say. The teams had come up as they did on account that both Sam and Rosa had deemed it potentially unfair for the two team players among them to be on the same side, especially since they were married. So, it became that they had one Friar to each side, one collecting her brother and the other his former co-worker.

Maya was telling the truth, she did know where Sam hid his chart... her brother did not know that she did. It so happened that one night, as she'd gone into the Hex in search of her 'unused bits and pieces' song book, she'd accidentally dislodged the folded page from its place. Unfolding it, she'd smiled to herself. Her brother had such a distinctive way of writing, always did. It reminded her of their father's hand in some elements, and that hadn't always been the same. Somehow, he'd adjusted his own, integrated a few things, as a way to remember him.

Later on, without telling him that she had seen the chart now returned to its place, Maya had asked Sam why it mattered so much to keep it going. None of them but him were really keeping score, and much as she complained, they knew Rosa wouldn't actually take it from him.

"It's a reminder, I guess," Sam had told her. Of the score? "No, just all of this, for as long as it lasts, I guess." She had still not been following, so he'd explained further. "I've been starting to think how close I'm getting to finishing college, and what's going to happen after that, when I move away and I'm not living with you guys anymore." They hadn't brought it up yet, and even if she had always known they'd be headed that way, it had not been without effect on big sister Maya. "So, the chart is just so I can remember, in my own way."

He was back in Austin with the girls tonight. Dora, and Cecilia... Who knew what would happen, when Sam did graduate. He would want to be wherever Cecilia was, provided they were still together by then, which seemed fairly likely. She would be finishing high school just as Sam did college. Maybe she would end up going to some school across the country, even overseas... and Sam would follow...

They weren't there yet. Tonight was about Houston, and their friends. Maya reminded herself of that as the girls arrived from across the street.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	215. Their Surprise From Secrets

August 2nd 2020

_Chapter 215  
Their Surprise From Secrets_

"Hey!" Sophie lit up as she first reached the Austin couple and effectively pulled them into a group hug. Maya and Lucas both returned the gesture at once.

Some days, that distance between their home and their friends' felt completely manageable, but some others, especially if they didn't get the chance to see one another for weeks... Whenever they would end up uniting again, for a little while, it would be as though the clocks had been reset and they were kids again and not a trio of married couples in their mid-twenties.

"Sorry it took so long, there was a call right when we were about to leave," Sophie explained as she pulled back and Chiara stepped up to take her place.

"Was it the..." Ray asked, making a gesture neither Maya nor Lucas understood, which likely meant it was something only those four living across from one another were aware of.

"Yeah, yeah," Sophie replied, and between the nod and the rapidity with which she replied, almost like she meant to prevent Ray from saying the words out loud, the uninformed pair was left to wonder what they were all caught up in together that they wouldn't tell their friends.

"Maya was just telling us about the basketball tryouts," Asher spoke up, himself sounding like he was providing an alternate topic of conversation that would take them away from this mysterious phone call.

"What? Without us?" Sophie turned back to her former teammate, who pointed to Asher at once. "Did he say how he's bitter about his gym team?" Sophie asked now as though everything had started to make more sense again.

As they had made their way into the kitchen, with Asher and Ray working together to get the last of dinner ready and on to plates, the tale of basketball tryouts, and the videos, had been given again, this time for Sophie and Chiara's benefit. They were both just as surprised to hear August had both tried out and made the team.

"I thought he and Riley were both more watchers than players," Chiara commented.

"Guess you can only watch for so long before some people want to give it a shot for real," Lucas shrugged.

As surprised as everyone was, he personally couldn't say that he felt the same. Sure, it was like Chiara said, he kept more to the sidelines, but it wasn't like he never played with them. Lucas had personally helped him with his shots from way back when he'd been about nine or ten. And he was agile on his feet, anyone could see that. He was observant, some might call it sneaky. Put all that together, along with his years of watching the game, and then it really was plain to see.

Sophie and Chiara both cringed when they saw the video of Phoebe Munroe's fall, though for having heard of the girl's accident prone tendencies, it was less of a surprise and more 'oh so that's her.'

"Is she alright?" Chiara asked, pointing in the general direction of her face.

"Oh, yeah, bounced right back. She can't wait to start practicing with me. I told her she had to wait until her face was all the same color again."

"Good plan," Sophie nodded, making Maya laugh. "How are you supposed to keep her from hurting herself like that though?"

"I have been asking myself the same thing," Maya admitted, turning a smirk to Lucas as she recalled the two of them being collectively confused the night she'd come home from school after making the arrangement with the coach.

"If it's a lack of coordination or attention, you can work on that," Ray pointed out as he and Asher sat down and everyone picked up their utensils.

"True, yeah," Maya considered this. "She's good out there, could be great, you saw it on the video right before..." she mimed falling.

"So more the attention span then," Lucas nodded.

"She can focus fine, I mean she's all As and one or two Bs, I saw her records," Maya went on. "It's when she moves, like she gets ahead of herself and then out come the band-aids." At this, Lucas and Sophie both looked to one another at the same time. "What?" Maya asked, noticing.

"Samantha Stone," Lucas turned back to his wife who, like Asher, had a look of 'I have heard this name somewhere before.' "She graduated with us?"

"Oh, yeah, Mandy..." Asher recalled.

"What about her?" Maya asked, still not following.

"She was in dance class with us, remember?" Sophie asked back.

"Well, yeah, so?"

"So, you weren't in there with us in the beginning," Lucas told her. "By the time you saw her, she was great, but when we all started, I mean..." he hesitated, like a good guy too ill at ease with speaking the truth.

"She was a clumsy mess," Sophie saved him. Maya blinked now, seeing what they were suggesting.

"Your girl looked like she could move out there, that might actually work," Ray added.

"You could get her signed up at the theater, Stage Ready," Chiara chimed in next.

"Hey, I'll try it," Maya nodded, trying at the same time to ignore the images playing in her head of about all the ways Phoebe could get hurt. At the same time, she thought about Stella, and whether she might follow her friend in this, draw some benefits of her own...

"So, when do you guys play?" Lucas turned to Asher and Ray. They didn't follow. "Basketball? At the gym," he clarified, taking them back to their previous conversation, before Sophie and Chiara had arrived.

"Oh, yeah," Asher shook his head, recalling. "Uh, you know, it moves around sometimes. We'll do one day for a few weeks, and then it'll change. If you ask me, that's part of the problem, they're committed but not really?" Lucas wasn't sure how to respond, especially as he hadn't gotten an entire answer. Asher seemed to catch this, as he finally added. "Until further notice, we're on Thursdays, six o'clock?"

"Are you?" Sophie asked, and there was the weirdest sort of look passed between the two of them, as hard to decipher as the signal earlier, about the call. Either way, it translated as far as Asher was concerned, because he turned back to Lucas. "But it might change again. I'll definitely let you know ahead of time, yeah?"

"Sure, okay," Lucas told him, clearly perplexed.

"Hey, be right back, sorry," Maya stood up, looking to Lucas before making her way out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the bathroom. She shut the door, then opened it again as silently as possible. Now, she waited, peering out the crack she'd left open. Two minutes went by before she spotted her husband and let him into the room, shutting the door again. "Wasn't sure you got that."

"No, I did, I was just trying to be sort of discreet, you know?" Lucas told her. "What's going on?"

"I don't know, that's kind of what I'm trying to find out, keep your voice down," she whispered.

"Maya, what are you..."

"Oh, come on, don't tell me you haven't picked up on how weird they're all being down there?"

"No, I caught that, too," he confessed. "I don't know what it is though."

"They're not that good at hiding things, are they?" Maya shook her head. "I mean... I don't know what it is that they're hiding, but there's something, it's right there."

"I mean, it's not like you and I don't keep secrets, too, it's not a big deal, it's their thing," Lucas shrugged.

"No, I know, I do, I'm just not good with those, my brain just sees a puzzle," she sighed.

"I've helped you sort the pieces a few times," he smiled, which got one out of her in return.

"You're always so good about that," she stated, and without either of them needing to say it, they knew this was going to be the thing for today, her reason for loving him. Already they had Sam with his basketball chart, but they also had Lucas doing some chronicling of his own.

He'd started to write down all of Maya's daily reasons. He hadn't planned it out that way, that was just how it had happened, when one night, working a quiet floor at the bookstore, he'd spent his break browsing downstairs. Next thing he knew, he was buying this notebook he had seen, immediately thinking how it reminded him of his wife. He'd gone back upstairs and, upon looking at that first blank page, he had started writing it all down. First the date, then the reason. He remembered them all, there hadn't been so many yet at the time. And then from there, day to day, he had been adding to the list.

Maya had not seen it or known about it until about two weeks in. She'd spotted the book, thought the cover looked beautiful, and then she'd opened it, just sort of without thinking, the way one might if they spotted it in a store and wanted to see the inside, the quality of the paper, the spacing of the lines... What she had found had been a neatly written list in her husband's hand, dates and reasons, familiar ones. She'd been unable to stop smiling, even as Lucas came and found her there with the book.

"Okay, so... Wait, what do they think you're doing up here?" Maya asked, thinking now how they had pulled this move more than once in the past.

"Didn't say anything," Lucas shrugged. "Didn't think I had to explain myself. Besides, they would have come up with their own anyway." On consideration, he was probably right.

"Alright, so what are we thinking here?"

"That we should just go back down there and, whatever this secret is, if it exists, they will tell us when it's time," Lucas told her, and she wished his whole sage thing didn't make so much sense.

"Or, we go now, quietly, and we can hear what they're saying," she whispered. He gave her a look, and a moment later she grinned. "I was kidding, relax," she tapped his arm as they left the bathroom and went down to rejoin their friends in the kitchen.

They did not in fact come quiet to spy, though they could almost have done it, for how they found the other four in hushed conversation. The moment Lucas and Maya were spotted, everyone had been way too obvious in how they settled back to their plates and glasses. Once everyone was seated again, it felt like the six of them were playing a game of chicken, waiting to see who would break first.

"You know, with the guys being all about their team and the gym, I think we should get a girls' game going, too," Maya spoke up. "Might have to be in Austin, my schedule is a bit crazy as it is, but I always want to make time for you and the others, and it might be fun. Some of the girls from the team are back in town now, so we could really..."

"Okay, alright, I see what you're doing," Sophie cut her off, stuck between a smile and a roll of the eyes.

"I'm doing something?" Maya innocently asked. Lucas had to rein in his smirk. Meanwhile, Sophie, Chiara, Asher, and Ray were all looking to one another, speaking without words.

"Beware the cherub face," Asher intoned dramatically, and Maya replied with a devilish grin. "Yeah, there she is."

"So, what's up?" Lucas asked, looking to one friend and then another.

"Right, well, it's kind of a long story," Ray stated.

"Good thing we're having dinner, best place for those," Maya nodded. "We'd love to hear it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	216. Their Surprise From Friends

August 3rd 2020

_Chapter 216  
Their Surprise From Friends_

"The phone call we got earlier, before Chiara and I came out here, was from the hospital, to confirm an appointment we were looking to get," Sophie started, just as quickly raising her hand, indicating it wasn't what they might have been thinking. She was fine, and she had been for a while. To see her on the job, you would hardly know she'd been off on recovery for so long.

"So, what is it about then?" Lucas asked, and there was that shared look again, the unit of those couples.

"Sparing you the exact procedural details, we are trying to have a baby. All of us," Asher went right for it, leaving the visiting couple to sit there, in complete and awed silence.

The story went like this.

When Sophie and Chiara had gotten married, even before that, when they had gotten engaged, there had been one big question that could not be ignored. Would they both want children someday? It was still early, for both of them, and it wasn't as though they would come into this with some unplanned pregnancy. It would have to be planned, regardless of the way they came by these kids, biologically or not. They had to get that question on the table now, couldn't leave surprises to chance, that one of them would eventually want this and the other would not.

But they had been all in, both of them. Chiara came from a big family, and it was what felt natural to her. For her part, Sophie had pretty much the opposite, but she had all this love in her, just looking for outlets, and this felt right. With this knowledge between them, their fates were sealed together, bonded in marriage for a few years now.

The question had been left in the back of their minds for a while after their wedding. The next time it was addressed was after the incident which nearly claimed Sophie's life. At the beginning, when they had gotten to the point where the fear for that life became less and less of a thing, Sophie had been left in such a place that she believed perhaps their plans were not meant to come to fruition, that children would feel like too much for them. Chiara had seen through this, seen the fear in her wife, the fear of what their lives might become because of her condition.

It had taken some time, months, before those worries would be put to rest, after Sophie had finally cracked and let those pent up feelings out into the light. Chiara had vowed to her that absolutely nothing could have made her want to not have kids with her, that her resilience was just the kind of quality they should aspire to pass on. From that point forward, quietly so, they had started to consider their options.

Meanwhile, there were developments on the other side, too.

Like the girls, the idea of children had been discussed, only in the case of Asher and Ray, it had happened before, a long time before. It hadn't necessarily been a discussion of the two of them having those kids together specifically, but it spoke of their intentions. It came down in a not so different pattern from Sophie and Chiara's. Asher had grown up with one brother but so many more cousins, aunts and uncles... When he looked to the future, even back in high school, he saw himself with a family of his own.

Ray also came from a large family, except in one moment they had all been taken from him, when his parents had found out about him and his sexuality and they had kicked him out, shunned him without looking back.

Not so long after it had happened, in his first days living at the Friar house with Lucas and his parents, he had been out with Asher. He was still pretty shaken up over his parents' choice. He had feared this would happen if they ever found out, but maybe a part of him had hoped they would surprise him and be okay with it. He'd clung to that hope, and it had been his undoing.

In that broken state, he had made a defiant claim, that he would have his own family someday, and it would be bright, and loving, and no one would ever have to fear that they might be tossed away like trash for being who they were.

From there, as their bond and their relationship had grown, solidified, Asher and Ray had never straight up asked one another if they wanted kids someday, it was just a fact of who they were and who they saw themselves becoming. One day, they would be a family together, they would have children.

The two sides had not come to cross together until the sign had gone up on the Shaws' lawn across the street from Sophie and Chiara's house.

The guys had been living with the girls since they had moved back to Texas and jobs had taken them to Houston rather than their native Austin. The plan had always been that they were welcome to stay there as long as needed, as they were eventually looking to buy a house of their own, once things had settled down post move from New York.

Until such a chance came up, the four of them were just living together, and they found they had such an ease of it that they almost didn't think about the guys moving anymore, it was just their life now. Someday they would go, they figured, but that was not important at the time.

Then the sign had gone up on the lawn across the street, and they had seen it. Chiara had been the first to see it, and almost instantly she had sent a picture of it into the house chat.

Once they'd all been home that night, they'd just sort of been looking at it, stalking it almost, with an unspoken thought in them that soon became spoken. What if the guys bought it?

They weren't even sure who had said it anymore, because really it had been on all of their minds, as far back as when Chiara had sent the photo. They hardly had to address it any further than that, an offer would be made, the very next morning if they could. The Shaws knew them, the Shaws liked them, treated them pretty much like four more of their kids, as they had always done, same with Maya and Lucas, and Rosa, Riley, and Dylan, when they had lived across from them as well. They might be compelled to sell to these people they knew already.

Ray had been looking out at the house, seeing the whole of it, and his first thought had been for how happy they could be out there, raising their family together, and Asher had just smiled, showing a similar picture existed in his mind's eye.

It had not been an immediate leap from that to 'let's have a kid together,' but it had been the start. The offer had been made on the house, and before long their assumption toward the Shaws had paid off. They had taken the offer, the house would become Asher and Ray's new home. When they had heard the news, the response had been clear: they had to celebrate.

Admittedly, they had been a bit tipsy when the idea had been put on the table for the first time. Even so, the way they saw it, the drinks loosening up their tongues and inhibitions might just have been what they needed. They had been talking about how their kids would get to grow up together, going across the street here and there, and they could all be one big, happy family.

The actual meaning when they'd mentioned 'their kids' had been 'Asher and Ray's kids and Sophie and Chiara's kids,' separate, but before long the meaning took to shifting. In bringing up the subject, most times, she wouldn't have tipped her hand, but in her near drunken state, Sophie had found herself opening up, bringing up the fact that, following her injuries and the surgeries required to repair them, her doctor had explained how unlikely it was that she would ever be able to carry a child of her own. It wasn't as though they hadn't already talked, her and Chiara, about which of them would do this, if that was the route they took. Chiara had been the obvious choice, but now she had become the only choice.

Whether they would use Chiara's own egg or get one from Sophie for her to carry, there was still that other very important part they needed to consider, which they had mentioned. Right then, one as tipsy as the next, both Ray and Asher had chimed in with 'I'll do it.'

They had all sort of laughed at first. It almost felt too silly, like a sign that they'd celebrated too much. But then once the chuckles had died down, the guys had looked to each other. They were serious, they both were. More than that, it felt right, almost like the house, when they had first decided to go after it. They were all so close to one another, to the point where they might have easily kept living together.

Now, they would all be living across the street from one another. And if they did this, the child would be part of both their families, would forever bind them together, and that was kind of the best idea. Stating this very thought to the girls, it had left Sophie and Chiara to be the ones looking at each other now, considering this offer. Sure, it was unusual, but then when had either of them turned aside an idea because it wasn't the 'normal' way. Their whole story had started on a message board, the two of them parted by countless miles and an ocean, and then by chance they had been brought together. They were making it work.

Their answer had been that they would all reconvene on this idea in the morning, when they were sober.

They were just brimming on the edge of hungover, but that might have been the best option again, leaving them to be direct. What they were all suggesting would boil down to bringing this child into the world in a shared custody scenario, mothers here, fathers there. But they would be across the street from one another, and it would never be all that separated between them. They would all look after the baby, see it grow. They would need to work out the break down of who had the child when, if they would do one week here and one there, but even that would mostly be about bed time, wouldn't it? They would have their meals together, they would spend time together... It wouldn't be such a bad idea, would it? They would be their child's other half, familiar and loved.

So, that was the plan, the start of it, of course. They wanted more than one, but they weren't getting ahead of themselves. What mattered was that they were all ready to jump in. There had been plenty of talk of whose egg and whose sperm, which had bordered between awkward and comical and landed somewhere along the line of them 'vowing' to have one of each combination. For now though, they were looking to call up the 'ChiaRay' combo. If all went well, it would all be happening very soon, and now Maya and Lucas knew that this secret would not have remained one, if given the time. It was the whole reason this dinner had happened, for them to share the news.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	217. Their Surprise From News

August 4th 2020

_Chapter 217  
Their Surprise From News_

It was hard not to feel as though the world had taken a new spin, as they processed the revelation put on to them. As much as they had all been keeping in touch in the last couple of years, those of them in Austin and these four here in Houston, there would be those instances where they would be reminded of how there was this whole other world growing out here, in this house and the one across the street. Surely, if they had all been living in the same city, seeing each other more often, they would have heard of this sooner in some way.

It was already something to hear of Zay and Nadine on their road to adoption, or Farkle and Isadora expecting the next Minkus baby in just a few months. Now they had the four of them here, making an extended family out of themselves. To hear them explain how they had gotten to this point, this decision, it really felt like they had been headed for this all along, and it was perfect for them.

"When are you going to know for sure if it all worked out?" Maya asked Sophie and Chiara, as they sat back at the table after dinner, leaving the guys to clear away the dishes.

"I have an appointment on Thursday," Chiara explained. "Once that is done, Ray will have to go and do his part, and then after that, after they do the procedure, I guess it will all depend."

She looked so happy and just a bit nervous at the same time, which Maya could easily understand. If it all worked out, then they would be on their way, but if it didn't, then how many times would they be willing to try? Maya asked her this, and Chiara responded with an immediate and confident smile.

"I am not worried about that. The women in my family have always been very... fortunate with babies, every one."

Even as she said this though, Maya could see what lay underneath that statement. What if she was the one who broke the line? What if something went wrong and she couldn't do it? More than that, there was Sophie to think about. The two of them were so intent on this idea, and after what had happened to her wife, Chiara was the one who had to step up and do it. If that wasn't enough, now she was essentially being put in charge of ensuring the birth of their child and their friends' child as well. It was a lot of pressure, and her confidence could only handle so much before it had to face this potential reality.

"She'll be the best," Sophie declared, with some confidence of her own, born of complete love for the woman she had married. "I can't wait," she smiled, and Chiara received the words like they had come and fortified her.

Maya couldn't say for sure how Sophie felt about the fact that she wouldn't be the one to carry any of the children they might have. Whether or not she would have been able to before, whether or not she might have wanted and chosen to, this was different. This was something that had happened to her, a lasting effect of that night almost two years ago. It would be something else, for the choice to be taken from her like that.

"Have you told your parents?" Maya asked of the two of them.

"My mother has been in Japan for the last month, she's not going to be back until the spring," Sophie revealed. "I'm sort of hoping to tell her in person, not over Skype. She might figure it out before though..."

"If it all works out before then?" Maya guessed.

"That, too, but mostly the part where I am going to be dipping into a lot of my funds to pay for the whole thing. It's not cheap, and for once I'm thinking I might as well benefit from what I've got thanks to her."

"Oh, yeah," Maya nodded. "So maybe you should just tell her. Better on a screen than not at all, right?"

"Right, no, you're right, I just wish she was here right now," Sophie shrugged. Chiara caught up her hand in hers, gave it a squeeze.

"My family is coming out for Christmas," she turned to Maya. "Hopefully, we will have good news to give them when they do," Chiara breathed deep.

"Are you going to tell us when you know, or do we have to wait until Christmas, too?" Maya asked with a sweet smile, making her friends laugh.

"Yes, you will know, we promise," Sophie told her, checking with her wife and getting a nod.

"Okay, good, because I am going to be waiting for the news like you wouldn't believe."

"Wait, are you saying you are too curious for your own good?" Sophie feigned shock.

"Hey, hey," Maya pointed at her, 'warning,' only getting giggles in return. "I can't help it if I'm this eager to go all Auntie Maya on your kid. Your genes and his, that's going to be some weaponized cuteness right there," she told them, nodding back over to Ray.

"Oh, we know," Sophie nodded. "Asher said the same thing."

They both looked so thrilled at the prospect, not about this mythically cute baby specifically but about this baby in general. Maya knew the look too well by now. She had seen it on several of her friends' faces now. She'd seen it on her own face and on Lucas' face as well, more and more. It was unmistakable and inescapable, too.

"We're trying very hard not to think too much about what every combination will look like," Sophie went on.

"Hey, you know, I could try and draw that. Then we'll see how close I was," Maya joked.

It hadn't taken long for Lucas to get up and offer his assistance to their hosts in clearing the table, putting away the leftovers, and cleaning the dishes. All the same, both Asher and Ray knew Lucas enough to know he wouldn't be turned away so easily without his manners won out, so they welcomed his offer.

"Okay, so how bad is that team?" Lucas asked.

"Oh, it is amateur hour, I mean... Alright, so none of us are pros, sure, but the three of us might as well be compared to most of the guys. Ray and I work so hard to try and win, but that's never happened once. One time, one time we came close," Asher told him, raising his index in an almost too dramatic fashion.

"What happened to make you lose?" Lucas had to wonder. Asher's face bent itself to what felt like an unmistakable 'I don't know if I want to say' expression.

"Tell him," Ray could barely keep a straight face.

"I needed to change those laces, alright? I knew it, and I kept putting it off, and that's what I got. Laces, man, they're no joke."

"A good parenting tip right there," Lucas offered, and it made both the guys smile at once.

They all talked daily, the whole of their group jumping into messages as though a part pf them was always there, in a conversation they'd kept going for over a decade. Some of them had come along earlier than others, but they'd always been in it, sometimes just with an emoji or two, a picture, anything.

If he were to look back on messages in recent weeks, Lucas was almost sure he would start to see certain messages under a new light, like only in knowing what they were all planning would it start to make complete sense.

None of them had had younger siblings until Nadine had come into the picture. Then suddenly there were two little sisters, in the form of Marley and Michaela Zhu. Both of them had soon become staples in the boys' lives. Lucas thought about those days now, as he thought about Asher as a father. He thought about those two girls, and then little sister Olivia, and he thought about the Hunter Hart kids... He had always been so good with them. What he'd been awkward about at the time, he would make up for in so many ways that you practically forgot about the rest. As he had gotten older, he had improved, finessed those awkward points until they just didn't exist anymore.

And Ray, well, the guy had always been so loving and welcoming. He would be wonderful as a father, there was hardly any question. From all Lucas had seen of him, especially from the point where he had lived with him and his parents, his whole thing had just become about appreciating the good things and people in his life, the ones who showed him genuine love, not the kind left to be conditional with who he was in his heart and mind. He deserved so much for things to turn out as he envisioned them.

"Does anybody else know?" Lucas asked the guys, and he didn't specify who he meant here. The rest of their group back in Austin, whether they knew yet or not, would be the first people they wouldn't be able to wait to go to and talk about this, like the band of future aunts and uncles they were.

"Well, not really, actually," Asher revealed. "Dylan and Riley were going to be the first, but they had to reschedule, so now here you are, so... yeah..." His face told him without words that, even if things had not gone the way they had first intended, they were very happy with the alternative.

"Right, so we shouldn't tell them," Lucas guessed. The guys confirmed. "When is this make-up dinner?" he asked, discreetly tipping his head to his wife. She would not enjoy having to wait.

"Tomorrow night," Ray told him, understanding soon enough.

"Good, good, that shouldn't be too bad," Lucas told himself. "What about Rosa?" he went on then, thinking of how she had been supposed to come tonight.

"Yeah, she would be the 'not really' I mentioned before," Asher spoke up now, and Lucas blinked. She already knew? "It wasn't planned, but she came up to visit her mother a couple days back, and well, she's so close by, so she came over. There were some pamphlets and then... well, we had to tell her," he explained with a shrug.

"I'm starting to think she didn't come tonight just so she wouldn't have to play poker face," Lucas thought aloud. The guys' faces said enough here for him to know that was exactly what that was. "Wow..."

"Oh, don't tell your parents either," Ray requested. "We're headed out there next weekend, and I'd like to tell them," he admitted. Lucas smiled at this.

"Hey, you should," he clapped him on the shoulder. "I'd like to be there, too, you know, family affair and all." Ray beamed at this, giving him a quick hug. No matter how many the years since those days, no matter how that time when he had lived with them was made to feel small and far away by comparison, none of them had forgotten, and this was his brother, part of the family who had taken him in when his own had turned him away. Of course he had to be there. "It'll be their first grandkid," Lucas told him, and he believed it, as much as he didn't regret the privilege.

"She is going to flip out," Asher grinned, looking at his humbled husband, his heart feeling high in his chest and caught in a tremor of emotion.

"Flip out, more like pass out," Lucas chuckled. Oh, he definitely had to be there for that.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	218. Their Surprise From Time

**_A/N:_**_ The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

August 5th 2020

_Chapter 218  
Their Surprise From Time_

Neither Maya nor Lucas ever had to worry that the drive to or from Houston would lack in conversation between the two of them. That being said, returning home that night after their dinner with their friends, they almost had too much material for them to scour through. Maya was at the wheel, swapping over from when Lucas had taken the seat for the previous drive, and her fingers kept a near steady beat on the steering wheel as they went. She couldn't keep them still if she tried.

"Maybe I should have been the one to drive," Lucas teased as he looked on.

"No, no, it's all good," she waved this off with a smile. "I'm just all… good-place happy."

"I know the feeling," Lucas nodded.

"Sam is going to freak out," Maya laughed as the image came to her mind. Lucas wasn't far behind, once the scenario was shared with him. "I can see his face already, like…" Maya mimed it, eyes still on the road, fueling her husband's laughter.

"It's uncanny," he judged. She grinned.

"It'll go alright for them, right?" she went on to ask.

"Why wouldn't it?"

"I don't know, but with everything Nadine and Zay have been going through, I'd hate to see more of our friends struggling for this."

Months onward from them starting the process of adopting, the Babineaux family remained in wait. They knew it could take a while, just as it could happen very fast, but it was hard not to look at the time going by and wonder if maybe there was a reason they were still waiting, especially after their close call.

Shortly after the fall festival, they had gotten a call. A young woman wanted to meet with them, and before they had ever been able to arrange anything, she'd gone into labor. The next thing they knew, Zay and Nadine were flying out to where she was, in Minnesota. The rest of them back in Texas, and in New York, had waited eagerly for news. The baby was born shortly before they'd made it to the hospital, it was a boy, a healthy baby boy.

The next day, Zay and Nadine were flying home alone. The mother had changed her mind. She would keep her baby. She had been so sorry for making them fly out for nothing, and both Nadine and Zay had shown nothing but understanding, wishing them both well. The return home had been a quiet one, from what Maya and Lucas heard. They had known something like this might happen, but it had been difficult for them not to feel a sudden flash of those two losses they had suffered to even set them down this path.

Now, they continued to wait, and wait, and even though life went on with plenty of happy days and good memories, the absence felt more and more like a sucking void, trying to pull them in.

"It won't be like that for them," Lucas promised her. It was easy to hear his voice and trust it, call the whole thing a done deal and go forward in the assumption that everything would work out for Sophie, Chiara, Asher, and Ray. But then they had all been forced to evolve and step into this chapter of their lives that came with just… a whole lot of twists and turns they could not have prepared themselves for. All they could do now was to try and navigate it all together as best as they could, to learn it all as they went.

When Maya mentioned how she had told Sophie and Chiara about attempting to sketch their potential children, depending on the combinations with the guys, Lucas laughed.

"I'm serious," Maya laughed along.

"Never doubted you were," he assured her. "I'm just trying to picture what they would be like. I mean, Chiara and Ray already…"

"Right? We really need to get that out of our system, otherwise that kid is going to have so many complexes," Maya shook her head.

"How can you tell what they'd look like?" Lucas wondered.

"Oh, well, I need to do some research, but I've been wanting to do it for a while, to really just improve on my sketching skills in different ways." She paused. "Plus, if I don't do theirs, I'll just end up trying to do ours, and that is just… that is a slippery slope," she shook her head, face rising into a smirk at how it made him laugh.

"See, you say that, but I know you're going to do it anyway, and well… I'd kind of like to see it, too," Lucas admitted.

"Well, in that case…" she hummed. "I need to focus on the road here, this is not helping. Give me something else to think about, anything else."

"We'll be decorating for Christmas soon?" he offered, and she shook her head. "Too soon?"

"No, please, I've been ready since after Halloween," she pointed out. "It's too much though, I'll start thinking about twinkly lights, and garlands, and ornaments, and my classroom… Oh, it's going to be so good…

"Okay, okay, you've made your point, not Christmas… Hey, are you guys doing an album this year?"

"Lucas!" she 'scolded,' and his laughter was too much to keep her from joining in. "Please, just give me a nice, road safe subject of conversation?"

"How much my mother is going to freak out when they tell her?" he suggested, passing on how the guys were headed out to dinner with Tom and Melinda, and they should be there, too. The way the smile came over her face at the thought was nothing short of amazing.

"You know, back when Asher and Ray got married, I heard her talking with Zay and Nadine about the adoption and how that was all going. I'm pretty sure now that she wanted to pump them for information, too, for the guys."

"I can see that," Lucas nodded. "I don't even have to try that hard, and I don't think you do either."

She really didn't. As much as she might have been digging around on whatever ways existed for Ray and Asher to find themselves with a child, when it came to Lucas and Maya, it wasn't so much about digging, no. It was just a lot of nudging, and dropping hints the size of boulders.

They had sort of figured that it would start to happen, especially after the wedding, as though the moment they'd said 'I do' they had also said 'I will provide grandchildren as soon as possible.' Sure, Melinda had not flat out said it. She didn't have to. Almost every single time they spoke, either in person or on the phone, there would be some element dropped into the conversation and hidden about as well as an elephant behind a telephone pole. She was so ready to be a grandmother, and they weren't sure she was actually trying to be discreet about it.

"Maybe we should tell her about the waiting," Lucas stated, as they drove on. "At least she'd know we have a plan… sort of a plan… part of…" Seeing the twinge of a smirk on her face, he had to ask. "What's so funny?"

"You are so your mother's son," Maya told him, laughing. "You're doing it to me, too, asking without asking."

"Alright, maybe a little," he admitted with a sheepish smile. "Can you blame me right now? Everywhere we look, our friends are out there, starting their families, and I get why you want us to wait, I'm completely on board. I just… I'd like to know when, just sort of… ballpark figure… we might be giving it a try."

"I've been thinking about it, too," Maya revealed, which made him perk up to attention. "Easy there, it's not happening right now," Maya laughed.

"That would really not be 'road safe,'" he agreed, making her laugh some more.

"Right, well, this is what I'm thinking. This whole time, we have been trying _not_ to get pregnant and, despite a couple of false alarms, we have been successful at that," Maya started. Lucas nodded. "Once we _do_ start to actually try, we don't know how long it's going to take. It could be very fast, or it could take months… or longer than that," she breathed out, thinking of Nadine.

"It could," Lucas nodded along.

"So we can only plan so much, and if we put too much stake in a specific time frame, we could end up putting ourselves in for some disappointments."

"Yeah." He did not want to put any pressure on either one of them, didn't want this time to start feeling like something other than what it was, when it was meant to be this next step for the two of them, this step to become the three of them.

"Ideally, I would not want to have to leave in the middle of a school year, so I would have to aim to deliver somewhere about August at the earliest, that way I wouldn't so much go on leave, I'd just be going on summer holidays, and then the year after that… either I skip a whole one, or maybe half of one, I'm not sure."

"So, August," Lucas breathed. "That would mean it would have to be…" he counted back, stopped and blinked as he came to the answer. "November… that's…"

"This month? I know," Maya could only steal a peek at the almost giddy look on her husband's face. "Which begs the question… I know we both said we're ready, and we want this, so… Does that mean we're _really_ ready? All systems go, let's make a baby?"

Lucas knew she had to have been thinking this through a lot, more than he already had. This was not something they could take on lightly, he realized that. Faced with some actual timeframe, he had to stop and do some math of his own. August, maybe September or October, if they went under the assumption that they succeeded in getting pregnant soon enough… He would be starting his last year at school, and they would have a newborn at home. He wouldn't get to lend too much of a hand for a lot of that time, what with him sprinting toward the finish line of his education before taking on the job at Sullivan Stables.

There was no set date for him to start the job, and Juliet would not rush him, if he needed to spend time with Maya, with the baby, but school… School would be an hour drive to and from every day, plus assignments and tests, and those definitely have deadlines he'd have to respect…

They both wanted this so much, but wouldn't it be more important for them to do it right? What was an extra year if it meant getting what they wanted _and_ getting to appreciate it?

"So, next year?"

He'd been so caught up in his thoughts that, for a moment, he thought it had been in his head, his own thought. Instead, blinking, he realized it had been Maya who said it, out loud as she drove.

"Yeah, maybe, I mean…" he gave a light shrug.

"No, I get it, I do," Maya told him at once. "It's the right call… even if it means your mother is going to have to hold on to her Nana horses a little while longer." Lucas laughed a while at this before looking at her again.

"So, next year, November," he stated, and she smiled, sighing dramatically.

"What do you get a girl on your eleventh anniversary?"

When they arrived back home, they found Sam and Rosa waiting, watching a movie together with all the dogs either on the couch with them or at their feet. They had the movie on with the Italian dubbing, as Sam had asked Rosa to help him learn the language. She was making him repeat words now, and barely managed to do so with a straight face, as stumbled his way over the letter R like it came up to smack him in the face every time he tried to say it the way she did. This was Sam though, and he just kept trying, no matter how many times he fell.

"Maybe you should give it a rest, Sammy, go get some water?" Maya addressed her brother, making both he and Rosa – and the dogs – turn to attention. Half the pups scampered over to say hello. Crowley practically did a somersault, tripping over his feet and landing on his back before Lucas picked him up.

"Hey, we saw a couple of your brothers tonight," he smiled. Sophie and Chiara had brought Shadow along, the little dog running off with brother Bod once they'd arrived at Asher and Ray's.

"So, how did it go?" Rosa asked, once Sam had walked off toward the kitchen, still saying the words to himself. The way she'd watched him go and waited until he was out of earshot, it was all too clear that she knew what they were supposed to have learned that night, and now she wanted to hear about it.

"How are you such a sneak?" Maya squinted, leaning over the back of the couch.

"Depends on the occasion, I guess," Rosa shrugged, looking ridiculously proud of herself.

"How was it tonight?" Sam returned, and the trio shared a look before turning back to him. "What?" he asked, in that very 'I feel cornered and observed' way of his.

"They are… having a baby," Lucas was the one to get to say it.

"Who is?" Sam asked, very confused.

"All of them," Maya nodded. "The four of them. Well, hasn't happened yet, but soon." Sam still looked like someone had handed him a puzzle and played keep away with half the pieces. Lucas explained it simply enough, until Sam caught up.

"Wow… That's great," he finally stated, moving to sit back on the couch with his water.

"You can't tell anyone right now, okay? Especially my parents," Lucas told him.

"Only reason we told you was so the rest of us wouldn't have to whisper about it and have you go off thinking we were the ones having a baby," Maya added, pointing to herself and Lucas. "That's not happening for another year."

"Wait, it's not?" Sam turned around now, more surprised than he'd been about the other news.

"Yeah, well, you know, it makes more sense that way, with him finishing school soon and…" Maya explained.

"Yeah, but so am I," Sam cut in, and his big sister understood his surprise. This all meant that he would have graduated by the time it all went and happened, and he wouldn't be living with them anymore. He had wanted to be here, with them, when they had their first baby. As she so often did, Maya was now left with the urge to hug her little brother.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	219. Their Blaze of December

August 6th 2020

_Chapter 219  
Their Blaze of December_

The day Maya had left school knowing she wouldn't see her students again until classes started up again after the New Year, she was left in awe to realize that she had already been through half of her first school year. Alright, technically that wasn't true, and the part starting in January was longer than the one ending in December, but it was hard not to see it as one half here and one there, with the holidays in between. Either way, she had reached this point and this being her first year, it was kind of amazing.

"What's with the face?" Lucas had asked when he'd come back from work and found her plopped down there on the couch with a bit of a pouty frown. He'd already finished _his_ semester days ago, and he was now working just about full time for the duration of his break, splitting his time between the bookstore and the stables.

"I miss my kids?" Maya stared up innocently.

"You've got one of them up the road," Lucas reminded her in an attempt to cheer her up. The way she'd blinked, he almost felt the urge to warn Missy Sanderson to run before Maya went up there and tried to get her to paint something for her. Luckily, she'd just burst out laughing a moment later, motioning for him to come and sit with her, which he did.

"I'll be fine," she'd told him. "A couple weeks of less of them and more of you? I could get used to it." He'd laughed and nodded, kissing her until Sam came bounding down the stairs and they split apart, rather than to hear any complaining out of him. "So," Maya cleared her throat. "How was the store tonight? Everyone running around on mad gift hunts?" she asked, giving her best impression.

"Oh, big time," Lucas laughed. "This season really brings out the best and the worst out of people."

"Yeah, no kidding," Maya nodded.

She had dealt with her fair share of 'stage parents' over the last couple of years of Stage Ready, especially when the camp had come along. Maya was not really concerned. She could handle them like she'd been doing it all her life, which went a long way with the kids as much as the parents. It didn't have to be Christmas for her to see 'the best and the worst.' Now with the holiday rush camp kicking off on Monday, she expected to see it all come to a head.

"I saw a couple of your kids out there tonight," Lucas remembered, and she was intrigued to hear at once, as though she hadn't seen them a few hours prior.

"Who'd you see? What'd they need? Did you help them? Were you a very courteous clerk?" she asked, one question after the other. It was hard not to be excited with her.

"The brother and sister, the seniors?"

"Tony and Milena?" she provided at once.

"Yeah, them and their father. He was shopping for them, and then Milena was shopping for him. Her brother was just kind of tagging along with her. She saw me and remembered me from the festival, so she came to ask if I'd help their father because he was 'hopeless unless it's with a motor.'" Maya laughed. She'd heard this as well, when Milena had laid out a similar warning the day of her first parent-teacher night. She'd been pretty nervous going in, not knowing how it would all go, if she'd just come off as a newbie. The prospect of encountering the 'hopeless' Mr. Janacek had helped reset some of her expectations.

"You know how I told you about the mom, she was an artist?" Maya asked Lucas, who nodded. "I knew the name sounded familiar. There's that small frame, on Patty's wall, the pencil sketch?"

"That was her?" Lucas blinked. He had seen it plenty of times, whenever he'd visit his grandparents. "How did you…"

"The last project I had everyone do before the break, I suggested to Tony he might want to do it on his mother. He looked so happy about it," she smiled, recalling it. He was not exactly sullen on the whole, but compared to his sister, he definitely came off as the broody big brother. He always looked so different when he mentioned his mother, or did something that clearly reminded him of her. They had been so very close, which wasn't to say that Milena had not been close to her mother, but Tony… He would have proudly announced himself a mama's boy. "He included some photos of some of her work. The one Patty has, it wasn't one of those, but there was her signature, and just the style of it… It all came together in a flash. I need to ask her about it, next time we see her."

"That'll be Christmas," Lucas nodded, and Maya gave a happy clap of her hands, making him laugh.

"I was thinking, we should put your new music skills on display that day, maybe you and I can play some songs while everyone's here, some nice carols…"

"Why is this giving me flashbacks to when Zay and I were little, and he'd try to get me to 'put on a show' for our parents?" Lucas asked, with an uncertain look to him.

"Please, this will be nothing like that," Maya shook her head.

"How do you know that?" Lucas wondered.

"Because you're brilliant, of course," she shook her head, pulling his face toward hers for another kiss. Apparently this was just the moment when Sam had finished making his snack and come out of the kitchen, going by the noise they heard. Maya stretched out one hand without breaking the kiss and signed 'you want to pay rent?' A few seconds later, they heard hurried steps heading back upstairs, and with a happy smile, they allowed themselves to get just a bit lost together.

"Oh, guys, come on, can we just…" They sat back up and apart, startled to find Rosa standing on the other side of the couch.

"H-Hey, when'd you get here, you… Did you just get back?" Maya asked, trying to play it casual, running a hand through her hair.

"Yes, I did just get back, _Mom_," Rosa teased. "Was hanging out with Jenna, but look, made it back for curfew. Maybe you guys should move all this upstairs? You know, to your room?" With a smirk, she moved off to the basement door, Peanut and Lupescu scampering in from the kitchen to go with her.

"Man, these kids are really stepping on our game," Lucas whispered, and Maya had to clamp her hand to her mouth not to burst out laughing. "Here we are, being all good and hospitable, and this is the thanks we get?"

"We should really kick them out on their butts, huh?" Maya chimed in on this line of faux indignation.

"We'll give them a pass until the new year, and then they're out," Lucas suggested, slipping his arms around his wife once again.

"I really like this plan," she breathed in the space before their lips were reunited.

This new kiss barely had time to gain traction that it was interrupted by the sound of Lucas' phone ringing in his back pocket.

"Would it be rude… if I said… to ignore it?" Maya asked, never breaking the embrace for much more than those tiny seconds in order to speak.

"Check who it is," Lucas requested, equally determined not to let the moment go to waste unless he really had to. Maya blindly fished around him until she was able to pull the phone from his pocket and angle it so she could see the screen. When she did, she sighed and pulled back.

"Your dad," she breathed. Lucas frowned, wondering why he would be calling at this hour. He and Maya both sat back on the couch as he answered the call.

"Hey, Dad, sorry it took a while to answer, I just got home from work and my phone was just…"

"No, it's alright, don't worry about it," Thomas Friar replied. There was something strange, sort of distracted in his voice, which quickly drew his son's attention. "Listen, I need you to do me a favor?"

"Sure, what is it?" he asked. Maya could see the look on his face, and now she was signing, asking what was going on. He shrugged, didn't know yet.

"Alright, first things first, your mother and I are fine, everything is… mostly fine," Thomas stated, which was really not as reassuring as he might have tried to make it sound.

"Why wouldn't you be fine?" he asked, sitting up. Maya looked instantly concerned as well.

"There was a fire at the house," Thomas revealed, and Lucas' hand went up at once, spelling out F-I-R-E. Immediately, Maya got up from the couch and sped off down the stairs to the basement to find Rosa. As Lucas went on talking with his father, standing from the couch to pace after a few seconds, she would reappear and sprint up to go and find Sam, too. "The firefighters came, managed to contain it, but the kitchen is pretty gutted, didn't spread out much further than that, though they'll be checking the structure. I'll need to make some calls in the morning, nothing's open now…" The way he spoke, it almost sounded like how his wife did, too, when there was too much going on and she needed to keep talking or else she'd stop and then it would get worse.

"Where are you now?" Lucas asked. Rosa had come up from the basement now, stood there listening on and looking worried.

"The ER," Thomas told his son, and Lucas' knees felt like they were made of jelly. "We just got out. Your mother is mostly shaken up, I had some minor burns, really nothing serious. The problem now is we need to get out of here, and we can't go home…"

"I'm on my way," Lucas told him at once. There was absolutely no other response to give. "As soon as I can, getting in the car in a minute."

"Please, take your time, alright? Last thing we need is you kids hurrying and getting hurt for it."

"We'll be careful, I promise. Tell Mom I love her?"

"Of course, son."

"And I love you, too, Dad."

"I love you, too, Lucas," Thomas replied, sounding just a bit more relaxed than he'd done a moment before, and Lucas took a breath as he hung up. When he turned around, there they all here, Maya, Sam, Rosa, staring back at him.

"Hey," Maya stepped up, putting her arms around him. "What did he say?"

"I-I have to go get them, we… They can't go back to the house, Mom's freaked out, and my father's got some burns, he…"

"Okay, okay," Maya spoke soothingly. "We'll get them. You should let me drive." He didn't argue.

"I'll call Jenna, see if I can crash at her place tonight, maybe a little while. Your parents can have the basement," Rosa told Lucas. He tried to tell her she didn't have to, but she was already gone to pack a bag.

"What can I do?" Sam asked, a little frazzled, too.

"I don't know if they'll just want to go to sleep or if they'll want to stay up a while, maybe eat something…" Maya suggested, as Lucas was already heading out the door to get to the car.

"Right, I'll figure it out," Sam told his sister, who spared herself the moment to hug him close for a few seconds, kissing the side of his head before hurrying off after her husband. She climbed into the driver's seat, turning the key in the ignition as she looked to Lucas, sitting there, knees almost jumping from worrying. It was really a good thing she didn't have to convince him to let her take the wheel.

"They're okay, remember?" Maya quietly told him. He looked at her, took a breath.

"I know," he assured her as they drove out on to the road and on their way to the hospital.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	220. Their Blaze of Losses

August 7th 2020

_Chapter 220  
Their Blaze of Losses_

It was late enough by the time Maya and Lucas left the house on their way to the hospital that they could have made record time, with smooth sailing the whole way. The ride had been quiet all along as they went, and Maya was left to wonder what might have been going through her husband's mind. His father's call had come as such a shock, and even though that was to be expected, with the news he was given, she had not foreseen the level to which it would affect him. It was as though all this time his parents had felt contained in this safety bubble, where nothing could touch them, and now… now something had touched them, hurt them.

"Wait," he spoke, so unexpectedly that she'd been startled by the sound of his voice. "Sorry…" he added, upon her reaction.

"It's fine," she promised him. "What is it?"

"I need to make a detour real quick," he told her, and he didn't need to add more for her to know where he wanted to go.

He needed to see it. He just needed to. They wouldn't be stopping anywhere once they'd picked up his parents, so he just had to get his peek while he could. So, they made the detour, Maya turning up the speed just enough to stay within limits while getting them there quicker.

As they approached, the image was just a bit contradictory. The front of the house looked entirely untouched, like nothing had happened. But then everything around it clearly showed that something _had_ happened, that the firefighters had been here, doing whatever they had to do to control the situation.

They got out of the car, approaching the house with what felt like inappropriate caution. They were walking like they were headed to a haunted mansion, abandoned, scary… But they weren't, were they? They were going to his house, his parents' house, site of so many adolescent memories for her, and for him… This was the place he'd grown up, from the day he was born until he'd moved to Houston for college. It, like his parents, was meant to be something solid. From the front, it was.

They didn't go into the house, didn't know what to expect, and as it was the door was sort of cordoned off. Instead, they walked around the side of the house. The closer they got to the kitchen windows, the illusion of normalcy felt as though it was wearing off. They'd been boarded up, and there were shards of glass cracking under their feet as they moved along. When they tried to look through some of the windows which remained intact, it was almost impossible to see a single thing. It was so dark outside, and there were no lights on inside. Even with the flashlights on their phones, they got very little. The back door was boarded up, too, as though there was anything at all that would make them want to go inside. Maya could only speak for herself, but it gave her chills.

"We should go, they'll be waiting for us," Lucas spoke quietly as he turned away from his childhood home to return to the car.

"Hey, hey, hold on," Maya caught his hand, just managing to get in front of him. She set her hand to his chest, her words existing in her eyes. _Breathe._ Lucas looked back at her, and though he could not think of what to tell her, he pulled her into his arms, and that was enough. She held him as he held her, and they gave themselves a minute before finally getting back to the car and continuing on their way to the hospital.

It wasn't so much of a detour that they wouldn't have been here just a couple minutes earlier if they'd gone right from the house to the ER. When they came up after parking the car, they found Thomas and Melinda sitting on a bench just outside. Of all the images they might have conjured in their minds as to what the two of them might look like when they arrived, it was hard to place the one they got.

To have known Melinda Friar now for nearly half her lifetime, Maya had always known the woman to feel very tall, and vibrantly joyful. Sure, there had been a few times where that mood had been challenged, like the day of the accident with her and Lucas, and the time Pappy Joe had been hurt… This was different though, and for obvious reasons. On those occasions, the people she cared about had been put in harm's way, and it was not something she wanted to see, but then as frightening as hat initial incident was, once it was over she could move directly into caretaking mode, and then the buoyant Melinda would have control. Today… Today, she had been the one hurt, the one left to carry this trauma, and it left her just… small, and quiet, and so unlike the woman who now demanded to be called Mom by her daughter-in-law, and who sought so indiscreetly to be called Grandma.

Meanwhile, sitting next to her, Thomas Friar looked… Well, to be honest, he looked the most like his son than Maya had ever seen him. It was as though father and son had left the posts where they normally stood and were brought to meet in the middle by this event. Lucas' father had always had this sort of impressive air to him, the kind that might make some unsuspecting stranger believe that this man was hard, and all about rules and disciplines and business. Sure, some of that was true, sometimes, but that wasn't the whole picture, and it certainly wasn't the heart of the image. Thomas Friar was the man his son had always aspired to be, and Maya could vouch for his successes, every day of her life since she was thirteen years old. This whole family had become so vital to her, the moment she'd met them, and now she was a part of it, and now… Now here was this man, sitting by his wife, so focused on her as to not realize his son and daughter-in-law had arrived.

"Mom, Dad…" Lucas spoke, and they both looked up at once. A light came on in Melinda's face, a flicker strong enough to lift her to her feet, the better to pull the pair of them into her arms. Lucas and Maya both hugged her as fiercely as she did them, showing how much they had worried for her. She said nothing, and like Lucas earlier, she didn't have to. The tremor in her said enough, it said 'it was so horrible, I was so scared, I'm so glad you're here now.' "Are you alright?" Lucas asked, his voice cracking as he found himself having to be the one to comfort his mother, when she had done it for him so many times before. He rose to the task as they would always expect him to.

"Of course, sweetheart," she spoke, almost on reflex. Her tone had difficulty selling it, even as her voice came rough. They knew she'd taken in some smoke, and here it showed in a painful way.

"Are you sure?" Maya had to ask. "Maybe they should keep you overnight, so they can keep an eye on you in case…" Melinda looked to her, touched her cheek. Maya leaned into the touch, looking at her, truly, as a mother.

"Yes, I'm sure, honey," Melinda nodded.

"Let me get you to the car," Lucas told her, and Maya split off from the group hug to let them go. She could tell Lucas wanted to see to his father as well, but then even Mr. Friar would have wanted them to do the same. Now Maya turned to her father-in-law, and getting a look at him, she noticed for the first time the bandages covering both of his hands, possibly part of his arms.

"Are you… Is it okay if I hug you right now?" she asked, indicating his hands and the rest of him as though to ask if he was hurt anywhere else.

"Let's risk it," Thomas nodded, and that was all she needed to hear. She hugged the man just as she'd done his wife a moment before, and he gave as good as he received.

"How bad are they? Your hands, your…" she asked, when they pulled back.

"Oh, well," he looked down, lifting his arms, wincing some. "Can't really point so well, but the right one goes nearly to the elbow, and the left one hardly made the wrist. It's really not as bad as it looks," he insisted. "It'll heal."

"You know, I have known your son long enough to know, down to a hair, when he's putting on a brave face and hiding behind it? I've also known _you_ long enough to know where he got it… _Dad_…" she gave him a pointed look. As much as her words were shaped like a reprimand, it acted instead as the means to pull a laugh from him, a true one, with its own brand of healing.

"Nothing gets by you," Thomas Friar guessed, as they started to walk back to the car to rejoin the others.

"I'll give you a pass for tonight, but don't think this conversation is over."

"Yes, ma'am."

Lucas had considered bringing the car closer, rather than to have his mother walk, but when he'd asked her if she wanted him to do that, she'd shaken her head. She wanted to walk, wanted to breathe the air. It wasn't so cold tonight, which was good. He'd already shuffled off his jacket and slipped it over her shoulders. Neither she nor his father looked to have gotten their hands on anything to put over themselves after what happened at the house. She was still in what could only be described as a Melinda Friar Christmas Classic, with reds and greens and golds… It had started out that way at least, until the fire, and now it had grown dull and gray in places, possibly burnt in places. Suddenly Lucas was having to realize that their holidays would have to be altered in consequence, if they happened at all.

His mother didn't speak as they walked. She held to his arms like a lifeline though, and that was all he needed to know. When they finally reached the car, he settled her into the front passenger seat. Part of him wanted to get in next to her, but he knew they might be better off if Maya drove again. At least it would give him a chance to be by his father's side. When the two of them arrived, Maya walked around to take her place, while Lucas looked to his father, seeing the bandages for the first time as well.

"Can you get in alright?" he asked, after quickly getting the back door open.

"I believe so," Thomas went and lowered himself to the seat before swivelling his feet in, keeping his hands from pressing down in any way. "Can I trouble you to buckle me in?" he looked up, just a bit humbled. Lucas obliged without a word, finally closing the door and going around the other side. Once he was seated and buckled up, Maya took the car out of the lot and back on the road home.

"How bad is it? Your hands, you…" Lucas asked his father.

"It'll heal, son," Thomas nodded to him, even as his look travelled to the rear view mirror, and his daughter-in-law's brief but pointed look. "We can talk it all over once we get... to your home," he course-corrected his response.

"_Our_ home," Lucas told him, as once again they found themselves with new lodgers, for however long they would require it. "Yours before it was mine."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	221. Their Blaze of Hospitality

August 8th 2020

_Chapter 221  
Their Blaze of Hospitality_

Coming up the lane, many of the houses still showing their Christmas lights all colorful and bright, just as they had seen the whole ride back from the hospital, Maya and Lucas both sort of hoped, deep down, that this would do their passengers some good. Sure, the lights would not change what had happened today, wouldn't fix the house, wouldn't heal them quicker… But it would be a reminder that the world kept turning, and they were days away from… whatever they would make of Christmas, and then soon after that would come a brand new year.

Both the elder Friars were seen looking out on those lit up houses as they went along. Their house had been lit up like that, too, just last night. When Lucas and Maya had gone to check out the place earlier, there had been something inevitably foreboding about finding it the sole dark spot on the street. Now, they were here, making their way to a house still tuned to 'merry and bright.' Later, Sam would tell his sister and brother-in-law how he had debated whether to turn them off or not, thinking maybe it would be like a weird reminder to the displaced couple, but in the end he had chosen to leave them on, as a sign of welcoming. It had been the right call, and they thanked him for it.

He was here now, as the car pulled up next to the minivan. Sam stood on the porch, waiting. He had that same look about him as he'd done before they'd left earlier. His whole demeanor was locked on to making himself available to his sister's in-laws in whatever needs they might have had. His first assignment came in the form of tag-teaming with Maya to assist Thomas Friar out of the car. His swivel maneuver had not worked so well coming out, and so the siblings acted like crutches for him to manage to stand up without using his bandaged limbs. Meanwhile, Lucas went and helped his mother, bringing her up from the car as he'd brought her to it before.

"It's about to get crowded in there, isn't it?" Thomas Friar stated.

"Are you going to be able to get to the basement alright?" Maya asked him, thinking about it now. He couldn't hold to the ramp, could he?

"Isn't your friend staying down there?"

"She went to stay with a friend, it's all yours," Sam replied. "I put in new sheets on the bed, and you've got… well… There's empty drawers for…" He was realizing, even as he was saying it, that they had nothing to them save for the clothes on their backs.

"That is very kind of you," Thomas told him, bailing him out.

"I took some of Lucas' PJs down, hope that's okay. They should fit you," Sam went on.

"Yes, imagine that."

"And, well… I wasn't sure, with Mrs. Friar, since Maya is… well…"

"Shorter? You can say it, Sammy," Maya smiled.

"So, I called the Sandersons. Missy ran over a few things of her mother and grandmother's, for tonight at least. They'll be back in the morning."

"He's something else, this brother of yours," Thomas turned to his daughter-in-law.

"You have no idea," Maya smiled over to Sam.

As they'd walked into the house, there was a moment where they were left to consider what to do next. Did they want to just go downstairs, or sit in the living room, or the kitchen? It quickly came down to the kitchen, and so they went. Without a word, Sam brought over cups, and a few of their stay warm mugs.

"Coffee here, hot water for tea or hot chocolate here," he pointed out. "I wasn't sure what…" he started, then stopped as Melinda Friar touched his arm and gave a smile and a thankful nod before indicating the water and reaching for a tea bag. Soon, they all had their drinks set before them.

They were all quiet for a few minutes, the silence broken only by the sound of stirring spoons, cups picked up and put back down again after a sip… As he couldn't pick up his own cup, Mr. Friar had to be aided by his wife. They were all visibly tired from the day's events, but they didn't look like they were ready to go to sleep either. So where were they supposed to start? Without a doubt, there would be so many questions to address, about what would happen with the house, what calls needed to be made, when they might be able to start on repairs, what was the state of their injuries… None of that would be brought up tonight, there just was no way. Even asking about the fire, how it had started, and how Mr. Friar had gotten burned… They were the most direct questions, seemingly most natural ones to ask, but no one seemed ready or willing to vocalize them.

Eventually, it was Melinda who broke the silence, to a point. She tapped her son's arm and made the easily recognizable gesture for 'I would like something to write with.' Lucas stood at once, grabbing a nearby notepad and pen and bringing them to his mother. It was hard not to watch her as she set herself to writing, even as she tried to dissimulate the way her hand shook still as she worked the pen. They'd already noticed it from the clinking of her tea cup whenever she'd take hold of it.

_Thank you for everything you've done tonight._

She'd shown this to each of her three hosts, with a quick nod to each. It wasn't as though any of them had needed to wonder whether or not they would do it, so really they might have said it was nothing. But whether that was the case or not, she needed to express this gratitude, and they would not take it from her.

"I'm just glad you're both okay," Lucas promised his mother, sharing this notion with a look to his father, too. "When you called, I just…" he shook his head, the memory strong in his mind. Now that the initial shock had worn off though, a few things fell into place, top most being… "Where's Duke?" he asked even as the thought came to him. The moment the dog's name was brought up, Maya and Sam sat up as well.

"He's alright, he's safe," Thomas reassured them all. "Neighbors have him for tonight, we can get him in the morning, that'll be… a lot of dogs in here," he looked around.

"Not really, Rosa took her two with her over to Jenna's. Technically she's not supposed to have dogs in her apartment apparently, but Jenna told Rosa that they'd run the risk, and if anyone asked questions, she'd handle it."

"Then it's settled, Duke is coming over tomorrow," Maya nodded. "It'll be good to have him around," she smiled over to her mother-in-law, who looked very glad to hear it. She was still so shaken up, but being here now, with family, at home, all went a long way toward getting her closer to herself again.

"She rescued him, you know?" Thomas told the kids, nodding to his wife with a spark of pride in his eyes, and a little shake of his head like 'you mad woman, I love you so.' "He was losing it out there, hiding under the kitchen table, but she crawled under there and got him, kept him safe. That's how the smoke got her, and then I had to get them out."

_He went back inside._ Melinda's second note was joined to a look on _her_ face that read more like 'Thomas Joseph Friar, have you lost your mind, you could have died.'

"I wanted to try and contain it as best I could until the firefighters came," he shook his head, showing how he saw his own foolishness now. His arms left gingerly on the table's surface, the bandages showed – or hid – the extent of what that decision had cost him. "I learned my lesson," he bowed his head to his wife, receiving a 'you better have' look in return.

"Are you going to be okay to get some sleep? You really should…" Lucas told his parents.

"We will, yes," Thomas assured him, looking to Melinda, who looked half asleep where she sat. "Very soon, I think."

In time, the pair retreated, with Melinda helping her husband down to the basement, where they would find the clothes borrowed from Lucas and the Sanderson women. Maya gave her brother his marching orders, with an excess of gratitude, and Sam went off to his room. Once they'd picked up and put away the cups and other items laid out on the kitchen table, Maya and Lucas went upstairs as well, moving into their room to start changing for bed.

The evening had started out so differently. It didn't seem possible that just a couple of hours ago the two of them had been casually enjoying some quiet closeness on the couch, and now… Now they felt like they'd just run an emotional marathon.

"I can feel you watching me," Lucas stated as he pulled on a shirt. "And not the normal way where you pretend like you're not." He turned around to find his wife standing there, a borderline apologetic smile on her face.

"I can't help it," she shrugged. "Ever since we left to go get your parents, I just… I worry… about you, and how you're handling this, because I can see it in you, even when I can't see your eyes, how much it's just…" she gestured at his face, looking for the words that wouldn't come.

"I know you do," Lucas assured her, walking those short steps to rejoin her. "How do you think I've been keeping myself from losing it completely all night?" he smiled, brushing hair from her face. "Couldn't have done this without you… Couldn't do… all the things we're going to have to do over the next few weeks without you."

"Well, then, it's a good thing you won't have to, right?" she nodded up at him.

"I was just thinking that."

"Come here, sit," Maya took hold of his hands, leading him to sit on the edge of the bed.

"Why?" he wondered.

"Because, like there's ever a chance you could forget, you are so much taller than I am, and when I hug you standing up, it all still just feels like you're hugging me, and right now, I need the vertical advantage. I think you need it," she informed him. She knew it would make him smile, and she was right. Stepping up closer, she put her arms around his shoulders, until his head could rest over her heart and his arms could lock around her waist. "See? Now I've got you," Maya hummed, pressing a kiss to the top of his head, as he let himself be held by her.

"I really get it now," he agreed, looking up at her. She met this gaze with a slow kiss to his lips, after which he resettled his head as it had been, where he could feel her heartbeat. After a few seconds, as the beats started to lull him into calm, it slowly made him feel as though the night was expanding over him. He had been going around with everything that had happened with his parents, and the house, carrying it like a tight ball in his grasp, to keep it from bursting out. Now it was coming out in waves, and his fear, even if he knew now that his mother and father were okay, had never felt more real. He was safe though, it didn't overpower him, because wherever the waves crashed, all they found was Maya's loving hold, and it pushed those waves away, until he could relax, exhale. Tomorrow, they would start fresh.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	222. Their Blaze of Home Life

August 9th 2020

_Chapter 222  
Their Blaze of Home Life_

When he woke up the next morning, Lucas caught a scent in the air and it pulled him back in time. It was the smell of some of his mother's holiday breakfast favorites, coming up from below. He opened his eyes, and for a moment he had to stop and think back to the night before, to remember… The fire… the hospital… His parents had spent the night in the basement, and now his mother was in the kitchen? He knew it would be in her instincts to do this, but he wanted her to know she was a guest here, and she deserved to take things easy and let them treat her, after everything that had happened yesterday.

Carefully pulling himself away to let Maya keep sleeping, her first day off from work, he walked out of the room and made his way down the stairs. As he neared the kitchen, he could hear a voice. Sam was in there, too, which made sense. He was always the first one up, made breakfast most days. With Maya's earlier wake-up time for work, they'd come to realize he always woke up extra early like this, the better to get some quiet studying in, before the sun had a chance to rise. He was on break now, but he still did it. The question now was which of the two, Melinda or Sam, had made it to the kitchen, first.

He could only hear Sam, but he was definitely speaking to his silenced mother, as she told him what to do next for the recipe, with the aid of her paper and pen. Lucas could just see them, even as they didn't notice him. His mother appeared to be wearing some more of the Sanderson women's clothing, something for the day. She almost didn't look like herself, between the borrowed clothing and the way her hair lay flatter than usual. But she was here, working on breakfast, her favorite meal of the day, and with Sam's aid, she was going around with renewed ease. Later, they'd have to get back into that bubble of the aftermath from the fire, but for now she was good, and he left her that way, undisturbed, as he climbed back up to his room.

"I woke up and you weren't there," his wife's sleepy voice greeted him.

"I was only gone a minute," Lucas promised, climbing back into bed even as Maya moved to burrow her way into his arms. "I was trying to let you sleep in," he added, laying a kiss to the top of her head as he rubbed her back.

"Very sweet of you, Huckleberry, but considering everything that… Do I smell…"

"Mom's cinnamon buns? You do," Lucas confirmed, warmed by the smile it earned him. A moment later though, Maya had the same reaction as he'd had before.

"But she's not…"

"You would have to wake up very early to get in the way of Melinda Friar making breakfast. When we'd go on vacation, and we'd be in a hotel, she would have this look in her eyes like she had half a mind to sneak into the hotel kitchens and show them 'how it's done,'" he recalled.

"I really need to see that," Maya laughed. "Maybe we could all go on a trip next summer, your family and mine… ours… Something nice for our first married anniversary."

"I like the sound of that," Lucas nodded, and Maya nodded with a grin.

Lying there for a few quiet seconds, it started to dawn on them how this might well me their mornings for several weeks, maybe more. They still had no idea what the extent of the damages would be, and what it would mean for a timeline of getting his parents back into their own home. It wasn't as though they didn't want them around, far from it, but it would definitely change a lot of things. There wasn't even a question to be asked, they would host the elder Friars for as long as was necessary and happily so. It would be interesting, and that was really the least they could say.

"We should really tell them about the waiting soon," Maya decided. Lucas looked at her. "I'm sorry, I love your mom, and I want her to recuperate, but that doesn't mean it won't drive me nuts once she gets back to her 'casual hinting.'"

"Yeah… yeah, that's gonna be hard to dodge," Lucas had to chuckle. "So, we'll tell her."

"Not this morning," Maya clarified. "Just… in a couple days or something."

"Fair," he agreed.

"Anyway, it'll be hard enough to 'get in the mood' with your parents downstairs the whole time," she whispered. Lucas bit back a laugh and kissed her.

Once they were up and changed out of their PJs, they headed down to the kitchen, knowing better than to wait for Melinda to come up and knock at their door. They sort of felt bad for the change, as it left one of their party to stand out. Thomas had also come up from the basement, and while Sam had also poached some of Lucas' day clothes for him to wear, he could not change on his own, and so for the time being he sat at the table, looking even stranger than his wife, with checkered shorts and a university t-shirt. It did show more of the extent of his injuries, as they could see now how high the bandages did or didn't go. It also revealed an as yet unmentioned third bandage on his left calf, which came to explain the barely noticeable shift in his walk they had seen the night before.

"You know, in all this time, I don't think I've really noticed just how nice you made this kitchen when you fixed up the place," Thomas told his son in greeting. "It looks bigger than I remember."

"Sometimes I remember that you grew up here, and I kind of love it," Maya told her father-in-law as she sat in the chair next to his after getting coffee for the both of them. She motioned to his cup, fixed with the milk and sugar she knew he took, and with a sigh he nodded. He didn't like being helped to eat or drink, but then he didn't have much of a choice.

"Thank you," he spoke, once he'd swallowed his first sip. "I really love this house, too," he told her. "When Dad moved in with us, part of me hated the thought that he might sell it. Then when he told me he wanted to hold on to it, to pass it to Lucas, I was relieved. Now, it gets to stay in the family, with you two," he smiled, and Maya could just see him hold back the natural follow up to this statement. Just because his wife was extremely vocal when it came to her desire for grandchildren, it did not mean that Thomas Friar himself was not looking forward to the day when he'd have them, too.

"Hey," Maya whispered to her father-in-law, motioning for him to lean in. "Next year, alright?" she told him, holding a finger to her lips and signalling Melinda with her eyes as a way to say 'let's keep this between us.' Thomas considered this, and it went to show how she'd been right, that he _had_ been thinking about it, as he understood what she was telling him. It could have been a disappointing statement, but really it was the opposite, and it made him smile and nod, waving his hand between the two of them. They had a deal. "Now, I gave you a pass last night because a lot of things happened. Talk to me, how bad is it?" she asked, looking to his arms. "And what happened to your leg?"

As they spoke, Lucas had joined Sam in playing helper to his mother. He hadn't noticed when he'd come down and seen them before, but soon he realized how his mother was keeping well away from the oven and wasn't actually doing all that much, mostly directing Sam and now him, too, to do what had to be done. She was scared, much as she tried to hide it. It got him wondering now if she had gotten much sleep. She was here now, making the most of her circumstances, trying to treat this day like it was any other day, but it just wasn't. It was the day after her kitchen had burned down, and possibly more of the house damaged, and she and her husband had landed in the ER and now their son's guest room. The fire most of all was still with her, and now it was a struggle for her to do one of the things she normally loved doing the most. But she was here anyway.

"Hey, Mom?" Lucas looked at her, while Sam pulled the tray from the oven. She looked at him, raised her eyebrows. _Yes?_ It was still the weirdest part of all, the fact that she wasn't speaking. Melinda Friar's voice was normally nothing short of a character all its own. "We were going to head to the grocery store later today, to make a run for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. I don't know if you…" She responded by tapping his shoulder and nodding. She wanted to go, too. "Good," he smiled. "It'll be our first Christmas morning waking up in the same house in a while," he stated, and this possibly brightened her face most of all. "Should we call Pappy Joe?" Lucas asked quietly. His mother reached for her pad and pen.

_I told Thomas to let him know what happened. He wants to wait until he knows more about the house. We also need to go there today._

Lucas had read from over her shoulder as she wrote, finding still something of a tremor in her hand but less than last night. After a beat, she added…

_Maybe I might go with Maya and Sam to the grocery store. You could go to the house with your father._

She looked at him when she had finished writing, and he understood this, too. She wasn't ready to go and see the damages. As much as she wanted to stand by Thomas through all of it, she just couldn't bring herself to go.

"I think that's a great idea," Lucas told his mother, and she nodded, agreed.

Soon, breakfast was served. Melinda took over assisting duties from Maya, which more than once led Thomas to receive one bite only once he'd gotten his wife to agree to take one of her own, too, and not just to fuss over him. She would promise, and do as he'd asked, before the cycle started all over again. Lucas, Maya, and Sam all did their best to mind their own plates, without calling to attention Mr. Friar's need to swallow his pride. Lucas told the siblings about the plan he and his mother had come up with, and they were on board.

They had barely finished breakfast when the Sandersons came up from their farm, as had been promised the day before. Missy, her parents, and her grandparents sat in the kitchen along with the Friars, elder and younger, and Sam. They must have been up very early, collecting some things they thought Thomas and Melinda might need, while they could not go into their home. It was all received with extreme gratitude and humility. It did them so much good to receive this visit, to sit with these people who'd once been Thomas' neighbors, back when he'd lived here as a boy. Their families had never been very far apart, and now it continued, in some ways, with Maya teaching Missy up at the high school. And really, on this day so near to Christmas, this presence returned some holiday cheer to the couple, following their ordeal… It told them, as other small things here and there had done, that they would be alright.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	223. Their Blaze of Cheer

August 10th 2020

_Chapter 223  
Their Blaze of Cheer_

"I forgot the singing," Maya mumbled, as she woke up on Christmas Eve to the sounds of her mother-in-law from below. Lucas laughed, only to find this stalled by her hand over his mouth. "The thing about us being quiet up here is that she doesn't know we're awake, and then she'll leave us alone. And if she leaves us alone, well then who knows what might happen," she gave him a pointed look which left _him_ with a look that suggested he was thinking strongly about these supposed possibilities.

"It's Christmas Eve morning, there's no escaping her," he finally had to concede. Maya sighed.

"I know, I know," she promised, taking her chances at the very least to hold on to him a little while longer before they had to go downstairs.

The singing had begun, and though in itself it was very much appreciated for how it showed Melinda's recovery from the fire and the smoke, it was more than that. Maya so well the first year she had found herself waking in the Friar house on a twenty-fourth of December. She'd heard that same cheerful bit of carols from beyond Lucas' room, been woken up by it with a confusion her then boyfriend did not share. He'd told her how this was an every year thing in his parents' house, how it meant his mother was already working at whatever food things she could get done the day before, for Christmas Day.

"I remember being seven, barely awake and standing next to her on a step stool, rolling cookie dough in my hands," he'd told her, smiling at the memory. "Every year after that, if I didn't come along on my own, she came looking for her 'favorite helper.' When I moved out, I think that's one of the things she regretted the most."

Rather than to have her come and seek them out, Lucas and Maya got out of bed and headed down the stairs, where they were first greeted by the dogs, which now counted Trix, Lou, Archer, and Crowley, and of course Duke. The elder Friars' dog had been a fretful mess when they'd first brought him back from the neighbors'. Lucas had been doing his best to help him in the days since, and while he had gotten better, to a point, he would still get jumpy, would still be found hiding under the kitchen table from time to time. He was there now, watching Melinda as she worked at the counter, with her holiday apron on and everything.

She had not been back to her own house since the fire, but her husband, son, and daughter-in-law had all been out there a few times. After a couple days of uncertainty, they had gotten some good news. While the kitchen would need extensive repairs, inside and out, the fire had not caused any damages sufficient to make the house unsafe. They could go back inside, though there was no question of them staying there until the repairs had been completed, this being decided by Lucas and Maya, who insisted that the parents could stay with them as long as it was needed, as much as by Melinda's ongoing inability to walk into her own house and see what the fire had done.

Those repairs wouldn't start until after New Year's Day, but at least they had been able to collect some items to bring over to the younger Friars' house, to make Thomas and Melinda feel a bit less displaced. This included the infamous Christmas apron, which had survived for having been in the laundry room when the fire happened. Really, there was nothing for them to save from the kitchen, and it had been so disheartening for all of them to see it the first time. Just having to tell Melinda that her cookbooks, including her mother's handwritten recipes, had been lost had felt like knocking someone down while they were still trying to get up from the last blow.

This had been softened somewhat by Melinda's brother, Michael, who had surrendered his own copies, after having scanned them to his computer for himself, as an early Christmas present. He had been just one of the elder Friars' family to have been brought around by the news of the fire.

Pappy Joe and Patty had come over from Houston, along with the Hillards, two days after the incident. That was when they had been told about it, and Maya had never seen Lucas' grandfather so upset, not just at the fire, and the injuries it had caused, but almost primarily at the fact that it had taken this long for him to be told. They could all see the source of this upset was really just that his son and daughter-in-law had been put in peril, but they carried on as though they had no idea, for his sake.

And though bound by their children's union most of all, Katy and Shawn had been indispensable in those few days, for whatever purpose they might have been needed. The whole thing really just made it feel as though Christmas had been turned into a week-long event, with the constant flow of family and friends dropping by the house on the lane, so much so that they could not count one dinner, and hardly any lunches, some breakfasts, too, where they hadn't had at least a couple of guests on top of their temporary lodgers in the basement. They would not have wanted it any other way.

Approaching the kitchen now, the singing felt almost like a siren song, drawing them in. Melinda Friar could count among her many talents the fact that she could mostly carry a tune. Oh, she would never have taken to a stage or been asked to, but on the whole she was solid. She had been keeping mostly quiet in the days after the fire, Thomas had suggested, for the express purpose of letting herself recover enough to be able to maintain this small tradition. And though they had been able to hear from her how she had genuinely recovered for the most part, over the previous day, her singing now… That was the most they'd heard from her since before the fire.

"Oh, good, you're awake," their song bird beamed as she saw them. She was in her element right now. She still had trouble doing certain things without feeling afraid, but if she could do the rest then she could convince herself that everything was fine. She needed that today, and it would be their express privilege to enable her to carry on.

"We heard your call," Maya smirked, and her mother-in-law laughed, moving up to embrace her and Lucas both.

"Well, I'm hardly on your level," Melinda humbly insisted, and Maya smiled, accepting the compliment.

"What can we do to help?" Lucas asked.

"Can you go and see if your father is awake? He…" she started to ask, only to stop and look a bit crestfallen at realizing what she'd been about to ask. She'd just gone and gotten carried away by the spirit of the morning, forgetting how her Thomas could not help her this year, as he had done for nearly thirty years. Sure, he had gotten better at managing despite the state of his hands, to a certain point, but he still needed help for so many things, and there was just no way he would have been able to do anything to help his wife today.

"I'll go see," Lucas touched his mother's shoulder. "He'll love to hear you singing," he smiled, and Melinda smiled back with a nod.

"Only if you'll join me," she turned to Maya. "A little harmony with my favorite daughter."

"You hear that?" Maya grinned over to Lucas, as though she was not the one and only. He chuckled, heading down to the basement.

Thomas Friar was indeed awake, and, as the sound of Melinda and Maya's voices echoed out from above, Lucas found him sitting on the edge of the bed, feet on the ground, hands on his knees, just listening. He blinked and moved to rise when he saw his son.

"Help me with my robe, will you?" he pointed, and Lucas moved at once to get the blue thing and help his father get one arm in and then the other. Every time he heard his father wince, or felt him jolt from pain, Lucas felt a pinch of his own. He hated seeing him like this, when he'd always been so solid. It was temporary, he knew, and really he should have counted it as a good thing that he at least felt something, but it didn't make it easier at all.

"How long have you been sitting there like that?" he asked his father.

"Oh, well, I woke up and I could hear Mel," Thomas explained. "When I did, I could barely move. I didn't realize until now how much I had missed her voice." He turned a smile to his son at this, and Lucas returned it. The two of them were easily best placed to understand the power of Melinda Friar – née Sullivan – and the way she spoke… a lot and with great energy. Some not so accustomed people may have been thrown off by the volume of it, but to those who knew her best, it was just such a part of her. They had never felt this so true as they did in the last few days, when they didn't hear it. "I sat up when she stopped, and I knew you and Maya were up there with her." He paused for a moment, listening. "They sound good together," he smiled.

"Yeah, they do, don't they?" Lucas turned his eyes up, catching his mother and his wife singing along. Maya could have easily overpowered, but she didn't, instead matching her mother-in-law. "Next thing you know, they'll end up in the Hex." Thomas laughed, signalling to the stairs. Lucas nodded, and he went and stood behind his father as he started on his way up. It wasn't as though he had never gone up or down stairs without holding the ramp, but now that he couldn't, he wanted to be careful, especially for how his leg would complicate this trek up or down. For that, he always had someone in ahead of him when he went down and behind him when he went up.

Even as they got to the top of the stairs and approached the kitchen, the two Friar men couldn't help but stand back and listen in on their respective wives, caroling along. Sam was off with the Hart-Lanes, who had flown in a couple days ago to spend the holidays here. They had heard about the fire, of course, and so they had changed their plans, making the trip over from Tucson rather than to have Sam come to join them, when he clearly wanted to stick around Austin to be near Maya and Lucas and the elder Friars. They were staying up at the Zvolensky summer home again.

"How long do you think we can stay out here before…" Lucas whispered, only for him and his father both to be surprised by Maya as she popped her head out of the kitchen.

"You know, you can hear so much better from in here," she squinted at them in mock 'ha ha, caught you' tones.

"That would make sense, yes," Thomas slowly nodded, as Maya smiled now, coming up to greet him.

"If you join in, you get extra bacon," she informed him as he carefully hugged her back.

"Now this just got interesting," he laughed, sounding much more like his own father now. The trio headed into the kitchen, where their Christmas Eve morning concert resumed in full force, to the betterment of each of their singers' hearts.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	224. Their Blaze of Joy

August 11th 2020

_Chapter 224  
Their Blaze of Joy_

"Look, look," Maya stepped up next to Lucas and nodded over to the couch. Lucas turned to look and saw at once what she'd wanted him to see. His father had been sitting there for a while, talking with Hank Hillard and Dot Cassidy, when he had been accosted by a curious three-year-old. Haley Hunter, in her Christmas best, had gone up to the man with the strange hands with the teetering hesitation of a child before hoisting herself up on to the couch next to him, where she now inspected Thomas Friar's bandaged hands like she really didn't understand what was wrong with them. Meanwhile, Lucas' father gave the dutiful explanation of a man putting his grandfatherly affections where he could.

"We are going to have _so _many eager grandparents on our hands," Lucas smiled, which made Maya bury her laughter into his arm.

Up until the previous week, their Christmas plans had not been exactly what they were today. Maya and Lucas were going to be making the rounds with some people on the twenty-fourth, and others would be dropping over at _their_ house on the twenty-fifth, and that would be a fairly small gathering, no larger than most dinners where they had the Hunters and the Friars. Sam was going to be in Tucson, bringing his wishes and some presents over to the rest of his siblings and to his parents on behalf of the younger Friars. And then the fire had happened, and after spending a couple of days where they were uncertain they would even have the holiday in any way, they had flipped this thought on its head, and instead went for what was easily their largest family gathering yet. So many people had either changed their plans or simply carried their party over into this one, until it was all of them, celebrating together.

Part of them had worried just a bit that this would end up being too much for Lucas' parents, that they would have been better off with a small gathering, with less activity and noise. Now that they were here though, they saw that this was exactly as it should have been, that it was better to let them mingle and have this big party than to have ended up closing away into this bubble of a reminder of their current situation.

"Hey, sorry we're late, we had to make a detour, we accidentally left these at home and we had to turn back because we weren't going to get anything else today _and_ they would have been lost after sitting on the counter all day… or the dogs would have gotten into them… Anyway, here we are," Sophie nodded to the large pastry box in her hand with a smile. "Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas," Lucas smiled back and hugged her, moving to repeat this with Chiara, and Asher, and Ray. "You left your two together or you got another one?" he asked, pointing to the girls and the guys, on the mention of the plural 'dogs.'

"Oh, no, we left them together at the house," Chiara clarified. "It never feels right to leave them both on their own, better that they have each other."

"So, how's it going with your new roommates?" Asher asked, as the girls carried off the pastries into the kitchen, doing – as they knew they should – as though they were at home.

"Really well, I mean, all things considered," Lucas stole a look to his parents. His father had just been joined by his mother on the couch, where she now had little Haley on her lap. The girl looked poised to fall asleep in her arms, and Melinda was more than happy to let it happen, rocking her gently and brushing at her golden hair.

Lucas thought about when he and Maya had started imagining what the next several weeks might be like. Sure, right now, they had the holidays, and that made for a scenario they were all familiar with, being at home either when they lived there or visited from Houston. There was no forgetting the actual reason for their cohabitation, especially with Lucas' father and his hands, but once they had known that the house _could_ be fixed but _wouldn't_, not until after the turn of the new year, then they had more or less given themselves permission to brush all of that to the side. They were just here, and it was Christmas.

This morning, they had awakened to find the presents already under the tree had been joined by several more, which Shawn and Katy had gone to retrieve from the other house and snuck in on their last visit. With the way Melinda would fuss over them as they were passed on to either Lucas or Maya, they had a feeling that she had felt some urge to add to the pile, for everything they'd done, only to have been stopped by her husband's pointing out that this would not have been necessary.

Once the holiday were over, it would all be so different, they knew. Lucas would be starting back at school again, and Maya would be back teaching at _her_ school. Thomas Friar would be seeing to some of his clients, only those who needed him enough that they couldn't reschedule and give him time to recuperate. If possible, they would have these meetings over the phone, or on Skype, and if they needed to meet in person then his clients would travel out to the house on the lane. Other times, he would be going to the house, as they figured out what to do with the repairs.

And then Melinda, well… She wasn't working, except when she stepped in to assist her husband with his clients, but she had plenty of other engagements around the city, always. She did not know what boredom was. The problem was that, with her current situation, they fully expected her to decide she found it easier to stay at the house, and from there they could just imagine they would come home at night and found she had cleaned one room or another from top to bottom, possibly rearranged the kitchen or the bathroom in a more 'efficient' way…

"Is it just going to come off like I don't want her to touch our stuff if I say we have to make sure she keeps going out instead of staying here all by herself?" Maya had wondered, a couple of nights ago.

"Well, is that something you're thinking about?" Lucas had asked back, smirking at the look of her, all anxious and innocent.

"I…" she'd started to reply, only to be stalled, unsure of what to say.

"Believe it or not, she does have some self-control," he'd promised. "If you don't want her to do it, just tell her."

"But if I do tell her, she'll know that I assumed she would," Maya had countered.

"You're going to have to decide, one way or the other."

For the time being, she'd said nothing, though every time Lucas would see his mother grabbing something from a cupboard or drawer and have a look that could be remotely interpreted as 'actually, if you put these over there instead,' he would steal a look over to Maya, who'd just try and get him to stop.

"I kind of feel bad that you guys didn't get to have your first Christmas at your house," Maya told Riley as they sat out on the porch. Riley had found her best friend and requested a breather from the packed house, so they'd grabbed a couple of drinks and snuck their way out, sitting on the front steps.

"We had Christmas Eve," Riley pointed out with a shrug. "We just made it like it was today. My parents and my brothers were there, and Dylan's parents, his brother and his wife… We got to meet their daughter for the first time, she's _so_ cute," she raved, pulling out her phone to show pictures of little Brittany Orlando.

"Stop it, she looks like a doll," Maya breathed, her face locked in a smile at the sight of the girl who had been born just four days ago. "Aww, look at Hunter being a good…" she paused, as Riley had swiped to a picture of her three-year-old brother holding the baby, under the supervision of her Uncle Dylan. "I guess eventually they'll be cousins?"

"Yeah," Riley nodded. "Eventually," she added, and Maya wasn't sure if she'd touched on something she shouldn't have. Riley and Dylan had been dating for five years now, they had bought a house together. They weren't married, not even engaged, and even though everyone seemed to look at this fact like a sealed eventuality, maybe Riley was starting to wonder why it hadn't happened yet.

"Hey, hey, come on," Maya pulled her closer, slinging her arm around her friend's shoulders. "If you ask me, a guy like Dylan, I'm sure he's just waiting, to give you your own moment. I mean, look at what this year has been. Lucas and I got married, Asher and Ray got married…"

"I know, I… You're right, I'm just being weird," Riley breathed, setting her head to her best friend's shoulder.

"It'd be weirder if you didn't," Maya smiled, tipping her head to rest against hers. Later that night, when she'd tell Lucas about this conversation, she would come to discover just how much she had nailed this prediction.

"Got room for one more?" They both looked back to find Nadine's face swimming overhead.

"What kind of question is that?" Maya 'scoffed' at her as she came to sit next to her.

"Are you okay?" Riley asked, leaning to look past Maya.

"I'm fine, it's nothing, I just… I started to think about last year, around this time and then I didn't want Zay to have to see me and wonder if we should go…"

Last year… Last year, on New Year's Eve, Nadine and Zay had believed they were pregnant. Later on, as it turned out, they had discovered that they _were_, and they hadn't had the time to consider very long whether or not to tell their friends and families before they'd gone and lost it. Now she was remembering that moment, possibly that last genuine moment of hope, before they'd gone and started on their rocky year of ups and downs, landing them to this moment, still waiting on something to turn it all around for them.

Both Maya and Riley extended out their drinks, offering them for Nadine if she wanted either… or both… but she waved them off graciously and they left it at that, enjoying the quiet and the air for a little while. The three of them were finally getting up to return to the party when they found Thomas Friar attempting to open the door. Eventually, Riley and Nadine went back inside, while Maya stayed out with her father-in-law, resuming her seat on the steps after helping him to sit next to her. He took a deep breath of December air, let it out.

"All good?" Maya smiled at him.

"Very much," Thomas assured her, smiling back. "I couldn't have imagined a better Christmas," he told her, then, leaning in to whisper, "Don't tell Mel."

"Your secret and mine," Maya chuckled.

"Alright, it might have been just… a little better," he looked to his hands. "But other than that… and the house… Nothing more. I have really missed spending the holidays out here. When Mel and I were dating, I would take her to the rink up there," he pointed up the road. "You should see her on skates."

"Well, there's still time," Maya pointed out. "We should all go sometime, in the next few days… Maybe no skates for you, but it'd still be fun, wouldn't it?" Thomas Friar considered this, and the smile on his face said plenty.

"I think we call _that_ a plan."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	225. Their Blaze of Renewal

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

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August 12th 2020

_Chapter 225  
Their Blaze of Renewal_

"I really just want to poke my head in a few minutes," Maya insisted as Lucas and his parents followed her out of the car and toward the theater. It had only been meant to be her coming up here today, but then as soon as she'd mentioned she was going there, to get a look at how things were working out with the holiday rush camp, her in-laws had jumped at the chance of seeing it all in person. So they had all gotten into the car together and made their way here. Maya had barely been able to get involved with this shortened camp period, what with the situation with the elder Friars being piled on top of the holidays, but Lily had been keeping her updated the whole time, so at least she knew that all was well.

"Maya!" a cheerful voice greeted them from the top of the aisle inside the auditorium, and suddenly they were watching the fast dash of Lucas' twelve-year-old cousin as she came up toward the group and locked her arms around her teacher/coach/mentor/cousin-in-law. Her enthusiasm never presented itself as anything short of excessive. They would joke that the Sullivan genes were strong enough to surpass adoption, with how much it reminded them of Lea's Aunt Melinda.

"Hey!" Maya laughed. She had gotten much better at bracing for these running starts. In two years of the girl's attending Stage Ready, the only times she hadn't come to greet her this way was when Lea was already on stage when Maya arrived, and then all she could do was wave or smile until she came back down. "You next?" Maya guessed now, from how Lea had more or less posted herself near the stage, ensuring no one would take her spot.

"Yeah! Can you all stay to watch?" she asked, looking to her cousin, aunt, and uncle excitedly.

"Wouldn't miss it," Melinda promised her, and Lea smiled, catching her hand and pulling her along back down the aisle.

"Be right back, okay?" Maya told Lucas and his father. They nodded and she hurried off to find Lily, sitting near the front with Siobhan. The camp, as much as the regular sessions of Stage Ready, had a way of drawing in some of the theater's staff, from Siobhan on down, who would come now and then to sit in the auditorium and watch whatever was happening that day.

Maya rejoined the others just in time to sit and listen as Lea sang her song. One of the things that made Maya so driven to remain attached to the theater and to the program she had created was… this. Progress. Lea had been with them for a couple of years now, one of their top regulars, and it showed. She had already been so confident in the beginning, and while she did have notable talent in the beginning, talent and potential, now here she stood… and they could hear and see the work she had put in. She loved it as much now as she did then, maybe more, and that showed, too.

"Did you get it all?" Lea came bounding back to her aunt, who'd had her phone out and framing her the whole time.

"Every second, come here," Melinda was all smiles, pulling her niece into her arms. "Want me to send it to your fathers?" Lea wanted this very much. "Sending it now," Melinda promised, as the girl turned to her uncle and looked at his hands. It was hard not to, even now.

"You know, if you're almost done here, we're on our way to the skating rink, by your cousin's house," Thomas told her, tipping his head to Lucas. "If you want, we can call your dads to meet us there with your sisters. I won't be getting out there," he indicated his hands and his leg, "But that's all the more reason to have more people to take my place."

Soon, they were leaving the theater, the five of them, to be met by the rest of the Sullivan-Reyes family down at the rink. Lucas sat out the first bit of skating, watching his wife, mother, uncles, and cousins going about on their skates. Melinda went along, sandwiched between her brother's younger daughters, Lara and Lydia, aged nine and six. It was as Thomas had told Maya on Christmas Day, she was a natural on the ice.

"I know what you're doing, you know?" Lucas told his father, who looked over at him with intrigue. "You invited Michael and Keith and the girls so Mom wouldn't feel so bad about leaving you out here on the sidelines."

"Lucas, you know as well as I do that your mother is an excellent multitasker. Just because she's out there, doesn't mean she's not keeping an eye on me at the same time," Thomas pointed out, and Lucas looked back to the ice, just in time to catch his mother stealing a look toward them.

"Yeah, okay, alright, I get your point," he chuckled. For a few seconds, they just watched everyone out there. Maya was skating backward, leading the way with a sort of shimmy that made Lea and her sisters laugh. "But you still invited them because of Mom," Lucas told his father without looking away.

"Guess we'll never know," Thomas echoed his tone.

"Hey, Huckleberry, get your butt out here!" Maya called out a moment later.

"You've been summoned," Thomas smirked as his son moved under the rail and slid along the ice to join his wife, who promptly took off, the better for him to have to race after her.

The whole thing nearly ended up in a worst spill than the one that came when Maya looked over her shoulder to see how close he was getting and, upon finding he was no more than an arm's length away, attempted to pour on some speed and ended up tripping over herself. Now _he_ was the one to speed up, just enough to catch her and stop her from face planting, but the motion still managed to send them both falling in a heap on the ice. By the time Keith Reyes skated over to check on them, they were both just sitting there, laughing and wincing at the same time.

That didn't stop Melinda Friar from jumping right into nurse mode once everyone had returned to the house. Lucas and Maya both were made to go and get changed, so they might have a better idea of what needed attention. Lucas had an aching back and a scraped elbow to contend with, while Maya had bruised her hip and somehow managed to get both her knees bloodied up, but on the whole it was nothing that ice and some band aids wouldn't see to. All of this had been seen to by Melinda, who right about now genuinely needed her brother and his family around in order to remind her that they'd had a good time skating.

"She always worried if anyone got hurt, but I think after the fire, it's worse now," Maya cringed as she made it to the top of the stairs that night. Lucas was right behind her, showing he was not far from her as far as feeling the effort of the climb.

"I don't think that'll ever really leave her," he agreed, keeping as best he could to the posture he'd found to minimize the pull at his back.

"We might have to rethink the whole spoon bit for a few nights," Maya pointed out as they headed into their room for a bit of very cautious changing for the night.

"Realizing that now," he was forced to admit. "What's the plan here?"

"Well…" she considered for a moment, looking at herself and then at him. Right now, her knees were just patched up and barely able to bend because of the bandages and the mess underneath them, while her hip was a field of colors rivaling with her tattoos. "I'll be on my back, and you…"

"Definitely _not_ on my back," he shook his head.

"No," she gave a pitiful laugh for his sake. "I think you might be stuck on your stomach there."

"Not a fan, but I'll endure," he sighed, approaching her for a very light embrace.

"Don't worry, you'll be good as new next year," she teased with a smile against his chest. "Good thing for both of us _that_ is just a few days away."

The last days of the year had been both very relaxed and bordering on tense, as Nurse Melinda ruled the roost over her husband and his recovering burns and her son and daughter-in-law with their scrapes and bruises, all three of them essentially grounded on the living room couch, where they might be brought whatever items they might need to pass the time, books and magazines, sketch books, laptop, remote control, and of course whatever they might need to eat or drink.

"I don't know about you guys, but I don't think she's been this happy since she came out here," Maya declared, as Melinda had walked off to see if they had more chocolate sauce and her daughter-in-law was left to contemplate how to dig in to the great bowl of ice cream she had been given.

"Yeah, why didn't we think of getting hurt sooner?" Lucas joked before accepting the spoonful he was offered.

By the time December 31st rolled around, neither one of them could say that they were a hundred percent back to normal, but they were in a much better state than they had been earlier that week. After the packed house of their Christmas party, they were now looking to ring in the new year with a less hectic sort of gathering. The Hart-Lanes had returned to Arizona, taking Sam with them for a few days with the promise of his being back the night before his classes started. New Year's Eve would thus feature the four of them plus the Hunter-Harts.

"You know that means there will be ten of us here," Lucas told Maya as they stepped out to help Shawn and Katy unload the kids and everything else they needed to bring in from the car, from food to some of the gifts MJ and Haley had received for Christmas, without which neither would leave the house. "It'll be like our own countdown made out of people."

"If we're assigning numbers, I'm in, and I want to be ten," Maya declared.

"Why ten?" he had to ask.

"Well, I get to lead the way," she explained, and he laughed.

"Ya-Ya, look at my doll, please!" Haley politely requested, hoisting up the thing, which was almost as big as her. Even as she did so, her attention was drawn – arms and doll still in the air – to her sister's knees, poking out from under her dress' skirt and showing cleaner, smaller, but still noticeable band-aids. "What's that?" she inquired, turning her eyes up again.

"Oh, I fell down the other day and hurt my knees," Maya explained to her little sister, who received this information with the instant resolve of very lightly touching each of Maya's knees like she had kissed them to make them better. "Thank you so much, that helped a lot," Maya lifted her up, planting her on her uninjured hip. "And I love your doll, is that the one Santa brought you?" she asked, as though she hadn't been the one to buy it for her. Haley nodded happily. "Does she have a name?"

"Daisy," Haley replied at once.

"That is a good name," Maya decided, giving her sister several kisses on her cheek, which earned her giggles and a good hug. Maya accepted it, basked in it, thinking how fast it would be before her littlest Hunter sibling was no longer little this way and how much she would miss it. "Is it because she has flowers on her dress?" It was. "Then I know she has to love her name, too." Haley agreed.

"What's midnight?" she leaned in until she was nearly nose to nose with her big sister and whispered. Humoring this covert conspiracy, Maya looked around, waved for Lucas to step back, which he did, not understanding precisely what was being passed between the pair but choosing to humor it.

"That's the time when one day turns into the next one. It usually happens when you're sleeping so you don't notice. And the one that's going to happen at the end of today, it's special," she revealed, in that same hushed tone. Her little sister stared in saucer-eyed awe.

"Why?"

"Well, because this one won't just be when one day turns into another one, _this_ one is when one year turns into a whole new one." As impressive as she might be able to make her voice sound, it gave no guarantee that the three-year-old would make much of any sense from it except in that clearly there was something special about it. "Okay, well…" Maya racked her brain, trying to explain it in a way Haley would get it, all the while repositioning her a bit, as her free and recovering hip was starting to complain. "I was born in the month of January, and _you_ were born in…"

"July!" Haley exclaimed out loud, too happy to have this answer to give. She immediately gasped and covered her mouth before opening out her hands again a moment later and whispering once more. "July…"

"Right," Maya struggled not to laugh. "Well, right now it's December, yeah? All of those are months, and there are twelve of them in a year, January first, December last, and July about in the middle," she set her forehead to her sister's for a moment, which made her smile. "And every year, the months start over again, so in a couple weeks it's going to be _my_ birthday, just like it was last time it was January. Do you remember when we had _your_ birthday last time?" Haley nodded. "Right, well, that means that in a few months, since the year started again, it's going to be your birthday again. That's why this midnight is special, because the year starts again, a new one though. By the end of _that_ one, you'll be this many years old," Maya held up four fingers. Haley was impressed. "Later, if you go to sleep for a little while, maybe Mom and Dad will let you wake up again and you can see it happen. Would you like that?"

"Yes, I want the midnight that's a year," Haley declared with a firm nod.

"Something else that you like is going to happen when it's midnight, you know that? Remember the fireworks? The loud lights in the sky, like they had around your birthday?" Haley tipped her head. "What's the matter? Don't you like them anymore?"

"Daddy said that was because of me," Haley informed her, and Maya could barely handle her tremulous little pout. She reached up to stroke her cheek in reassurance.

"Well, those ones were. And they will be again, next year."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

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_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	226. Their Visitors in Starts

August 13th 2020

_Chapter 226  
Their Visitors in Starts_

"How is she already awake?" Maya whispered, sitting up. At her side, Lucas yawned, scrubbing at his face to wake himself up before joining her. "It's not even light out, she should be asleep. I get that she likes to help around, but she doesn't have to be up right now…"

"As far as she's concerned, she kind of does," Lucas pointed out. "I think she's looking forward to seeing us off to school." Maya couldn't help it at that, she had to smile.

"Alright, fine, but the other days…"

"I'll quietly suggest she explore the benefits of sleeping in. I'm not making any promises," Lucas nodded, and Maya leaned over to kiss him.

"Thank you, sir."

"Sir?" he grinned. "Hold on now," he locked his arms around her, dragging her back down to the mattress and causing her to burst out laughing.

"Huckleberry, Huckleberry!" she tried again.

"Better," he grinned, kissing her now.

"I've got loads of other names for you, what are those going to get me?" she inquired.

"I don't know, maybe we can find out…" he started to lean again. There was a knock at the door, familiar enough in its cadence to reveal who was on the other side. Maya and Lucas collectively bit back a sigh. "To be continued," Lucas whispered, kissing his wife one quick last time before they sat up and got out of bed. "We'll be right down, Mom!" he called out.

"Good! Wouldn't want you to be late!"

Lucas turned back and found Maya was already going about getting dressed for the day. Even though it was only her first day back from holiday break, not the start of a new year, or a new semester like he and Sam were having today, his mother's presence took him back to that last first day, back in September, and all he could see was how much she had changed, grown in confidence as a teacher. It wasn't all unknown anymore, it was her work, and she took such great pride in it, day after day, none more than she did in her kids. Oh, how excited she was to see them all again today.

And then him… He was starting his second to last semester before he was officially done with school. More and more, their lives were getting to be about looking forward to the future, with careers, and so many of their friends already starting families… The thought didn't hold him back. If anything, it propelled him. He wanted to give everything he had, to succeed, and eventually join them.

"I'm going to miss you at lunch today," Maya stated as they moved to make the bed once they were dressed. "It was good, every Monday…"

"I know," he agreed. "But now it'll just be every Friday instead. Like a treat at the end of your week." She laughed. "Yeah, I heard it as I was saying it," he smiled.

"You're right though. Now I'll be looking forward to it every day."

"That makes two of us."

With his class-free/work-full day of the semester landing on Fridays this semester, they had shuffled Maya's two habitual lunch buddies, swapping Lucas and their lunch date with Lily and their lunch meeting about the theater. To compensate with this being the first day back, Maya and Lily had met the previous day, with her assistant and her family being invited to lunch here at the house. They would have their first Monday lunch meet the following week.

As they came down the stairs, they could hear Melinda Friar's voice, which sounded as though she was talking to someone on the phone. It only took a few key words for both Maya and Lucas to figure out she was talking to Katy… and planning to go out and visit her. Lucas turned to his wife as though to ask if she had anything to do with this, knowing her 'issues' with leaving his mother on her own in their home while they were at school and his father was out at their house to look after the repairs, which had started just a couple of days prior. Maya shook her head. This wasn't her doing, but she had to think maybe her mother had thought of her and guessed her unspoken concerns before deciding to intervene. She still had a few days off before returning to the theater.

At the table, Sam was already eating, looking through one of his new textbooks. Thomas Friar, his hands no longer bandaged as they had been but still in many ways lacking in the mobility he might have liked to have, was cautiously having his own breakfast, doing his best not to show much of frustration over his clumsiness in the effort. He didn't want to be helped as he'd been in the time following the fire, whether he might have needed it or not. It would sometimes flare up in him, and much as he would try not to take it out on those who would naturally only want to help him, sometimes he would lose himself and quickly apologize.

"Your mother and I are going to shop for new curtains for the kitchen," Melinda told Maya with a great smile. "We are going to look at tables and chairs as well, and dinnerware, and… Oh, there is just so much, so…"

Her voice trailed off, and they knew she was falling back into the memory of everything they had lost in the fire. The first thing they had done, once they could start going through the kitchen, was to clean out everything that had to be thrown out, at the same time hoping maybe to find anything at all they might have saved, for Melinda's sake more than anyone else's. There really had been very little worth salvaging though, and that realization had not been nearly as hard as having to tell Melinda about it. It wasn't just about objects, belongings, it was memories. It was three decades of their lives, their marriage, their family, and the idea of starting again from the ground up, while it could be seen as a fresh start, really only amounted to this big part of their lives being gone.

For her especially, when she loved so much to welcome people into her home, to cook and bake for them… For her who could look at one plate, with a crack or a chip, and remember exactly how it had happened, when it had happened and why, who had prided herself in the sturdy quality of their table… For her, starting over was harder than she could say.

"Hey, can I show you something?" Maya asked her, even as she had a thought. "Upstairs?"

"Sure, sure, yes," Melinda blinked, and they took off for the stairs, as Lucas went and fixed himself a plate and filled a cup, taking all this to the table, where he sat next to Sam. Thomas cleared his throat, and when Lucas looked at him, he turned his eyes to Sam, tipped his head to his book. Lucas wasn't sure what he was trying to say, but then looking at his brother, he saw it. Sam wasn't reading, or at least he might have been reading, but now he'd just spaced out.

"Hey," Lucas nudged his foot with his own and Sam startled, his knee hitting under the table and shaking everything. Thankfully nothing spilled. "You okay there?" Lucas chuckled.

"Yeah, fine," Sam rubbed at his knee.

"I could tell you weren't focused on that, but now I have to ask," Lucas indicated the textbook before turning back to Sam. "Something on your mind?"

In response, Sam pulled out his phone and opened up what Lucas soon found to be one of Cara's social pages. His and Maya's sixteen-year-old sister, still very much her older sister's mini-me, could be seen here in a selfie, lip-locked with a boy Lucas had never seen.

"Boyfriend?" Lucas guessed, as both he and his father had the same reaction of knowing exactly what was troubling Sam now and having to pull in the urge to smirk.

"Boyfriend," Sam frowned to himself, a very conflicted 'she can do what she wants, but she's my kid sister and I'm far away and I don't know this guy' sort of look on his face.

"I'm sure he's nice," Lucas tried to encourage him. "Does Maya know yet?" Sam shook his head. "You going to tell her when she gets back?" Sam looked at him.

"You just want to see the look on her face," he 'accused.'

"If you could see yours, you would understand why, dude."

Upstairs, Maya had taken her mother-in-law all the way into the attic. Melinda hardly ever came up here, but when she did it would mostly be so she might see the view from the windows, far off this way and that. From one of the drawers on her desk, Maya pulled out a small stack of photos and laid them out over the top of the desk's surface. Each photo had been taken in the elder Friars' now lost kitchen, as recently as the previous summer and as far back as when Maya had been the new girl in town and Lucas' new friend.

When Melinda saw these, her eyes welled up with tears at once. She would pick one up and then another, smiling for the memories but also clearly still retaining some effects from being in the fire, and knowing it would never be this way again. Maya let her have this moment, head almost to her arm in support, before she could reach into the drawer again, pulling out a box she put on the desk before opening it and reaching in for something. It was a roll, and as she pulled to unfurl it on the desk, her mother-in-law gasped.

Maya had made something like this before, for Eliza's room, although in that case it had been more free-hand, and it didn't matter so much for everything to be exactly a certain way. This one here, this was a reproduction, painstakingly made from staring at those pictures, and consulting Lucas, all in secret, whenever she had the time. She wasn't done yet, but it didn't matter. This was as close as they would get to the old wallpaper in the lost kitchen, the one they'd had for so many years they would never find it again if they wanted it again.

"I know a lot of things are going to be different, but I thought maybe… this could be one thing that could be the same again… mostly the same…" Maya explained. The way her mother-in-law looked at her in that moment, she could not have loved her more if she had brought her into the world herself. It was in her face as much as in her arms as she then went and hugged her. Maya hugged her back, happy to see she had seen the idea through.

When they had gone back downstairs, the guys all looked at them as though wondering what had happened upstairs. They both looked like they'd been taken by emotions beyond what this early morning and its barely risen sun should have held.

"Hey, what did we miss?" Maya asked, the better to redirect the conversation. After a beat of silence, the three guys shared a look, with varying expressions of amusement and awkwardness. "What?" Maya asked. When Sam slid his phone across the table, Maya and Melinda both looked at the screen. "Oh, Declan!" Maya smiled, picking up the phone. "Oh, I have to call her later," she happily declared.

"Wait, you knew?" Sam blurted out. Maya laughed, returning him his phone.

"I'm her big sister, of course she told me," she told him, sticking out her tongue in victory. Sam looked at the picture again, and she could almost see him mouthing the boy's name, like he was getting ready to take a deep dive to find out if he was worthy of his little sister. "Call off the dogs, Sammy, let her have this. Come on, I can drop you off at university when we're ready to go."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

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_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	227. Their Visitors in Lecture

August 14th 2020

_Chapter 227  
Their Visitors in Lecture_

Sometimes, Lucas would hate the drive to university. He'd feel silly about it later, sometimes would feel silly even as he was caught up in that feeling, but it couldn't be helped. On those days, it would just get to feel like everything was set on repeat, day in, day out, always that same stretch of road, those same trees, and signs, sometimes he swore he recognized some of the cars, too, like people who went into a store at the same times so often that they became part of the memory of it. That tended to happen closer to the end of the weeks, while he'd be on the flipside of that emotion at the start of the week, when he was coming off a weekend without the drive.

This semester though, he was sure he'd found his cure to all that, thanks to the shuffling of the lunch date with Maya. Sure, she was always the light at the end of the tunnel, but the fact that they'd discussed it this morning, it really just felt like they'd cracked the code. He didn't worry so much about his dreading those end-of-week drives at this point, not if it meant that the closer he got to those, the closer he was to his day at the bookstore and the break in the middle which allowed him to meet his wife at her school. That was a silliness of another kind, a good kind. They saw each other plenty of times, in the morning, at night, on the weekends, and did plenty more fun things than just sit at her desk and talk as they ate, but at the same time there was something so special to them both about that small nugget of time that… yeah, it really was something to look forward to.

Today, he wasn't having one of those 'I hate this drive' days, no. It just wouldn't have happened. Today was the first day of the semester, his first time heading out to the university – other than the one time he'd gone to get his new books – and he was so looking forward to it. Only a few weeks had gone by since the end of the previous semester, but then it had been the holidays, and he had been dealing with his parents and the aftermath of the fire… He hadn't really seen much of his classmates or spoken to them beyond a few texts in that time.

He'd seen Ramona at Christmas, at the party, with 'Build-a-Ben,' as the girls would call him. He'd also seen a handful of new photos of the nearly seven-month-old Erin, who was evolving day by day to look like the spitting image of Maeve, with a dash of Carter for good measure. Ramona and Ben were plainly enamored with her, and while she was only his niece, not hers, Ramona definitely had the makings of becoming her favorite aunt. Maya and the rest of the band were certain Ben was thinking of proposing to Ramona but didn't want to rush into it, seeing as she had come out of a marriage which had fallen apart not that long ago. They were also just as sure that Ramona would genuinely say yes if he just got the courage to ask.

He hadn't seen Bishop, who'd been in France with Leona, visiting his family, but he'd gotten plenty of texts from him, especially after hearing about the fire at his parents' house. Lucas had never really learned who had told him, but he figured it had to be Ramona. His subconscious was of a different mind, thinking maybe Maya had reached out to his great friend, the better for him to do his friend thing and be there for Lucas. Either way, Bishop had been checking in with him whenever he could, which had not been nearly enough times where Bishop himself was concerned. He promised that, once he was back in town – he had landed last night – he would be at his service for pitching in on the kitchen repairs. It would be like the days of the secret house fix three years prior.

That was the bulk of his interactions with the group. Simon had been checking in, too, and Josie, and Robbie, but he hadn't actually told any of them about the fire, and it was clear they hadn't learned about it from Ramona or Bishop or anyone else. He hadn't meant to keep it from them, not exactly, but maybe it was kind of nice to have people to talk to and keep them in this bubble where none of that happened. He appreciated the concern, he did, and his friends were great that way. But he also appreciated the normalcy, and he had not felt guilty about holding on to it. He was going to have to tell them today though, no more excuses.

If seeing his friends and starting new classes wasn't enough of a motivator for getting to the university that day, he found another in the parking lot as he arrived. This was not one of those familiar cars on the drive things, but rather a familiar car because he had ridden inside it several times, over several years.

"Uncle Hank, what are you doing here?" he asked with a grin as he approached the man, just standing up from where he'd been pulling his bag from the back seat.

"Hey!" Hank Hillard was a beaming, younger version of his Uncle Joe, Pappy to most, and today was no exception. He clapped his nephew on the shoulder in greeting. "Well, see how it is, I signed on to split my time between here and Houston this semester. I'll be doing two days here every week. You might have gotten an e-mail about it," he gestured toward Lucas, who pulled out his phone and checked.

"Yeah, here it is," he nodded, opening it and briefly scanning the message. "Wait, Professor Lindgren left?" he blinked.

"I'm afraid so," Hank replied. "Hip surgery finally got her to retire. I'm holding down the fort until they find her replacement for the fall and onward."

"Wow… Well, if you speak to her, will you let her know I'm thinking about her and I hope she recovers soon?" Lucas asked as they started from the parking lot and toward the university.

"You know I will," Hank nodded.

"So I guess we're back to 'Mr. Friar' and 'Professor Hillard,' huh?"

"Won't lie, I might have missed those days," Hank smiled, and Lucas found himself echoing this.

"Kind of did, too."

They split off when their paths diverged, and Lucas went off toward his first class of the day, sitting nearby after he'd gotten his usual from the coffee cart. He'd barely done this that he was approached by Simon Shin. He'd known the guy for almost seven years, and he had never been anything less than what he was this morning, very peaceful and caring, patient… They'd barely gotten through their hellos that Lucas found himself laying out the whole story of the fire and his parents. Simon listened to the story like a knowing counselor, who would allow a tale to be told when it needed to be told. When he was done, Simon gave an encouraging smile.

"I'm happy to know they're both doing well," he told Lucas, who nodded in thanks. "How is Maya doing with having them living with you?"

"Oh, she…" Lucas chuckled, amused that Simon would have pinpointed this right away. "She mostly doesn't like the idea of my mother snooping in our things if she gets it in her head to do some cleaning, but really she's glad to have them there, to be able to help them this way." She could have easily footed the bill to put them up in a hotel for the duration of the renovations, something she had realized one day with a look about her like she wouldn't even have brought it up if it wasn't that the idea had kind of floored her, the fact that she had the means for it, from her song writing. Lucas understood, knowing she hadn't said it as any suggestion that she'd rather not have them be at the house. For now, they preferred to put that kind of attention toward a family trip, everyone together. That was coming, too.

"Hey, guys!" They looked up when they heard Josie's voice and found her approaching, hand in hand with Robbie.

It was almost odd to see the two of them now. Not bad odd, but then they had been dating for nearly a year now, and Lucas had to say it had done wonders for them both. He used to think that Robbie had been at his best with Ramona, and in some ways he was, but in the end it had really only been from a standpoint of two friends being good for one another. In no disservice to Ramona, who would say the same thing, Robbie looked so much happier with Josie. Meanwhile, Josie looked as though after spending years of not knowing how to be herself and overcompensating to the point where she had earned little in the way of friendship or genuine connection. She had been coming out of her shell already for a little while, but with Robbie at her side it felt as though she had emerged fully. She had that happiness glowing out of her, same as he did, and it was truly great to see.

"Lucas, man, did I see your uncle back there?" Robbie asked, pointing the way he and Josie had come from.

"Yeah, yeah, he's taking over for Lindgren this semester, didn't you guys get the e-mail?" Like he'd done before, Robbie and Josie pulled out their phones to check.

"I saw it earlier," Simon declared. "I meant to bring it up, but then you were telling me about your parents and I forgot."

"What about your parents?" Josie asked. Lucas and Simon shared a look. "What?"

Lucas just had to go ahead and tell them the story, too, so he did. Where Simon had remained quiet and uninvolved in the telling, allowing Lucas to get it all out in one go, Josie and Robbie were more interactive, reacting in shock when they heard about the fire, asking at once if his mother and father were okay, how bad the damage was. He told them about his mother and the smoke, and her trauma, told them about his father's burns, and the difficulties it had brought along for him. He told them how they had been and would continue to stay with Maya and him until they were able to go home, which would be after the repairs had been completed.

"Lucas, I am so sorry that this happened. How are they now?" Josie asked. She'd ended up sitting next to him on the bench almost as soon as he'd started to tell his story. Once upon a time it might have looked like she was trying to put the moves on him, but that was all in the past, and she was being a good friend, which he appreciated.

"They're good, they… They're not going to be able to fully recover until after they're home again, and they get back to how things were, I guess, so for now we're just enjoying being together, all of us."

By the time Bishop arrived and their group was complete, Lucas felt more than ever how glad he was for this new semester to have started. This chapter of his life may have been drawing nearer to its end every day, but he wasn't going to waste a moment of it. He would look back on it someday and it would be a lot of learning, a lot of growing, but mostly a lot of this, and that was truly worth remembering.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	228. Their Visitors in Class

August 15th 2020

_Chapter 228  
Their Visitors in Class_

Maya was beyond happy to be back at work. It had quickly become her favorite place to be outside of home. She couldn't have predicted that, even for how long she had yearned to be here, in this exact position. She didn't want to make it sound as though she didn't love being at the theater with all the Stage Ready projects she continued to be a part of, and she really didn't want to make it sound as though she was not deeply attached to the work she did as a songwriter, or as one fifth of TXNY, not even a little. And yet, if she had to choose between the school, the theater, the band, and the songs… if she really had to… she would pick the school, wouldn't even have to think twice. _That_ was the surprise.

But it really did just sit in her heart like nothing else could, to be here, with her kids, day after day. She had missed it so much since they'd all gone off on holiday break. For all that this break had entailed, with the fire, and the Friars staying with Lucas and her, she had not forgotten a single one of them, and now… Now she was looking forward to getting them back so much that she wondered if she'd be able to keep herself from going off the rails once they came into her classroom, or even if she saw them in the hallways, or… sitting outside, right there on The Bench…

"Well, well, I haven't seen you since last year," Maya grinned, even more so when Stella Buckley lifted her head and saw her. She'd been bent over one of her notebooks, and from a distance Maya only had to see the way her pen moved to know she was drawing and not writing. She gasped upon seeing her teacher, and everything was tossed back into her bag and carried off as she stood and sprinted over. The way she stalled, she might have been about to hug Maya, only to stop as she wondered if it was okay to hug teachers. "You're here early," Maya laughed, leading the girl toward the school.

"My mom's out of town, and my dad works early, so he dropped me off," Stella shrugged.

"Got it," Maya nodded. "You want to come into my class until first period?" That was barely a question she had to ask, of course she wanted to go. "How was your break?"

"My sisters came out here for Christmas," Stella told her. "One of them got engaged on the morning when we opened presents."

"That's great! Right?" Maya asked, amending just in case there was more to the story, but Stella nodded at once. It _was_ great.

"And _then_ two of them revealed they were going to be having a baby," she went on to share what was clearly the top news item in her book as she held up two fingers for emphasis. She gave that full smile that put her braces in the spotlight.

"Woah!" Maya laughed. "Was this Christmas morning, too?" Stella nodded.

"My mom almost passed out." Maya could have hugged her for real.

Stella was in her class until Phoebe came and found her so they could head out to their first class of the day. She'd helped Maya get set up for _her_ first class, with the seniors.

"Are we starting today?" Phoebe had eagerly asked her art teacher. "I brought different shoes, and my heavy duty kit," she tapped the side of her school bag.

"Today, lunch. We'll try to get you out of here with minimal use of those band-aids," Maya smiled, watching the girl hurry off with her quiet friend. She almost ran into the door frame on the way out, so really nothing had changed there, and there was no telling how long these clumsiness-correcting dance lessons would take to help, or _if_ they would help, but Maya made it her personal mission to get that girl on the girls' basketball team proper, by the start of tenth grade.

As usual, her day started with her seniors. After having seen him several times in the last few weeks outside of school, part of her had maybe hoped that when August would walk in he would be that boy still. Instead, he was back to his quiet self, the one she'd discovered on her first day in September. He was better once Tony and Milena Janacek came around, but on the whole there was still that layer that had Maya concerned. She had hoped maybe that being on the basketball team would go and help set him back without her having to do anything, and to a point it _had _done that, but clearly it only went so far. He could zone in on the court, the ball, the team and the game when he was out there, but the rest of the time… She was really going to have to talk to him once and for all.

The bell had barely rung for lunch when Stella and Phoebe popped up at her door.

"Hey," Maya laughed. "Go on and eat, I'll be back and we can get started."

"Maybe we should do it first and eat after," Phoebe pointed out, scratching at the back of her head hesitantly. "If I just ate, I might end up…" she mimed being sick and Stella scrunched up her face.

"Okay, good point," Maya nodded, turning to shut the door. "Help me move the stations?"

With the middle of the classroom floor cleared out, Maya watched as Phoebe changed shoes while Stella went and sat on one of the moved tables to observe. She could have asked her if she wanted to join in, but she had a pretty good idea of what she'd say. If Stella ever decided she wanted to be a part of this, she would get up and ask to, so until then it was just her and Phoebe.

"Now…" Maya trailed off, browsing through her phone for a song. When the music filled the room, she turned to her student. "Show me what you got?"

What she had was the most Phoebe type of dancing Maya had ever seen. She was all wild, chaotic energy, and her limbs didn't seem to be in complete communication with her brain some of the time. She had rhythm, but it mostly came in short bursts interrupted by that miscommunication situation. Her demonstration had lasted all of a minute, and she had almost bumped into some table, stool, or foot – her own – about eight times. When she was done, she was a bit out of breath but overall satisfied.

Maya could see Stella sitting back there, and the expression on her face looked more or less like what she felt her own face had to look. Half of her felt like she was trying not to laugh, and the other felt like she was just dumbstruck.

"Okay, that was… We can work with that," she promised, nodding to Phoebe, who nodded back with a smile. "So, here's what we'll do. I'll show you one short thing, then after that we'll work on some skills. I want you to keep working at all of it at home when you can, and at the end of the week you'll do the choreography again, yeah?"

"Yeah, okay," Phoebe nodded, stepping back to go and stand next to where Stella sat. "I'll try to remember."

"I have a video, I'll send it to you after," Maya revealed with a smirk, recalling the previous night, when she'd recruited Lucas to act as her camera guy as she stood in the middle of the living room and did the short dance she'd put together for Phoebe. It had taken many, many takes, as she'd keep seeing the look on his face and end up laughing. Then, there were the elder Friars, who had come up from the basement after a while to have a look, and Sam, too, who soon got roped into being her assistant/test subject. He appeared with her in the final, official take, which she would send to Phoebe for reference. It had also made its way out to the Hart-Lanes in Tucson and was received with wild appreciation and laughing emojis.

Between the demonstration – which was received with the girls' awed looks – and then the rest of the day's first lesson, the lunch period snuck away from them in no time. They finally had to stop when Stella told them that the afternoon classes were starting in ten minutes. Ten minutes for them to put the stations back, get everything ready to receive the rest of the ninth graders, and actually have lunch, all to then go on with their day and not look like they'd been dancing around all this time.

"Slow down, slow down," Maya told the girls. "I'm giving you special permission to eat in class. Next time, we'll put a timer or something, yeah?" she pointed to Stella, appointing her as the time keeper. She was happy to take on the job.

Maya would have her lunch after the freshman class had come and gone, in her extended break before getting her juniors. She couldn't say that she'd had a single bad day, only good ones, but today might have been one of her all-time favorites. Sitting at her desk with her sandwich and salad, she watched the video of her and Sam again, chuckling along. This in turn had started her with a nugget of a melody which she tried to explore, alone in her classroom. After an hour and some, she was really starting to have something, and she couldn't wait to get to the Hex that evening. It might have been worth putting out to Ree for the album. She was coming up next month for another session.

They were no more than five minutes from last period when there was a short rap at her door and she swivelled in her chair to find the unexpected faces of her mother and mother-in-law in the door window, the two of them waving at her. Maya scrambled to stand, signalling for them to come in.

"Did something happen? What..." she asked.

"Oh, no, no, everything's fine," Katy promised at once, reassuring her daughter. "No, we were just done shopping, and…" she turned to Melinda.

"And I told your mother how I had never seen your classroom in person, and so here we are," she explained with a grin.

"Oh," Maya blinked. Her mind had just gone straight to the bad news side, and now she felt just a bit silly. "Well… this is it," she swept her hand around, suddenly very aware of the time. "And I'm about to have students coming in," she turned back to the two of them. She had a feeling that she'd be setting a precedent about this, but then what was she supposed to do? They were just standing there, the both of them, and she could see all that pride, and excitement… "I guess you can sit in and watch, but you have to just… be cool, okay?"

"I appreciate you trying not to single me out, but I understand, I do," Melinda nodded.

"Oh, no singling out, this was for both of you," Maya assured her, tipping her head to her mother.

"That… yeah, that makes sense," Katy had to nod, which made Maya grin.

"Alright, just… over here?" she went and pulled two chairs to the corner. When the students arrived, they all looked to the two women sitting in the corner in some variant of the look they'd had on the first day of the year, when she had been the stranger among them. Once everyone had arrived, she called them to attention. "Okay, alright, hello, welcome back everyone, happy new year!" There was a rumble of wishes returned to her. "First thing, so you won't be whispering about it until I tell you – yeah, you," she pointed to one of the boys, who gave an amiable laugh, "I'd like to introduce you to my mother and my mother-in-law, who are sitting in today." Katy and Melinda waved, keeping blissful quiet. "Now, let's get started."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	229. Their Visitors in Repairs

August 16th 2020

_Chapter 229  
Their Visitors in Repairs_

"Hey, how was your day?" Lucas stood from where he'd been kneeling on the ground, stripping the old tiles from his parents' kitchen floor, when he looked over and found Maya had come along. He'd come straight here after driving back from university, as she'd known he would, putting in a few hours with the repairs to the ravaged room. So, they'd made plans for her to come and join him, bringing dinner.

"Ridiculous good," Maya smiled as he pulled his arms around her and kissed her hello. "Better now," she added, her smile rising to a smirk, which made him laugh and kiss her again before stepping back to look at around. It was slowly coming together, though not so much that it didn't still look like something drastic had happened, especially not in his eyes. He felt silly for it, though he knew Maya would think it really wasn't, but part of him wanted to take some of those old tiles and hold on to them, a memory of what had been, for as long as he could remember. He could still look at those right now and recall sitting on the floor, under the table, playing pretend as a kid.

"Well I'm starving, so I'd love to hear about it while we have whatever's in that bag," he tipped his head to try and see what it was. All he could tell was that something in there smelled really good. They headed into the living room, setting up their dinner spread on the coffee table.

"Where's your dad?" Maya asked, noticing now that it was just the two of them.

"I gave him the night off," Lucas smiled. "He can't exactly do anything to help, you know?" he raised his hands to signify his father's hands. Thomas was often here, as Lucas and the others worked, but for all he'd been able to start doing again with his hands in recent days – which wasn't so much on the whole – the work here would just have been too much, all of it. So, he'd just have to stand and watch, sometimes give pointers. Lucas could tell it was frustrating him, and there was nothing they could do about it. "I suggested he might take Mom out for a movie date."

"You sneaky little good son," Maya laughed. "Good thing I'm here to help then, huh?"

"Always, always a good thing," he assured her, and she gave a humble half bow. "But I'm not going to be alone, Sam's on his way after eating at Cecilia's."

"Of course he is," she nodded.

"And August, too." Maya blinked at this one. "He's having dinner with his family and then he'll be here to help me with the floor."

"Right…" she slowly replied, telegraphing with ease how her thoughts had gone and drifted somewhere else.

"What are you thinking?" Lucas nudged her knee. She turned back to him.

"Well, it's just that I… Well, I really need to talk to him about…" she drifted again, her hands' empty gestures showing she lacked the words.

"You think he's ready?" Lucas asked, knowing enough of the situation to be able to cut to the chase with her.

"At this point, I don't think 'ready' is a thing, and the longer I let it go, knowing I might be able to help him, I… He's been walking around that place with a weight on his shoulders, not complaining, just going through it, but it's not right. And in a few months, he'll be done with that school, with that part of his life, and all he'll be able to do is look back on it like something bad. I'm not saying that I have the power to turn it all around, but… maybe I can help make the end of it be something a bit more positive for him, you know?"

"I think you can do that," Lucas spoke confidently, and Maya nodded, letting out a deep breath. "Do you know what you're going to say?"

"Not a clue," she shook her head at once, sighing. Lucas quietly pushed his fries toward her and she laughed, grabbing a few.

"Okay, alright, leave me some," he smirked, and she laughed harder.

Sam showed up first, which was probably for the best, as Maya was about to steal one of Lucas' helpers for that night. Depending on how the talk went, she might have had to step in to compensate for August if he ended up deciding he didn't want to help anymore once they were done.

"Hey, Maya," August greeted her when he arrived, and he was already so different from the boy who would greet her with a sort of forlorn 'hey, Mrs. Friar' at school. She wondered sometimes if he even realized his own mood flips.

"August, hey, hold on," she stopped him, as he was starting on his way toward the kitchen. "Can I talk to you for a bit?"

"Sure, about what?" he asked.

He wasn't even evasive here, when she knew that, if she'd said the same thing to him at school, he would have been looking for the door already. She tipped her head to the stairs, and they went up until they found themselves in Lucas' old room, which was still a very dedicated guest room, as in 'dedicated to our son and his wife.' Maya indicated for August to sit at the desk chair while she shut the door, giving him the first clue that this talk might have been something he didn't want to hear.

"Look, I'm not going to beat around the bush about this, alright? I need us to talk about what's going on with you and school," she told him, coming to stand across from him. His posture shifted, so slightly, like he'd reached a middling point between home-August and school-August. "Since day one, back in September, I've been wanting to talk to you, because I saw you out there and you were… off… You weren't yourself, not the August that I've known, not the one you are even right now, right here," she indicated him. "And I haven't said anything until now because… well, I guess a part of me hoped that everything would right itself, especially once I saw you and Tony making friends, and then when you got on the basketball team… But that's not what's happening, is it? You're still going around carrying what happened sophomore year."

He tried not to let anything show over his face, but it was too late. When she mentioned tenth grade, his eyes flickered with surprise for a moment before he could bow his head and lift it again.

"This is not the time for 'I don't know what you're talking about,' okay? I know it's awkward sometimes having to decide if you're talking to your sister's friend or your teacher, but right now we're both worried about you, and we both care about you, and we both know… This thing is just going to keep eating away at you until you let it out. You won't tell your parents, or Riley, but August you need to decide if maybe it's worth unburdening yourself, after all this time. You're such a good kid, and I get to see that all the time out here. Shouldn't the others see it, too?"

"No…" August mumbled, and Maya felt like that one little word had gone and spidered out like a crack on her heart. She came up and crouched and knelt in front of the chair, finding his eye line.

"Why not?" she asked. He wouldn't look at her. "August… Hey, Auggie… Look at me?" He did, just barely. "What happened in tenth grade?" she quietly asked.

He had spent the last two years pushing it all down, like maybe it couldn't touch him that way, and now that try and pull it out again felt almost like too much. He sat there, silently looking at his hands as his fingers twisted together, for near on a minute.

"First day of ninth grade, didn't take long before they all knew my dad was my dad and not just our teacher. Some of the others would tease me about it, but it wasn't… I expected it, didn't care that much," he shrugged. Some of them really wanted to try and make me care. I never let them, or… not so much that they could see. Made it through a year, and that was that. Then… the year after that, it became something else. There were two of them, they… they wanted me to…"

He grew quiet again here, though seeing into his eyes it felt like all the noise was happening in his head, barring the way for his words. Maya took hold of his hand, gave it a squeeze.

"They wanted me to get them answers… from my dad's tests." It was a hurdle he'd just jumped, and Maya contained her reaction as best she could. "I didn't want to, I knew it was wrong, but… but they would just follow me, wherever I went, they'd just be there, and every time I said no, it would get worse, and then one day…" His voice had been ramping up, growing, and growing, and then it took a dive, choked in his throat. His eyes looked frantic.

"August, what did they do?" Maya fought for the straightness in her voice.

"Cornered me at my locker one day. Said if I didn't do it this time, things would get bad, said they were going to give me a taste of it." He didn't say what happened exactly, but the way he sat now, she knew they'd definitely gotten some punches in. "If Milena hadn't shown up when she did, I…" he shook his head, and just as soon froze. He hadn't meant to say her name. Maya received this with a memory of the night she'd tried to ask her student about this, running into her at the movie theater. It had never dawned on her that the Janacek girl might have been this closely involved.

"Stays between us, okay?" she promised August. He still looked uncertain, but then he'd already started, so maybe it made it easier to continue.

"She wanted to know what had happened, after the guys ran off. I told her everything. I think I was just in shock. It didn't stop that day, the guys said they were going to make sure they didn't get interrupted next time. I-I was scared, and I was sick of it, so I…" He looked so ashamed now, and Maya closed her eyes.

"You did what they asked," she stated. He nodded, and she bowed her head. This was not what she had expected, and now she worried she might not have been able to keep her promise to him. "Just the one time or…"

"All that year, and last year," August confessed. "I was sure my dad would figure it out, but they always made sure not do too good, sneak some wrong answers in there. They were a year above me, they're gone now," he looked at her. "But they had friends in my class. I think they know what I did. Can't let it get out, I-I'll get expelled, maybe they'll arrest me or something. A-and my dad will lose his job, he'll be so humiliated, and Milena… She'll never speak to me again…" he mumbled after a beat.

There was one benefit of this conversation happening here, and between the two of them. Here she wasn't his teacher, and here no one would say a thing when she reached over and pulled the boy into a hug. He needed it, clung to her at once. His burden may not yet leave him, but now she bore some of the weight with him, as she was left to wonder where she was supposed to go from here, now that she knew what she knew.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	230. Their Visitors in Curiosity

August 17th 2020

_Chapter 230  
Their Visitors in Curiosity_

"How bad was it?" Lucas asked. Maya didn't hear him, standing at her dresser, pulling her hair out of the braid it had been in since that morning. "Maya," he called her name and she turned to him, braid fanning out in twists and curls.

"What?" she blinked.

"How bad was it? Your talk with August," he clarified after she frowned, looking lost. Her face changed now, and she reached up to finish undoing her hair.

"Oh, that… I…" she hesitated. Giving her head a shake when she was done with the braid, she pulled her hair around her shoulder, feeling somehow as though she'd relieved herself of a bit of stress in this small action. "I don't know how to…" Much as she'd been privy to information from her students, some of it private, some of it difficult, this felt like something completely different and she didn't know how to handle it.

"Hey…" Lucas approached her now, her distraction suddenly contextualized. "Are you able to tell me?" he asked, and she looked up at him. Leave it to him to acknowledge August's privacy first and foremost.

"Honestly, I'm not entirely sure," Maya admitted, with apologies in her eyes.

"Then until you are, don't worry about me," Lucas shook his head. "Just tell me you're going to help him if you can."

"You know I will," she managed a small smile, and her husband kissed her forehead, held her close. She let out a breath and held him. Even if she couldn't tell him everything, he was still there, he still had her back, and that meant so much more than she could say. "I just don't know what it's going to be like tomorrow when I see him…"

She had trouble sleeping that night, took at least two hours to fall asleep, and that hardly lasted one, took another to doze off again, and that took her to forty-five minutes before her alarm was set to ring, so she gave it up and carefully got out of bed without waking Lucas. The whole night, she'd tried to focus on him, as he had fallen asleep very easily, holding on to her like the good big spoon he was. She'd listen to the sound of his breathing, try to fall in synch with the rise and fall of his chest at her back, that it might lull her to sleep, but it was no use. She just kept thinking about August, and the talk they'd had.

All this time, since September, she had been left to wonder what had happened to him, what was it that turned him into this other person when he was at school. She had an imagination vivid enough to provide her with several options, each landing anywhere on the scale of bad to worse, and there had been plenty of those along the way, but now that she knew… Guilt. That was the thing that weighed on him, guilt, and fear, and shame, and something like a ticking clock, to the moment where it would all blow up in his face, or… or he'd get roped into some other situation, which kept him from wanting to draw too much attention to himself. Thinking about him now, being on the basketball team, she knew he could have been playing out there all this time, but then something had stopped him, last year and the year before that. He would have been a star player, easy. It wasn't until this year, when he and Tony finally became friends, that he went for it, and between him and Milena, right now she was so utterly appreciative of the Janacek siblings being there with him.

It was hard to think about how this had been going on, since two and a half years ago now. That was when they had all been back from Houston, living in Austin again. But she hadn't seen it, and Riley hadn't seen it… If only they could have figured it out earlier, they might have been able to do… something, anything… They'd let him down, everyone. She had to believe that, couldn't help it. He hadn't even been able to come to any of them, to ask for help, and instead he'd done what he thought he had to do in order to make this go away, and then it hadn't, not even when those guys had left the school.

When she got up that morning, giving up on the idea of getting back to sleep when she had to be up in less than an hour anyway, she'd followed her very first thought, for better or for worse. Grabbing her laptop, she headed down into the kitchen. With coffee made, she went to the table and started her search. She didn't know what she expected to find, or what she was supposed to do once she found it, but if she knew who those boys were…

"You're up early."

She jolted, closing her laptop screen by reflex before looking up to find her mother-in-law, looking much too bright for this time of the morning.

"I woke up," Maya shrugged. "What about you?"

"Oh, I'm a light sleeper myself, I heard you from down there," she nodded back toward the basement door. When Maya moved to stand and get her a cup, Melinda shook her head and went to serve herself rather than to make her go.

Settling back in her chair, Maya looked to her laptop and moved it aside with a sigh. It was probably for the best that she didn't go digging like this. What would she even accomplish in finding those boys now, when it would only drag August down with them. Yes, he had been coerced, but in the end he hadn't found a way out, he had made the choice to go and do what they asked, over and over. It sucked, so much more than she could even say, but there was nothing to do to get around it.

"Are you alright, honey?" Melinda approached the table now, setting her cup down and taking a seat next to her daughter-in-law.

"I'm fine," she told her, finding herself smiling. She could feel so much love in the pet name, and every time she heard it, she felt it again. "I didn't sleep that well, that's all," she went on to explain.

"Bad thoughts or discomforts?" Melinda asked, looking like she wanted to reach over and feel her forehead, and also a little bit like her granny bells were bracing themselves to ring, whether she realized it or not. Maya sighed. That was another thing.

They still hadn't explained to her about their plans. There was no real reason behind it, except, well… Maybe with everything going on over the last few weeks, it had become that intent and follow through were not on the same page. So as much as they felt they should tell her they didn't plan on getting pregnant until the end of this year at the earliest, they could only get as far as to look at her, and then they didn't see themselves taking that little nugget of hope that it would happen sooner than that. It wasn't like she'd be upset, really, the fact that it was on the agenda alone would have sufficed, but… well, what was wrong with a little hope right now? Nothing wrong, nothing at all, and still in that moment Maya heard herself say it.

"I'm not pregnant, I just couldn't sleep." Melinda looked back at her, like she wanted to say that this wasn't what she was insinuating, but after a beat maybe she realized that she _had_ been asking, subconsciously.

"Do I do that a lot?" she quietly asked, and Maya laughed.

"Just a bit, Mom," she confirmed. Melinda looked as though she loved _her_ new title as much as Maya did hers.

"You know, when Thomas and I were just married, his mother and mine were the same," she admitted.

"Yeah?" Maya asked, smirking.

"Oh, they were relentless, so was Joe," her mother-in-law nodded. "Honestly, I didn't realize I was coming on that strong. It used to drive me mad when they'd do it to me, I hope you're not upset I…"

"No, no, of course not, I… Look, it's going to happen, it is. Lucas and I are looking forward to it even more than you are, if you can imagine that." Now Melinda was the one laughing.

"That's good to hear."

"If it happens before, we'll be just as happy, of course, but we talked it out together, and we wanted to wait so he could finish school, and I could get through at least one year of teaching, before we have a baby to look after."

"That is a very thoughtful idea," Melinda declared.

"Yeah, we thought so, too," Maya told her. "So, we're just going to start really trying in like November?" she went on to explain, trying not to roll her eyes at herself for how her voice dipped down at telling this part, like it wouldn't already go without saying and she was the only one who was making it awkward. She cleared her throat, took a sip of her coffee, and moved on. "What was it like when you finally told them you were having Lucas?"

"Oh," Melinda sat up at this, happy to delve in the memories. "Well, the first person who knew, even before Thomas did, was my mother. She knew it before him, and even before me."

"How?" Maya wondered.

"I went to see her at the ranch one day, she was in one of the stables, looking after one of the horses. We were talking, and she just looked at me and the horse, how he was responding to me, and from there she put it together. _I_ still had no idea, but then she was looking at me with just…" she demonstrated a look which came off as 'emotionally surprised.' "She asked me if I had been feeling any different, and once she'd mentioned it, I guess I put it all together, too. I left the ranch and promised I'd let her know as soon as I had any news."

"Then what happened?" Maya asked, sort of enamored with the idea of hearing how the world got to know Lucas was on his way.

"I went and bought a test, and I drove straight to Thomas' office. I went in, didn't tell him why I was there, and I took the test in his bathroom, came back out and showed him when I saw it was positive. I tell you, if I had your talents, I could still draw it from memory, the look on his face when he found out he was going to be a father."

"Maybe I'll see it one generation down," Maya smiled, imagining the day Lucas would be the one hearing those words.

"As much as our parents all had been on us about when we would start our family, it was… miles away from the kind of happiness they showed when we told them," Melinda recalled, a small, bittersweet smile brought perhaps at the memory of her mother and Thomas' mother, no longer with them today. "A few more months won't change a thing where you and Lucas and all of us are concerned," she promised.

"I know," Maya nodded, and her mother-in-law scooted over in her chair so she might embrace her. Maya received and returned the gesture. "I didn't wake you up, did I?" she asked after a few seconds. Conversation aside, she'd figured this much from the beginning. When they pulled back apart and she could see her mother-in-law's face, she knew she'd had it right. She'd been having nightmares about the fire. She tried not to 'make a big deal' out of it, but she could only do so much to hide it. "I know you don't like the idea of going to talk to someone, but I'm here, if you do want to talk to me." Melinda Friar had a smile, looking to her daughter-in-law, and it was so similar to one her husband had, the one that said they could not imagine their son having found anyone better to join his life and their family to.

"I'll remember that."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	231. Their Visitors in Outings

August 18th 2020

_Chapter 231  
Their Visitors in Outings_

They had both been looking forward to Friday's lunch date all through the week, as much for the date itself as for the fact that it would be close to seeing that first week back ended. Maya had been sitting in her classroom, looking over her tenth graders' work from third period when she got a text from Lucas. He had to hang back at the bookstore over his break, they were short-staffed that day and he would only get a few minutes to eat, not enough to even drive to the school.

_Lucas: Make it up to you tonight?  
__Maya: I'll kick up the outfit if you do.  
__Lucas: Done._

When he'd arrived home from work, Lucas had thus found his wife had indeed traded in her 'teacher chic' for something a bit more knee weakening. It absolutely worked on him.

"Wow," he had no choice but to say it, which only made Maya smile more than she already had. "You did not come to play, did you?" Lucas asked, as she played it up even more with a slow turn to give him the full effect.

"I never do," she smirked, facing him once more. "You are going to have to match all this, do you think you're up to the challenge?"

"I… yeah…" he gave a humble nod, making her laugh. "Might be able to do that, yeah."

"Okay, well, you go and do that now," Maya pointed up the stairs. "One thing though, slight change of plans," she told him, with an almost nervous look.

"Change how?" he asked.

"Well…" she trailed off briefly. "I was getting ready, and your mom wanted to help, you know, mother-daughter moments and all…" she indicated her hair, which he took to mean had been the work of his mother, masterfully done. "We were talking, and one thing led to another, and now we are just sort of… going on a double date… with your parents…" she finally revealed, with a tentative smile. As he blinked, processing, she would just gesture at herself as though to say 'but you still get all this, so that's fun, right?' Eventually, he just had to chuckle.

"Alright, well then I really need to get ready," he nodded. "We're on the Melinda clock, now, can't be late."

After a speedy shower, Lucas finished getting ready for the evening, coming down to find Maya waiting for him like she'd been anxious to see what he'd put forth to 'match' her. Going by her not entirely exaggerated expression, he had done very well for himself.

"If I walk into the restaurant and very loudly announce 'yeah, that's right, that's my husband,' will that be too much?" Maya asked.

"Not if I get to return the favor," Lucas laughed as he reached her.

"Done," she agreed, sealing this 'pact' with a kiss soon interrupted by the other half of this evening's Friar Four. Soon, they were in the car and headed out, leaving Sam for a night to himself, likely to soon include Cecilia, and maybe some others as well.

In the car, as Lucas drove and told his parents about his day, Maya found herself briefly drifting back to work, and this first school week back from the break. It had been everything she could have hoped for, generally speaking, with her students being as they usually were, and then adding to it her lessons with Phoebe, which had not necessarily been meant to be at _every_ lunch period, but inevitably had become just that, as she and Stella had now taken to being out on the bench every morning when their art teacher showed up, and the first thing they would ask would be if there would be another lesson that day. It took until Thursday for Maya to figure out that they had been showing up this early not just to ask this but so that Phoebe could practice some more and show her best friend. That morning, she'd tripped up a bit and ended up with a new band-aid on her calf after a collision with the bench.

"I'm getting better, right?" she'd asked, with hopeful eyes, earlier that day, as the cancelled lunch date had made for a fifth consecutive dance class in the art room. She had just done the routine Maya had shown her at the beginning of the week.

"I can honestly say that yes, you are," Maya had proudly smiled. The big question was whether she was improving as far as the tendencies which had required the classes in the first place. The calf-bench hit might not have played in her favor on that part, though from everything she'd seen of the girl as the week progressed… maybe she was starting to make a turn on that as well.

For all the good of this week, Maya could not pretend as though there hadn't been something else occupying her mind, other than Phoebe's dancing. She still had August to contend with.

When she'd made it to school on Tuesday morning, after her sleepless night and her chat with her mother-in-law, the question of what she would find upon seeing August again was back in full force. Part of her worried that he wouldn't even show up that day, that he would realize his secret was not so safe anymore and be too scared to show his face. But then he was there, walking into the room with the Janaceks, and Maya hid her relief by turning to the board for a moment. That was only the first hurdle, of course. Now he was here, sure, and as much as she felt compelled to check on him, to make sure he was doing alright, she couldn't draw too much attention to him, just as she couldn't look to Milena too much. She couldn't say what it was, but she had a feeling there was more to the story for her.

All week long, on the whole, it had been business as usual for August in her classroom, and in the school. He still had a lot of that same stance to him, the same one he'd been showing since September, or at least since before the break, where it all depended whether he was interacting with Tony or Milena or any of his fellow basketball players or not. When it came to her, he was his usual respectful but not overly vocal self. She took it all as his way of saying 'I am just going to keep showing up, please don't draw attention to me.'

That was all good and fine, but she was still left with a dilemma, now that she knew what she knew. She had been handed this thing now, and she wasn't sure what to do with it. Whenever she would run into Mr. Matthews, she would feel a twinge of guilt, knowing she had this secret about his son and was keeping it from him. All this did was give her a taste of what August had to be feeling every day, and make her more determined than ever to see this through.

She had to put it out of her mind for now though. She wouldn't do anyone any good by obsessing over what she could or couldn't, should or shouldn't do, all day and every day, especially right now, as she was meant to be enjoying this night with her husband and her in-laws.

Maya could tell Lucas was aware when she retreated from her thoughts and became focused on the world and the car once again. They shared a brief look where she smiled and nodded at him. All was well.

_"What did I miss?"_ she covertly signed, and he smiled back, looking forward.

"Mom, are you sure?" he asked, and just like that, Melinda insisted that she _was_ sure by launching into her story once more from the start and thus bringing Maya into the loop.

When they arrived at the restaurant and they got out of the car, Maya soon fell in step with Lucas, and she took hold of his hand as they went, ensuring that he would look at her and she could pass on a loving look. There could not be words to express how much he meant to her in times like these, when something would come along to claim her mind, and he would be there, so patient and understanding, showing nothing but support. He made her feel safe in her thoughts, knowing he would always be on the other side, waiting, if she ever decided she needed to air them out. Right now, when it came to August's situation, she couldn't let them out, not yet, but if ever the time came where that changed… Lucas would be there to listen. Before they could walk into the restaurant, she leaned in to whisper at his ear, telling him her reason for loving him today. He responded by lifting her hand to his lips.

Dinner with the elder Friars was never a dull affair, and that night was no exception. Even though Lucas and Maya would have enjoyed having this meal to themselves on a whole other level, they couldn't pretend as though they didn't have a great time here, with Thomas and Melinda.

It quickly became that the subject of conversation turned to the summer. Specifically, Lucas and Maya shared Maya's previous thought of a trip, with the two of them and their families. The moment it was put on the table, the idea took flight, as both the elder Friars expressed their interest – in their own ways – in making this happen. As far as they were concerned, it would be such a wonderful way to bounce back from what had happened before Christmas, and any time spent with the kids, well… they were on board.

They didn't exactly lay down some specific plans that evening, especially as the Hunter Hart side still needed to be consulted, but it didn't hurt to discuss potential locations, and past vacations. Lucas and Maya managed to pull loose some memories of their honeymoon they had not yet shared, and Thomas and Melinda were happy to hear them. They in turn went on to share stories of their first big trip as a family, when Lucas was all of a year old. Maya was promised photos, the next time anyone went to the house to continue work on the kitchen.

"Will it be any surprise for me to say that I am picturing you right now in floaties and a little sun hat?" Maya teased, later, as they had made it back home and were in the process of changing before heading to bed.

"Will it be a big shock to hear I'm pretty sure they've got some photos just like that?" Lucas had struck back, earning an intrigued smile from his wife.

"I have known you this long and this is the first I hear about it?"

"Like you don't have any surprises left," he challenged.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" she returned, and they could only grin, knowing they could keep this going for ages if they allowed it. Instead, Lucas turned the subject elsewhere.

"So, earlier, in the car…" he asked.

"Yeah, that… I'm sort of working on it," Maya sighed. August's face, that night when they had spoken… It was the image that kept flashing through her mind, over and over. She looked back to Lucas, and after a moment it felt like she knew. "Maybe he should talk to you."

"Me?" Lucas asked, surprised. "Why?"

"I…" she started to reply, but… no, this wasn't the time yet. "I need to figure this out, before I say or do anything," she nodded, confident now. "When I'm ready though…"

"I'll be right here," Lucas promised.

"That much I know," Maya smiled. He was her certainty, every day, by no means taken for granted.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	232. Their Visitors in Progress

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

August 19th 2020

_Chapter 232  
Their Visitors in Progress_

There had never been signs of the fire to be seen from the front of the house. It had been visible only as you went around the side and then the back, the corner where the kitchen sat. You couldn't see it from the outside anymore. The broken windows had been replaced, the door, too, and everything else that might have been damaged on the outside walls had been mended. Even the inside, though it looked very much like a place in the midst of renovation, no longer looked like a fire had happened. Likely for that reason, today was the first time Melinda Friar walked into her own home since before Christmas. She'd been so nervous about it, Lucas could see it the whole way as they drove out, but she was convinced now, and she wasn't about to back out. That was the trick of it.

They were making a big push today. Just about everyone who had been helping here and there over the past couple weeks was helping today. The hope was to get the elder Friars back home by the end of January at the latest. It wasn't that Lucas and Maya didn't like having them at their house, but it was just going to be so much better for Thomas and Melinda to be here, in their own space, their own things, and that was always the end goal, wasn't it? By the end of today, they would have seen to the counters and cabinets, and hopefully the tiles.

Today also happened to be Maya's birthday. Her in-laws had insisted that they didn't have to do this big push today, that it should be about her, but today was the day everyone could be here, and really she could not have asked for anything better to celebrate her twenty-sixth. Besides, they would have a party that night, too. Right now, it was about the push.

She was set up in the living room already, painting away at her wallpaper. She'd made herself some stencils, easing the process of making everything come out like a repeated motif, as it had been, so it was easier, but it still took a lot of time and a lot of careful work. She was on her last panel though, and in a couple of days at the most, it would be set to the walls. She couldn't wait.

When Lucas arrived with his mother, Maya looked up. She knew he had to go with her to see the kitchen first, and she kind of wanted to be there, too, so she got up to join them. At the same time, she gave him a look that said 'after this, I need to talk to you.' He nodded.

"I don't know what made her cry more, seeing the kitchen, or all the people," Lucas breathed deep, like he had been about to cry, too, as he followed Maya up the stairs a few minutes later.

"Both, definitely," she decided, and he tended to agree. She led him to his old room, shutting the door behind them. Turning back to him, she let out a breath. "Remember I told you when the time came, I might ask you to speak to August?"

"Last week, yeah, of course," Lucas nodded. The Matthews boy was downstairs at the moment, helping his father and his Uncle Shawn with the installations. "Today?"

"Maybe, I don't know. I'm in this weird position where it doesn't feel right to keep pushing it off and at the same time we really need to do the work here, so who am I penalizing, you know?" Maya explained. She couldn't help but to be made to feel awkward about it all.

"How about you tell me what I need to know, and when I find my moment, I'll talk to him," Lucas offered. There really didn't seem to be a better way.

So, Maya told Lucas what she knew, about the boys who had threatened August, cornered him, beat him, until he'd agreed to steal test answers from his father and hand them over, how he'd done this for the better part of tenth grade and all of eleventh, until the boys had graduated and left the school the previous spring. Hearing it all, Lucas couldn't help but feel… so much. A lot of it was a jumble of… anger and regret, that those boys had not only done what they had done but also got away with it, and in the process left August trapped with emotions he couldn't resolve, not without trapping himself in the process.

"Do you know who they were?" Lucas asked, and Maya sighed.

"I wanted to find them at first, and then I decided not to. But then I kept thinking about it, and some things kept turning through my head. It was the basketball thing. He clearly loves it, and he's one of the best players on the team, so it makes no sense that he wouldn't be on the team…"

"Unless…" Lucas understood. Maya nodded.

"Wasn't hard after that. There were exactly two graduating seniors on the team last year. I managed to sort of casually ask some of the other teachers about them, and from everything they told me, it definitely sounds like those could have been the guys who went after August. I am trying so hard not to think about them too much, because as much as there's a part of me who would love nothing more than to give those two a very specific piece of my mind, I know that it won't actually accomplish anything. And it just kills me that they'll probably get away with it, and continue to cheat their way through life, going after people like August who are just… so much better than them in every way, and leaving them to feel that badly about themselves as though it's their fault, when it's not, it…"

"Maya, someone's outside," Lucas cut her off, quietly. She turned and opened the door, and there stood August Matthews.

"Auggie, I… I didn't tell…"

She was cut off again, this time by the tall boy bowing to hug her. It just about knocked the air out of her, but just as quickly she returned the hold, the power seemingly moving so that she was the one holding him, even as he towered over her. He was just a boy, and once upon a time she'd held him as a tiny babe. He had been in her class all year, but today might have been the first time he truly saw her as his teacher. Maybe for that, when he finally stood back, the first thing he did was to ask Maya if she would help him speak to his parents, tell them the truth.

"Absolutely, I'll be there," Maya promised him, holding his gaze. She was her father's daughter, and that gaze was one she had learned from Shawn Hunter. It told August that when she made promises, she kept them, always.

"I, uh, I was looking for you because I wanted to give you this," he pulled something from the pocket of his hoodie, a small box wrapped and topped with a bow. "I have to work tonight, so I can't be at the party, but I wanted to… well… Happy birthday," he handed her the gift.

"Thanks," she laughed, giving him a quick new hug. Unwrapping the box, she opened it to find a colorful glass owl.

"It's not much, but I saw it and it made me think of your tattoo, and the colors, I just…" August shrugged.

"I love it, are you kidding? Thank you," Maya beamed, holding the little thing in her palm. The sun was shining into the room, and meeting the glass in her hand, it felt as though the colors were alive.

As they'd gone back down the stairs to carry on with their tasks for the day, Lucas couldn't get enough of seeing his wife all sorts of giddy all of a sudden. Whatever she had expected of this day, her birthday, the big push, she had not seen this small turn with August coming. But now that it had, it felt like she'd been given the most perfect present, to make this day one to be remembered.

They had called it a day in late afternoon, giving everyone the chance to go refresh and change before reconvening at the Friar house on the lane, for Maya's party. At the end of the night, when they were leaving, Maya asked Mr. Matthews if she could drop by the house the next day. She needed to talk to him about a student. He asked if it could wait until Monday, and Maya told him she'd rather discuss it the next day, if he was available. So, he told her to come over around lunch.

"You got this?" Lucas asked, the next morning, as he was getting ready for work. Maya looked to the glass owl on her dresser.

"Yeah, I'm good," she breathed out. All she wanted was for everything to work out for August. This would not be easy. She knew it, and most importantly August knew it, too. But after all this time, something had finally clicked for him, and he was ready to face the consequences, whatever they may be.

"Tonight, when I get home, birthday round two, you and me?" Lucas suggested, and Maya turned a curious grin toward him.

"What are you gonna do, kick your parents out?"

"Yes," he nodded, and she had to laugh. "Well, I'll suggest they go and hang out with yours or something. They can take Sam, too." Maya took this with a nod that said she liked this plan, pausing a moment later and centering herself once more. That was for later. She appreciated the mood lift it gave her, but now she had to use it to get her over to the Matthews' house so they could have their talk.

She found more courage in arriving at the house to find the face of three-year-old Hunter Matthews plastered in the window and waving at her. A moment later, he disappeared and the door was opened.

"Hey, bud, you're not supposed to do that, are you?" Maya asked, hoisting the boy into her arms.

"Not strangers, I know you," Hunter pointed out.

"Alright, fair."

Joining Cory and Topanga and the boys for lunch, it was hard not to feel like two of them at the table were holding back, but thankfully with a small child among them, there was little to worry about, the conversation would not be boring. After they were done, Hunter ran off to get back to his toys in the living room.

"I'll leave you two to talk," Topanga moved to rise, looking to her older son to say he should do the same.

"Actually, do you mind sticking around?" Maya told her, and as Topanga looked back at her, Cory was looking to August as he pieced together the reason for her visit.

"You're the student?" Cory asked. August found his resolve shaken, just a bit, but he nodded. Topanga sat back down.

"August? What's going on?" He looked at his mother, his father, to his art teacher. Maya nodded to him. _You got this, I'm right here._

"I…" August looked to his parents again, cleared his throat. "When I was in tenth grade, there were these guys, juniors. They wanted me to… to get them a-answers, from… from your tests," he looked to his father, barely able to hold his head up. "I said no. I said it a lot. They wouldn't let it go, wouldn't let me… They were always there, they'd get all in my face, said they were going to hurt me."

"Auggie…" Topanga reached across the table, taking his hand. "Sweetie, did they?"

August stared at the table for a few quiet seconds where all they could really hear was Hunter out in the living room 'vroom vrooming' with his toy cars. Finally, he screwed up his courage and gave a nod. Maya knew it had been a lot for him to admit this, even when the bigger confession was still to come. This was the thing that had tipped the scales, the one that overturned his resolve, and he hated himself for it, she could tell.

Meanwhile, the Matthews were looking to one another. They'd known that there was something going on with their son for all this time, but there had been no accessing it, and all the while they could only do their best, to show they were ready to help him, whenever he was ready to talk. Now it was all coming out, and to see this pain finally manifested in their boy…

"I didn't want them to do it again, I… I did what they asked," he spoke now, his voice trembling with emotions, all of those which Maya saw in him, when they'd first spoken about all this. "I did it, and I did it again when they told me to, all that year a-and the one after that." Maya looked to the parents sitting across from them as they took in this information. They both looked stunned, thrown… It was so hard to believe, that he would do something like this, and worse that he would have done it for so long without their noticing it, Cory especially.

"August, why didn't you tell me?" he had to ask.

"Because they said if I did then they'd do s-so much worse, and I didn't… didn't want…" August blurted out, eyes welling up with tears. "A-and it… it just got worse, every time. I didn't want you to get in trouble, I didn't want t-to hurt you…" He was full on crying now, and even as Maya tried to rub at his back to calm him, Topanga was coming around the table to hold him.

Maya stood from her chair now, looking to Cory. Her colleague, her former teacher, her father figure of years past… He was looking back at her, and something like his son, it felt like he was seeing her as more than his daughter's best friend, his former student. She'd climbed a step now, and in doing so she had helped his son to open up. Whatever happened next, he was thankful for this much, and he wanted her to know it. She tipped her head to him. It was really no big deal; it was her job, wasn't it? It felt like so much more, especially now.

By the time she left the Matthews house, with August and his parents still talking things out, Maya walked to her car feeling like she'd been holding her breath since she'd walked in. Now, she could let it out. This wasn't over, no, but she had hopes for seeing someone closer to the August Matthews she had grown up to know when they walked into school the next day. Most of his classmates had probably forgotten the way he used to be after all this time.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	233. Their Record of Time

August 20th 2020

_Chapter 233  
Their Record of Time_

"Do you think she even slept last night? Like, did she just stay up all night to cook?" Maya wondered aloud as she turned her head to Lucas as he drove. He chuckled.

"I talked to my dad earlier, she definitely slept, but she set the alarm at five thirty this morning, let him sleep for another hour, then went up and got him to come down and help because it would be good for his hands."

"So, things are back to normal," Maya summarized.

"Just about," Lucas smiled.

The goal to get the elder Friars back home by the end of January had been overshot just a bit so that they'd left the house on the lane about a week into February. As was to be expected, the departure had not happened without some emotional tugging at everyone's hearts, now that they had sort of gotten used to cohabiting after all this time. Even more expected had been how it had been hardest for Melinda Friar for her to leave 'the kids' and go back to the old way, even if she was genuinely so happy to return home. It had been a few days now since they'd gone back and Maya, Lucas, and Sam were once again on their own, and now they were on their way out there, the first guests hosted in Thomas and Melinda's brand new kitchen.

Lucas was nothing if not so, so proud of his mother. He'd seen it as much as the others did, back in the beginning, the way she'd been so apprehensive about doing much of anything herself in her son's kitchen, too afraid that something would go wrong as it had done back in her own. She'd been coaxed back into it though, and a lot of the merit there went to Sam, with his early morning breakfast making. They'd lost count of how many mornings any of them had come into the kitchen to find the two of them working like chef and sous-chef, a well-oiled machine before long.

She had even started meeting with Riley, who had been more than happy to speak with her in a professional capacity, as Melinda had conceded she might need help but couldn't bear to air out her affairs to a stranger. Airing them out to her son's friend, a girl she'd known since she was in middle school, was the easiest compromise she'd made. And, really, it had been helping, to the point where Melinda would just sing her praises. She intended to keep on seeing her.

But tonight was the big night, the 'inaugural dinner.' Lucas' father would joke, saying how even though they had of course been eating in the kitchen ever since their return home, none of them had apparently counted in his wife's book.

It felt as though they had just seen the start of 2028, and now already they were into its second month. But then, wasn't that always the way? Lucas was busy with school still, finding himself so very close to finishing this year and starting his very last one in the following fall season. Rather than to feel worn out by it, the surprise of sorts was just how he felt energized by it all, with the goal post feeling more and more tangible on the horizon. There was just so much for him to look forward to, the closer he got to it, from him and Maya finally trying for a baby to his taking his place up at Sullivan Stables, just as he had been looking to do for so, so long.

As for Maya, well, she was perpetually occupied, as she had always been, as she generally preferred to be. The band, the songs, the theater, the school, all of them jockeying for the time she did not devote to Lucas, to Sam, and to the rest of her vastly extended family and friends. Ree was coming over the following weekend for her second session at the Hex, and Stage Ready was spreading further and further away in new theaters. TXNY had a showcase coming up, and as for school, Maya was soon to chaperone her first school dance, which she was beyond excited about.

"Do chaperones get to bring a date? Maybe I can sign you up to be one, too, then I definitely get to dance with you," Maya had stated, when Lucas had come home that day.

"Either way, I would be happy to," he'd replied with a smile, watching her sway about like she was already on the dance floor.

"We could have a repeat of the time we went and danced outside the school, sort of… ten, closer to eleven-year anniversary type deal, and wow…" she'd blinked, just realizing how long it had been.

"Aren't chaperones supposed to be where the kids are, so they can keep watch?" Lucas had to point out, getting himself a look back from his wife like she didn't want him ruining her fantasy. "Doesn't mean we can't have both," Lucas had carried on. "We can watch them, and at the end of the night, we can have our… ten-almost-eleven-year dance outside anniversary."

"See, you're always coming up with bright ideas," Maya had smiled at once.

As she continued to advance through her first teaching year, Maya was reminded again and again, in big and small ways, just how much it meant to her that she was finally here. To see her kids every day, and week by week to watch what they all would produce in her class, to see how they came to embrace art in their own ways, those were the things she had gone in expecting. But then there was the rest. The way they grew to respond to her, to rely on her as their teacher…

She had been watching as Phoebe Munroe transformed, in the last several weeks, since their return from holiday break. The dance lessons had carried on, a near daily activity almost like a boost of energy at midday, and for all the uncertainty she'd had about whether or not they would actually do what they were meant to do… Phoebe was improving, beyond any expectations. She still had moments where her clumsiness would manifest, enough that she continued to attend school with her kit in her bag in case of emergencies. But the incidents felt fewer and further in between. The bigger takeaway here was how much she'd picked up on the dancing, and how much she had taken to it. She would show up, Stella in tow, with that look on her face asking when they could start.

As transformations went though, they really could not beat the one August Matthews went through in the last few weeks. Could they even really call it a transformation when this was on the whole the exact person he had always been on the inside, so long as he wasn't at school?

The first sign of his turn had come right on the day after Maya had gone to the Matthews to back August up as he spoke to his parents. It wasn't as though he'd burst through the halls greeting everyone, making jokes, like someone had flipped a switch. But then he'd been walking through this school with a semi-permanent slouch to his shoulders for the better part of the last four years, so to suddenly see him walk around with a proper posture made a world of difference. The same went for how he'd look up more, speak up more. And then, in first period, when he and the rest of the seniors had been in her class, he'd acknowledged the fact that they knew one another and had done so for the whole of his life, since way back when they all lived in New York. From there, the August she had known all along started to make himself seen, more and more each day.

He hadn't come out of the whole revelation unscathed, and neither he nor Maya had expected that he would. While both Cory and Topanga were of a mind that, now that the boys had graduated and moved on with their lives, there was no sense in tanking August, especially so close to his own high school diploma. As far as the school was concerned, it would remain a secret shared between the Matthews family and the younger Friars. Still, for all the reasons, August had done something wrong, something that would easily have gotten him expelled if it had gotten out. He not only expected punishment but felt deep down that he deserved it, nothing insignificant either. He was nearing eighteen at this point, so the old standards like grounding him or taking his allowance didn't work so easily.

But he'd surrendered his car, which he would not get to use again until after graduation, and he'd been made to quit his job, which largely took away whatever money he was setting aside for when he started college in the fall. He was going to have to keep living at home for a while, and this would come with conditions. He would spend his weekends at home, looking after his little brother, same as his evenings in the week. He took it all; he felt he could have gotten much worse.

Maya, Lucas and Sam stopped off on the way to the elder Friars' to pick up some wine, as showing up empty handed, especially on this occasion, would have felt disrespectful of their hostess. When Maya's phone rang, she gave Lucas a look that said 'your mother knows we're running late.' He chuckled, though when Maya looked at her screen and reached back to touch his arm, he guessed it wasn't his mother after all.

"You are calling me at a very weird time to just call me instead of texting, which tells me this is either a butt dial or you have something to say which is better said with actual words out of your mouth. How am I doing so far?" Maya asked.

"Switch to video, please?" Sophie laughed. The edge of giddiness in her voice already said enough, but Maya humored her, pulling her phone from her ear. Soon, she had it turned sideways, with Lucas and Sam standing close at either side of her as they all looked back at the quartet staring at them from Sophie's phone. They all had some variant on 'sharing something huge but also trying to keep it in until after it's actually been shared and failing so hard at it.'

"Evening," Ray waved.

"Where are you guys?" Asher asked, attempting to see around them.

"We're headed to my parents' for dinner, we stopped for wine," Lucas explained.

"So…" Maya cut back in, as though she was the only one here who remembered that there was something important hanging in the air. Sophie, Chiara, Asher, and Ray all looked to one another for a moment before everyone finally turned to Chiara, allowing her to be the one to say it, which really just made sense. She held up a small print out of what was instantly recognizable as a sonogram.

"Say hello," she beamed, her voice an accented melody full of joy. There was a barely contained bit of celebrating in the middle of the store, as the trio reacted to the news as it well deserved. To see the four of them now, back in the girls' home in Houston, it was easy to see that they had already known for some time, and still it came off with all the excitement they must have had upon confirming that everything had worked out. Already this little human growing inside Chiara had four parents so in love with it, and now it was gaining on aunts and uncles, too. They would all have so much to say to one another when they had a proper chance to speak. They would be driving up to Austin the next day, the better to tell the future grandparents.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	234. Their Record of Sessions

August 21st 2020

_Chapter 234  
Their Record of Sessions_

On days when she'd be headed into the Hex for a while, Maya loved to get up early, as the world was quiet, walk through the house, grab some coffee and traipse on over to the studio. Some days she would go and pick up one of her guitars and just see what her mind decided to do with it, or she would sit at the console and tinker at a recording… It was a special kind of peace all her own.

Lately, she'd been going the way of a third option for these mornings. After a while, it was hard for her not to look at the rest of the instruments in this place and feel a bit of a pull toward them. She'd always had her guitar, and it was great, but maybe for having stepped up as a teacher now, she was getting to consider the possibility that she could expand her musical brain if she knew how to play all of those, too. The first one to call to her was Kayla's drum kit. She'd been calling up memories of many years watching both Kayla and Nadine sitting there, and watching an inordinate amount of videos, thanking the insulation of the studio as she experimented.

"You're getting pretty good at that."

Maya blinked, looking up to find Ree standing in the doorway with a smile. She got up, looking down to find she was still in her PJs.

"I know, I'm early," Ree apologized, as Maya had gone to look at the time. "I'd explain why, but seeing as you're in here already, I'd say you are best placed to understand all on your own."

"Just give me five minutes, I'll go get changed," Maya smiled.

"Don't worry about breakfast, got you covered," Ree nodded, holding up a bag branded as being from Ma Maggie's. Maya had told the singer about the restaurant back when they'd first met in person, and Ree now swore by it, whenever she was in town.

As promised, after a mad dash back into the house – passing a bewildered Lucas and Sam, still just coming down from upstairs – Maya returned, dressed and ready for the day's session. She found Ree sitting on the stool with her guitar, lightly strumming the melody from one of the songs they were set to record that day. When she'd heard the demo, she'd declared it possibly her favorite song that Maya had done for her yet, which had been the kind of compliment her young songwriter had to take humbly as they spoke on the phone and wait until after they'd hung up to react in earnest as she'd felt.

"So, how's school?" Ree asked, setting the instrument aside so she might join Maya as they broke into the food together. They could have eaten back inside the house, at the kitchen table, but then they both had that same feeling about being here in the Hex, and they preferred to stick around.

"Making me glad that I found the person I'd want to spend my life with when I did, so that I didn't have to 'suffer' trying to figure out dance dates," Maya declared, which had Ree laughing at once. "We had one of those last night, Lucas and I chaperoned," she added in explanation.

"I had tutors, once I was signed, so I wasn't in school so much in my teens. Never been to a dance like that," Ree told Maya, taking a bite of her pancake.

"Next time we have one of those, you are welcome to join us, you and Peter. Make a date of it," Maya suggested, and Ree burst in a great cackling laugh.

"Might just take you up on that, it would be just brilliant, yeah. Oh, prom, make it that," she waved her fork.

"Done," Maya laughed, grabbing her phone. "Making a note of it, and I am going to hold you to it."

"Please, do. We can always use a bit of casual fun. All the touring, the interviews, flying everywhere, it all starts to take a toll after a while, on Peter, on Christina. It's things like that which make me really respect the choice _you_ made," Ree went on. "Sometimes I wish I could settle down, reset the balance between my career and my family. You cracked the code, Maya."

"I…" she blinked, touched, unsure how to respond. Ree was right though, wasn't she? She'd chosen her path, and so far it was really all she could have asked for. "I hope you're right. Once Lucas and I start to have kids, maybe it won't feel that way anymore, and then things will have to change again. They're going to be the thing that matters most."

"See? You'll be alright," Ree smiled. "Now, go on, what else is new?"

"Oh, it's like… everyone's got babies on the brain these days," Maya shook her head before taking a bite of her bacon. Ree gave a nod and a look that suggested she remembered a similar time in her own life. "Some of our friends found out they were expecting, others are still waiting to hear from the adoption people, and then _more_ others are locked on 'any day now' with baby number two, so we're just waiting for the call out of New York…"

"That is definitely a lot," Ree reacted in awe.

"It is, yeah," Maya smiled. It was hard not to think about what the next few years were going to look like, as they all went and had kids, and that growing group got to grow up together…

While they waited for that call from Farkle and Isadora, the talk of the hour was definitely 'baby SCAR,' as they took to calling it, deciding they liked the acronym best, no matter how some might have found it strange.

As promised, the four of them had come over from Houston the previous Sunday, the better to unveil their news to those parents they could tell in person. Both Chiara's parents and Sophie's mother had to be told over a video call, but then they had Asher's parents, and they had Ray's chosen family, the Friars. Finding a way to tell them all at the same time had required some subterfuge, but they'd managed easily, what with the new kitchen and all. They only had to mention – via a very willing to participate Lucas and Maya on _their_ dinner night – how others, like the Garcias, would be so interested to see the completed work, too, and from there they could let Melinda set the stage by herself. It worked.

After their surprise drop in with the baby bombshell, the four had made their way over to the house on the lane where they could say hello to their friends and be given the hugs they deserved before giving their whole story, from when they'd found out to how the reveal to the parents had gone.

It was to be expected, with how the whole thing had been such a process, that they would all choose to let some time pass before telling people about the baby. Chiara was due in early August and already three months along when they told everyone, at which point she was happy to show off her rounding belly. The actual discovery though, that had happened a month ago already. According to Chiara, they had all been saying they would patiently wait to see if it had taken, if she was finally pregnant. That had been the plan. But the more days went by, the more she could feel all their eyes on her, like they were waiting for her to do something, to be sick, or to show any other sign, and they had been driving her just a bit nuts.

It had all finally come to a head one night. She'd come home and dropped a test box on the table, declaring that they were going to find out once and for all. Sophie, Asher, and Ray had all looked to one another, appropriately sheepish, before each of them in turn had surrendered their own boxes, each purchased independently in some failed ploy to go 'hey, Chiara, how about it?' It had only taken one, and when she'd come sweeping out of the bathroom, to present them that stick with the plus sign, she'd almost run into them, all lined up and waiting for her. There had been a lot of hugging and so, _so_ much happy crying. Telling their parents, a month later, had brought it all back, as the Garcias and the Friars in Austin and Diana Zvolensky and the Mantovanis overseas all received the news of this impending grandchild as they might have done if this child had been their very own.

"Lucas and I are looking at all this, how his parents are taking it all in, like a preview for what we can expect when it'll be us," Maya told Ree with a chuckle.

"Is it that intense?" Ree asked, laughing.

"It always is with his mother," Maya pointed out. "But in a good way," she specified.

"How are they doing now?" Ree inquired. She'd heard about the fire when she'd called Maya to wish her a Merry Christmas.

"Oh, well, they're back home, which has been great for them, and for us, too, I guess. Not that we weren't happy to have them here, because we were, it was just… time to get back on track. Mr. Friar is still having trouble with his hands, but he tries not to show it, doesn't want anyone to worry, least of all his wife or Lucas and me, but it's not like we don't see it. And Mrs. Friar, you know, now that she's back at her house, she can be herself again, and that's really been the most helpful," Maya nodded. _And her sessions with Riley, but that's for her to share._ "I think it helped _us_, too, Lucas and me, to have them here. We weren't expecting that, but it's like… it helped us to look at them and see that they weren't just his parents anymore, and we were all a bit more… on the same level. I used to go out to their house and feel so nervous about making a good impression…"

"Happens if you're courting their son," Ree teased. Maya snorted.

"I wasn't at first!" she replied.

"Weren't you though?" Ree countered. Maya had no way to reply to that.

"We should probably get started," she set aside her empty container, indicating the console, the booth…

"Need to digest before that," Ree told her as she ate her last bite. "So, here's something while we do. I wanted to talk to you about the album, once we're through, once I release it."

"Okay," Maya sat up, business like.

"I would like you to come on tour, with me," Ree smiled, more so at what had to be shock on Maya's face. "You will have put a whole lot of work into this album, maybe more than I will have done. It just would not be fair for me to go out there and claim it as my own when it's _ours._ So, what do you say? One taste of the whole thing, see how it is for yourself."

Maya was speechless. It was unexpected, of course, but it was also just… huge… and requiring a lot of consideration, so many factors coming in… They had set themselves a schedule, Ree and her, and by the time they finished recording the last of the songs, it would be somewhere in October, and the album would likely come out around the turn of the year.

"When… when would this be, I mean I have my job, my kids… and maybe _a_ kid on the way by then…" At this, Ree raised her hands, settling her down.

"There are no dates just yet, not for the album, not for this tour, and I can be very flexible if it means you'll come with me. We have time to figure this out. Say you'll at least consider it? Talk to your husband, see what he has to say."

"He'll probably say I should do it," Maya breathed, sitting back in her chair. "I should still run it by him." Ree agreed. "I… I'll think about it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	235. Their Record of Night

August 22nd 2020

_Chapter 235  
Their Record of Night_

It was just as well that Ree had shown up as early as she did. They recorded three songs that day, and it took them until well into the night before they were both satisfied enough to leave the Hex and call it a job well done. On this, their levels of perfectionism were entirely on par with one another. They hugged, and Ree made Maya promise to think about her offer long and hard before giving her an answer.

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't rooting for you to accept, but I'll understand if you can't, alright?" she smiled as they walked back to the house.

"I do," Maya assured her. "And I will think about it, I… No matter what, you know how much it means to me that you even asked." Ree gave her a side hug as they went, and Maya was barely keeping the giddy beast in her heart in check, as she continued to try and play it cool. It had been easy enough, once they'd started to work on the songs, for her to set her mind where it had to be, but now…

She walked Ree to her car, watched her get in and drive away. Not until that car was a speck, far up the lane, did Maya's legs give a wobble and she ended up crouched in a ball on the lawn outside her house, hands over her mouth as the rumbles of excitement eased out of their hiding place. It wasn't just excitement, of course. If it had been, she could have said yes right away, but there was so much more to it than that, there were… responsibilities, and possibilities… and she couldn't _just_ say yes.

"Need you, right now," Maya tapped at Lucas' shoulder over the couch as she came back into the house.

"I'm sitting right here!" Sam protested, also on the couch.

"Not like that, also stop it," Maya reached to ruffle her brother's hair, which he evaded by diving into the cushions. Lucas laughed as he got up.

"Want me to hold him down for you?" he joked.

"Considering it now," Maya smiled, and the fact that this smile seemed to get caught up in everything else that she was feeling now got her husband's attention in earnest. He followed her up the stairs, to the second floor and then into the attic, where he guessed she wanted him to pull in the steps and shut the door, so he did.

"What's going on? You look like you're…"

"Losing my mind? Maybe a little," Maya told him, standing like she didn't know how to stand, much less do it without fidgeting or moving around.

"What happened? Did the session with Ree not go alright?" Lucas asked, tracking her movements without intervening just yet.

"What? Oh, no, it was amazing, I mean watching her sing like that, right in front of you, that is just an experience, and she just takes my songs and turns them into something I couldn't even have… Wait until you hear what she did with Unbound…" she paused briefly, as though the memory had returned to her, hearing the last run of it. Then she blinked and she was on the move again. "No, it's not about the session, more what happened right before the session, what Ree asked me, she…" She let out a breath, trying to center herself again so she could speak to him as she needed to. "Ree wants me to tour the album with her when it comes out."

She didn't know why it made her love for him surge the way it did, but to see how the news hit him in what felt like just the way it had hit _her_, it was as though they'd both landed on the very same wavelength, and now they had two minds facing this offer on equal footing. There was no one in the world who could do that with her, not another soul, just as she was this for him in return. They both knew that when something came along and made them feel like their heads were too crowded to make sense of anything, they had one person who would be able to untangle it all with the most stable hands.

"Woah…" he still had to state.

"I know," Maya breathed out as he came toward her. First things first, because it _was_ something wonderful, he had to hug her, and she folded herself into his arms at once.

"So you'd be going around with her, all the cities, all the shows…"

"Every one," Maya nodded.

"When…"

"There's no dates yet, for any of it. She said if it meant that I'd go, she'd make it all work. But the album should be ready by November, December, and I have my job, my students. And we…" she looked up at him. _And we're supposed to be trying for a baby at that time._

"Okay…" Lucas breathed, the main facts now in his grasp. He didn't need to ask her if she wanted to do it. She wouldn't be this frazzled, wouldn't even need to ask him, if she didn't want this. What she needed now was for him to help her figure out if it was possible for her to do it, and if so how, when there were those very important factors. "How long do these tours last?"

"Well, when she was here before, she started and finished in North America, but she did a lot in between overseas," Maya tried to think, pulling out her phone at the same time to look up the dates of her first and final shows. She made a noise more than spoke, and Lucas moved to go and read over her shoulder. He also made a noise, both of them boiling down to 'that long?' Scanning through the rest of the dates, they could see a couple points where three to four weeks had no dates, but otherwise there was no more than four days between each show, the whole tour had run over five months. All of a sudden, it felt like alarms were going off, a direct strike detected, coming right for this chance Maya had been given unless they could deploy some evasive maneuvers and fast.

"Did Ree say how long _this_ one would be?" Lucas wondered.

"She couldn't have, could she? Nothing's been set in stone yet, and I don't know how these things are organized. It would definitely be months though, could be almost half a year like the last one."

"Come here, sit down," Lucas took Maya's hand and brought her to sit with him, her in the bean bag, him on the ground in front of her. She briefly turned her eyes up to the window in the roof, to the stars bright overhead. "Here's what I know… what I think I know, so correct me if I'm wrong." She nodded. "You want to do the tour." True. "This might be the best time for you to do it." Also true. "Once we actually have a child, it will be more complicated for you to do this, not impossible, just… trickier." She let out a breath, nodding still. "Do you want us to push it back again?" he slowly asked. At this, she got hold of his hands and he looked at her.

"Not changing that," she assured him. "The only reason we haven't started yet was so we could both be there, be a part of it. We waited so you could finish school. This tour does not get to take precedence over our family." The words made him smile, and a moment later she had moved from the bean bag and into his lap, where he could put his arms around her. "If I say yes to this, I'll be out of work one way or the other, summer isn't _that_ long."

"Would Ree make it so the tour only lasted as long as the summer? Two months and done?" Lucas wondered.

"I don't know," Maya shrugged. "Maybe yes, maybe no…"

"If she did, you'd be set, yeah? I could go with you, we'd get to travel…" Lucas pointed out.

"True," she hummed, looping her arms around his neck. "Except there's already a little something that's supposed to happen around that time, too, remember?" she whispered.

"A little something, right," he let out a breath. "What are the odds that it'll actually happen that fast?" he wondered.

"I couldn't tell you, we've never actually gotten to that point. A couple times we thought we did, but we didn't, did we? Once we actually try and make it happen, it could be weeks, like it could be months. Would be so much easier if we could predict it for sure, right?"

"Right," he nodded, amused at her sort of pitiful brushing of his hair. "Okay, let's say that you did the tour and you were also pregnant," he suggested, as though he'd turned from their first page full of scribbles over to a blank new page for them to explore a new scenario.

"Let's say…" she nodded, allowing him to continue.

"Wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing. Ree is always either standing or sitting when she performs, most she'll do is walk the stage. Whatever songs you'd be out there singing with her, I'm sure she'd let you sit if you had to. You could rest plenty between shows. And… it would be something we would get to tell the kid about in a few years' time." His smile was impossible to resist.

"And what if I end up out there and…" she made a gesture coupled with a popping sound, which he could only interpret as 'and the baby comes out.' "Don't go and say it'll be a bigger story, because I am telling you right now, I am not interested in giving birth in front of thousands of people," she informed him, the grin on her face showing they were at least both aware this was a joke, and it wouldn't actually happen. "Also, if I go and have this kid that far away from her, your mother will never let us hear the end of it. Do you want _that_ story?"

"No," Lucas laughed. "I really don't." They remained in silence for a few seconds after this. Now what? He looked at her, his beautiful, wonderful, madly talented wife, and the answer was clear. "Maya, you should say yes," he told her, continuing on even as he could see her move to protest, stacking up reasons to keep herself locked in uncertainty when he knew it was all for the sole reason that this was something so monumental that fear was the only place to start. "I'll be right by your side the whole time, and no matter what, we will find a way to make it work, together," he looked to her hand, pulled down to his own now so he might trace her rings with his thumb, calling on the vows they had made to each other seven months ago. "We usually do," he looked back up to her face, holding that tearfully happy gaze of hers. "If you say no, I think you might regret it forever." She let out a breath.

"Okay…" Maya finally spoke, quietly at first. Lucas gave her hand a squeeze. "Okay, I'll do it," she said it louder now, nodding at him, and he laughed, bridging the very small distance between them to kiss her. "Let's keep that between us for now, alright?" she added when they were looking at each other again.

"Sure, yeah, but I am going to need a tour shirt as soon as there's one," he stipulated, making her burst into giggles just as they heard the attic door get pulled open and Sam poked his head in after climbing up.

"Hey, the band's downstairs?" he pointed down.

"What?" Maya blinked, looking to Lucas. "It's like one in the morning…"

"They said they're here for 'Minkus Watch?'" Sam explained. Now, Maya and Lucas gasped, scrambling to stand and follow him down. She must have missed the call, between the session with Ree and then coming up here with Lucas. Back in New York, Isadora was in labor.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	236. Their Record of Love

August 23rd 2020

_Chapter 236  
Their Record of Love_

One day, a few weeks back, the band had been in the middle of practice up in the Hex when they had gotten a text. Isadora thought she might have been in labor, so Farkle was taking her to the hospital. It had been a false alarm in the end, but from that point on it had been hard not to be primed for the call that would have to come sooner or later, when it wouldn't be a false alarm anymore and Baby Minkus number two would be making his or her entrance into the world. So, the girls had made up their mind that whenever that call did come through, no matter what, they would get together and wait out the outcome together. Thus, Minkus Watch had been initiated, though none of them had expected it to be kicked off so late as it did, minutes off from one in the morning on a Sunday… technically a Monday, hours off from them being due at work or school. Still, a promise was a promise.

Lucas and Maya followed Sam down from the attic to find their living room had suddenly been invaded, not only by their bandmates but also some of their significant others. Riley and Dylan were there, along with Nadine and Zay, and Kayla and Will, and Rosa and Jenna.

Immediately, there was a rush of voices from either side, and it was a wonder that they all could pick up on any of it, but they did. Maya and Lucas wanted to know what the others had heard about Isadora and Farkle and the baby, while the others wanted to know about Maya's session with Ree Forster earlier that day.

"Hey, hey, time out, alright, one at a time," Lucas raised his voice enough so to be heard, which got him a few barks from the dogs, who were all over the place, hyped up by the presence of their visitors at this hour.

"We weren't sure if you were still with Ree," Riley explained to Maya, "Farkle meant to text but then he ended up calling me instead. Then I called the others, and then we all figured we'd just come on over, Minkus Watch."

_"When did you finish?"_ Kayla signed.

"Uh, not too long ago, actually. Ree left about a half hour ago," Maya spoke and signed at once, stealing a look to Lucas, who nodded, as much in confirmation as solidarity in not sharing the tour news yet. "When did he call? What did he say?"

"About an hour ago," Dylan told her.

"They're sure it's real this time. Farkle's parents came and picked them up and they went to the hospital together, then they could keep an eye on Ada," Nadine followed.

"Last we heard, they were just settling in, and Farkle said it might be a while," Rosa shrugged.

"Right…" Maya turned to Lucas and Sam. At this point, they were ridiculously used to having guests for the night, and the way this was shaping up, the whole group would be here until morning. There was no saying how much sleep, if any, they would get, but it was only right that they should set themselves up for the possibility that they would. "We'll get the fold mats up in the attic for whoever doesn't take the couches or the bed in the basement?"

"Done," Lucas nodded, tapping Sam's arm as though he wouldn't have tagged along to help him unasked.

"Is it okay if I work on my paper while we wait?" Jenna spoke up in a voice clearly showing she still hadn't completely gelled with the group to the point where she didn't see herself with 'new' floating over her head.

"Yeah, of course," Maya told her. "You want to set up in the kitchen? Or you can have the desk upstairs…"

"Kitchen will be fine, thanks," Jenna smiled, stealing a look to Rosa, who nodded at her before she went off with her bag. Rosa watched her go until she'd disappeared from view, finally turning back to the others, who all had a variation on a 'aren't you guys cute?' smirk. She briefly touched her face, trying to settle her expression into something more neutral again, better not to have them all stare at her.

"Hey, can we go to the Hex, play around for a while?" she asked, diverting the conversation somewhere less awkward for her.

"Sounds good," Maya nodded, turning to Dylan, Zay, and Will.

"Hey, we're good, you go," Zay shrugged. "We'll find something to pass the time, yeah?" he turned to Dylan and Will.

"Shoot off?" Dylan asked, turned to Will so he might read his lips.

"You're on," Will smiled.

"Lucas! Shoot off! Hurry up!" Zay shouted up the stairs as the guys made their way out to the basket, leaving the five members of TXNY standing in the living room, looking to one another.

"Okay, let's go," Maya waved her hand in the general direction of the Hex.

As they'd made their way through the kitchen, Rosa had casually checked on Jenna, while Maya told her she could take whatever she wanted if she was hungry or thirsty. Walking the short path from the house to the studio, the lights in the ground activated, breaking the darkness. Maya couldn't even feel silly for enjoying this. She had spent the whole day in her studio, and somehow it felt like a brand new space again.

"So, how was it today?" Nadine asked as they all went and grabbed or sat at their instruments. Maya turned to face her bandmates as she picked out her newest guitar. This wasn't practice, wasn't about pretending they were on stage. This was them taking music as their means of communing with their friend and former bandmate across the country, so they were a circle tonight.

"It was…" Maya searched her words. She couldn't tell them about the tour, couldn't even let them hear what she and Ree had been working on. They'd all helped her with the backing on the demo track, they knew the songs, but it had been specified that the recordings with Ree were to remain unheard as of yet. "I think one of them is going to be my new favorite that I've done outside the band," she finally told the others, smiling.

"See, now you said that and I just want to hear it," Rosa frowned as she adjusted her bass.

"Sorry," Maya laughed. "Speaking of things we want to hear though, what _I'd_ like to hear is how it's going now, with you living at Jenna's place. Are you good? Do we need to get you back in the basement now that the in-laws are gone?"

"Uh, no… no, I'm alright," Rosa waved off the offer, clearly oblivious to the fact that she lacked any kind of poker face when it came to her friend and roommate anymore. It was hardly unexpected, when the possibility and the call to anything mildly romantic was still so new to her. But in the last several months, there had been no doubt whatsoever that this was what it was, not to anyone who knew Rosa at all.

For as long as they had known her, it had always been the way. If others had found someone that made them feel all lovey dovey, more power to them, but she just didn't feel that way. And then she'd met Jenna, and suddenly the world had changed, or Rosa just didn't see it the way she used to anymore, not entirely. When she'd actually open up about it, which was not all the time, she would be so shy about it, and it would be hard not to find it all incredibly cute. She'd once told Maya that it felt a bit like learning to swim as an adult. All the little kids learned it so easily, because they didn't know any better, but her… She was very aware that she might sink and drown even if everyone told her she could float.

Worse yet was the fear that she might screw it up. New as they were, these feelings immediately felt dangerous to her. The very idea that she might try and fail, or that she might start, and be good for a while, and _then_ fail… It was enough to make anyone feel concerned when they had finally found someone worthy of those feelings, but for Rosa it was so much more. Jenna had become precious to her like no one else in her life, in all her twenty-three years.

Now, with February upon them, the world had gone and taken its dose of red and pink, of hearts plastered everywhere, and any other symbols of the looming day for valentines. In the almost seven years they had known Rosa, she had always kept a wide berth when these appeared. She would decorate as she always did, at her mother's bookstore back in Houston, as little more than professional pride, as she usually loved decorating and no one else did it right anyway. This year… This year, she was intrigued, she was drawn to it all in a bit of 'you know, this is kind of sweet' sort of way.

"Hey, come here a second," Rosa had pulled Lucas aside, one night when she'd been at the house for practice. "What'd you get Maya for Valentine's Day this year?"

"Uh… why?" he'd asked, unsure where this was coming from. Rosa would only make a gesture. _Just tell me_. "Well, it's the first one since we got married, also our tenth one since we've been together," he'd started, an easy smile coming to his face. "So I sort of wanted to get her something that would remind her of all those other ones, and…"

"Oh, for crying out loud, why are you so… fluffy…" Rosa had huffed. "What about the first year, what'd you get her then?"

"A book…"

"Seriously?" Rosa had blinked, shaking her head in disbelief. "You got her a book…"

"Really big one, from the museum where we tried to have our first date," he'd tried to mime out the size of it. "Had to save up for it for a while. Should have seen the look on her face when she saw it."

"Okay, okay, I get the picture. What about the next year? What'd you get her then?" Rosa cut him off. This went on until he'd listed out every single year, every gift. It had taken until about the third gift for him to understand what she was after.

"You want to ask Jenna out, don't you?" he'd finally asked, and oh the deer-in-the-headlights look she'd given him.

"Leave it up to me to make up my mind in _February_, right?" she'd smiled nervously. "What if she feels obligated, what if…"

"Rosa, listen to me, okay? You listening?" She was. "The one piece of advice I can give you: say what you feel. Don't second guess yourself, no sidebars, no take backs. Be honest with her. Best thing you can do. You know her a lot better than I do, but I'm pretty sure if you do that then she'll be honest with you, too, and then you'll know once and for all."

"Okay… Okay, I-I can do that…"

She had left the house after practice. An hour later, she'd come back, frantic and smiling. She had a _date_, an actual pick-you-up/take-you-out date, with Jenna, and she was in the most dire need for assistance. This time around, Maya had taken up the task, and between this and Lucas' advice earlier, they had gotten a good kick out of dubbing themselves Rosa's fairy godparents.

Now they were here, tonight, and Jenna may still have been acclimating to being part of the group, but there was no question that she was just that, that she was one of them. She had been becoming so long before earning the title of 'Rosa's girlfriend'.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	237. Their Record of Patience

August 24th 2020

_Chapter 237  
Their Record of Patience_

"Hey, we're starting a pool," Dylan told the girls. "Boy or girl, you in?"

They hadn't turned on the 'no entry' light, there was no point, when they were just going the way of 'we play what we want, see where it goes.' They had been in the midst of a rousing bit of improvisation, just on the cusp of triggering Maya's imagination, when Kayla had spotted the door opening and signalled the others. When they'd looked back, there was Dylan. Riley had gone to open the booth door, poking her head out to ask if there had been news about the baby.

There was no news, only the idea of this pool having started as the four guys tossed the ball at the hoop in their ongoing shoot off. It had been Dylan's idea first, and though the others had been slow to pronounce themselves at first, eventually they had come up with a compromise. Loser bought breakfast, winner got to see the baby first.

"It's a dead heat right now, two to two, and…" Dylan reported, before turning his head to listen. The girls could just make out someone calling out, unsure which of the guys. "Make that three to two on another girl."

"Who said what?" Maya had to ask.

"Will, Jenna, and I said girl. Lucas and Zay chose boy," Dylan counted off. The girls looked to one another, considering the question. Farkle and Isadora hadn't told them what they were having, same as the first time.

"Personally don't see the point, but I guess I'll say boy," Rosa shrugged.

_"I'll say boy, too,"_ Kayla smiled, the look on her face suggesting maybe she did so in order to have one half of her couple on either side of the divide.

"I kind of want to say it'll be a girl again," Riley pondered aloud. "It'd be sweet if Ada had a little sister."

"Surprise twins, one of each," Maya raised her hand with a smirk.

"Can she do that?" Rosa pointed at her.

"You have to pick one," Dylan told Maya.

"You're just scared that I might be right," she challenged. Dylan kept staring. "Fine, put me down for boy, I guess," she finally shook her head, looking to her guitar before turning to Nadine, the last unspoken. She turned her head up upon sensing her friend's eyes, the rest of the band's and Dylan's as well.

"Uh…" she hesitated, then with a slow shake of the head, "Boy, I guess."

"Great, so that's… six to four boy, I'll tell the others," Dylan shut the door and was gone in two seconds, leaving the studio to work its way back to where they were before he looked in on them.

"Nadine, you want to start us off?" Maya asked her friend, standing to her right. They shared a brief look before Nadine took a breath and set her violin back in place, taking a moment to find a start and filling the room with a melody the others followed, one after the other.

Sooner or later, they'd be made to remember, and whenever they did, the thing they'd be left thinking more often than not was just how much their situation sucked. It was no one's fault, no one was to blame, and yet… As much as she could soldier on with the best of brave faces, Nadine couldn't entirely hide the fact that she was in pain, day by day, as she and Zay continued to await some good news. The longer it went, the harder it got, as being patient and understanding that it might take some time would start to be edged out by questions and doubts about _why_ it was taking so long. Was it something wrong with them, that no one chose them?

It only made matters worse that their group appeared to be caught up in the biggest case of communal baby fever. So many of them were either having babies or talking about how they angling down that road, enough that it felt like a constant buzz word around them. There was no escaping it, for better or worse. Now the rest of them were left in the position of clearly being aware of this and not knowing whether to address it or leave it alone, all the while trying to keep Nadine from noticing, so she wouldn't feel bad about _them_ feeling bad about _her_ feeling bad…

"Can we take a break?" Riley asked after a few minutes. "I think I need coffee or something, if I'm going to make it through the night."

_"Me, too,"_ Kayla nodded.

"I should check to see how Jenna's doing with her paper," Rosa piped up. Soon, the three of them were filing out of the Hex. As the door shut behind them, Maya let out a breath.

"Looks like you were elected," Nadine told her. Turning around, Maya found that she had gone to sit on the ground, back to the wall. She went and joined her.

"I think it's the teacher thing. You would think they'd pick Riley half as much, she's a shrink."

"Yeah, but no one wants _that_," Nadine tilted her head to look at her. "Anyway, I think it's not the teacher thing so much as you're usually the one it's easiest to talk to when everything's so… you know." Maya couldn't help but smile, looping her arm with Nadine's.

"I appreciate the vote of confidence." They were quiet for a few seconds. "For the record, Lucas is way easier to talk to, but maybe that's just me."

"I don't know, your husband's Texas through and through, you're like fifty-fifty, New York balances you out or something."

"If I can borrow from Riley, I _think_ that's called deflecting," Maya gave her a look. Nadine let out a breath. "They're not going to come back in here until we talk, are they?"

"I almost didn't come tonight," Nadine confessed. "I figured I'd be too much of a downer on everyone else, and lo and behold…" she gestured around the empty studio.

"You're not a downer," Maya insisted.

"I don't want to make it look like I'm not happy for Isadora and Farkle, I am. I can't wait to see the baby, find out if it's a boy or a girl, find out what they'll name it and who it'll look like the most. I can't wait for all the pictures, and the videos, and to see how Ada responds to her new brother or sister…"

"I know," Maya quietly replied.

She almost told Nadine about the tour right then, out of some notion that it might be something good for her to hold on to, but… No, it wouldn't have been right, wouldn't have fixed anything. She was better off sticking to the plan, not telling anyone until they had more details.

"You know, there's one positive about all this waiting," she stated instead. Nadine silently asked what that was with a curious look. "Then maybe your kid and mine will be closer in age, whenever you get yours and I have mine." One beat, and Nadine laughed.

"That'll be nice," she agreed with a nod.

"Might be in the same year," Maya added.

"Besties," Nadine went on.

"For life," Maya swore. "And then, plot twist, they fall in love, get married, and we are set for life."

"You know, if that actually happened, we would lose our minds," Nadine laughed.

"Us? What about the guys?" Maya nodded toward the door. They could faintly hear the basketball hitting the backboard of the hoop.

"Oh, I might just want it to happen for that moment alone," Nadine just near collapsed in Maya's lap from the laughter now.

"Everything will happen when it's meant to happen. And it _is_ meant to happen, so it will. Your kid might not have been born yet, might not even have been conceived. But one day you'll get that call, and then the rest of us, we're going to be right here, waiting for as long as it takes, same as we are tonight, waiting for the call from New York."

Catching a sniffle, Maya looked back to Nadine. Even though she cried, her tears were following the curve of a smile as they fell. Nadine turned so far as to embrace her friend, and Maya returned the gesture at once.

"I'm getting used to sleeplessness with my shifts at the hospital, how are _you_ going to look at school tomorrow?" Nadine asked as they still held to one another.

"I might have to skip the lunch time dance lesson and take a nap instead," Maya smiled, which made Nadine chuckle. "Just hope this kid gets born before I have to take off."

After the hug broke, the two friends shared a look before standing up and moving out to confirm their suspicions. Peering through the window, they could just make out a few figures standing around outside the studio, idling. When Maya opened the door, Riley, Rosa, and Jenna stood there, coffee cups in hand as they watched the guys – joined by Kayla – back at the hoop.

"You guys coming back or what?" Maya spoke, startling the trio by the door and making Nadine snort.

"I almost called out to her," Rosa shook her head to herself before shouting out to the guys so they'd let Kayla know they were headed back in.

When she jogged over to rejoin them, Jenna also came into the Hex. As it turned out, she'd worked on her paper for about fifteen minutes before the sound of the rebounding ball called to her and she went out to join the guys. When Rosa and the others had stepped out for refreshments and to let Maya and Nadine talk, Jenna had finally realized she had no intention of getting back to work that night, which was fine. It was already near on two thirty in the morning, and she would get nowhere that wouldn't sound like gibberish upon rereading.

"Jenna, any preferences on what we do next?" Nadine asked the newcomer. Her renewed wakefulness and smile seemed to work like a wave over the band, as they looked to the girl standing in the open booth door. Rosa waved her over, and after a moment she stepped in and shut the door, finding a seat on the displaced stool in the corner.

"I don't know… Something happy, for the baby," Jenna decided.

"I like the sound of that," Maya agreed.

"I have an idea for that," Riley spoke up, and so she was given the floor. She set her hands back to the keys before her, and almost as soon as she started to play the others started to fall in with her, resetting the Hex on its vibrant way.

As the minutes ticked on by, deeper into the night and nearer still to sunrise and the new day, they liked to imagine that, even as they all sat here, waiting on the news, back in Houston another small gathering was sitting in wait, finding their anticipation in a way redoubled as they considered their own future addition, cooking away in the belly of Chiara Mantovani. If not for the hour at which this whole thing had started, they would probably have driven on over to Austin and been with the rest of them. All they could do now was look forward to all of them catching up in the morning.

They weren't sure how much time had passed before they became aware that the guys had either finished with their shoot off or simply decided they were done, but then there they were, crowded around the console, listening in as the band continued to play, sending off their musical vibes clear across the sky, from TX to NY and the growing Minkus family.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	238. Their Record of Healing

August 25th 2020

_Chapter 238  
Their Record of Healing_

As devoted as they had been to their plan to play through the night and the wait for Farkle's call, by just after four in the morning, they were all tapped out with the music. So, they walked out of the Hex, locking up and heading back into the house, where the group piled in on and around the couch with coffee and food and a movie guaranteed to keep them in a wakeful mood. It was not entirely successful. Will soon dozed off, Kayla holding him and doing nothing to potentially wake him, as 'some of us might as well get some rest.' This had been stated by Rosa, when they'd found both Riley and Zay had also fallen asleep, after fighting a losing battle against keeping their eyes open.

The rest of them were faring much better, if slipping on the side of loopy. Nadine had decided to commit entirely to her preferring one of the items in the bowl of mixed snacks and was nudging and burrowing her way through like she was on some archaeological dig in order to find and consume all the bits she was after. Dylan had started to make small braids out of his girlfriend's long hair, despite the fact that he had no elastics to bind any of it. On the ground together, Rosa and Jenna were about the only ones really paying attention to the movie anymore, and they did so with laughter, whispering to one another every so often. Up on the couch, both Maya and Lucas would see them down there, so happily caught up with each other, and they would smile, finding their long-time friend and their new friend's budding relationship to be one of the sweetest things they had ever seen. Both girls had clearly never had anyone in their lives who made them feel half as much as what they both made one another feel. Now they had it, and it was all shiny and new and wonderful.

When they weren't 'spying' on their friends, Maya and Lucas were caught up in a very tricky – due to the hour and the level of their exhaustion – game of 'how many peanuts can we line up on Lucas' arm before they fall.' Specifically, Maya would be playing at this, and Lucas would let her do it. Whenever one, or two, or all of the peanuts would roll his arm, they would land in her lap, where they would quickly be returned to their post… or consumed, by one or the other of them. When they had reached their new record of ten, only to have the lot spill over a second later, Lucas declared the game over, locking his arms around his wife as she laughed.

"Maybe you should try and get a couple hours of sleep," Maya turned her head about until she could see his face. "Wouldn't like the idea of you driving to school after being up all night."

"I'm not going to risk missing it now," Lucas told her. "Anyway, I can get Ramona to pick me up. What about you? What are you doing with the kids today?" He could just hear her muttering 'today' under her breath, like she still had to remind herself that it was officially Monday now, no longer 'tomorrow.'

"Well…" Maya started, flexing the fingers on his left hand like a posable model for drawing. "I gave them all an assignment on Friday, and today I get the pleasure and privilege to listen to them all present their creations."

"What's that going to look like on no sleep?" Lucas wondered.

"Oh, not good," Maya shook her head at once, smiling as he pulled her closer and kissed the side of her head. "I'll figure it out. It's all about stacking it right, I know which ones are good to boost the energy in the room. Then again, might now be so bad. Remember what it was like when _we_ were the students, on Valentine's Day?"

"I don't know what you mean, I was always well-behaved," Lucas declared, getting a laugh not only out of his wife but also two more of his oldest friends, as both Dylan and Nadine looked over at him.

"That's not well-behaved, that's just the Lucas Friar special," Nadine pointed out, to the amusement of Maya and Dylan.

"You're making it sound like I was boring," Lucas 'complained.'

"No, not boring," Dylan insisted. "Just… big-brother-in-charge version of messing around."

"Enjoying yourself there, Teach?" Lucas asked, looking to Maya, who was turning pink and climbing toward red from laughing.

"Hey, clearly that all worked for me or I wouldn't have married you, so…" she patted his arm.

"Uh huh, okay," he gave her a look to show he both appreciated the statement but also was not letting her off the hook for the laughing part. She countered this with big 'I love you' doe eyes. He just did not have the power in him to resist those.

"You know, I'm just now realizing that this means Baby Minkus will be born on Valentine's Day…" Maya pointed out now, easing them back from their bit of roasting.

"That kid is going to get so much chocolate for his or her birthday growing up," Dylan shook his head, the tone of his voice suggesting that a lot of said chocolate would be courtesy of good Uncle Dylan far off in Austin, Texas.

"It's really hard sometimes to think about how little we'll get to see those kids grow up," Maya went on, slightly more subdued now as she reflected on her friends back in New York. "The most we've see of Ada is on a screen, and it's great, she's the best, but it's not the same as when she's actually here, you know?"

"I do, yeah," Lucas assured her.

"Riley always says the same thing," Dylan chimed in, looking to his sleeping girlfriend, curled up with her head in his lap now. "Ever since Isadora told us about _this_ baby, it's almost worse for her, because now there's two. Sometimes she starts saying how she wants us to go back there, but she never means it for real," he shook his head, looking up and over to Maya a moment later like he realized maybe he shouldn't have said this. "Really, she doesn't want to go for real," he promised.

"No, I get it," Maya promised back. "I get those thoughts sometimes, too," she told him, all the while turning a look to Lucas, confirming that he was aware of it and she didn't keep it from him in any way. "It's like even after all those years, a part of us is still back there, and Farkle, and Isadora… they're holding on to those for us so they don't get lost. Every once in a while, we just feel it all again. Me, I'll start thinking about how much I miss them, back there, and I miss the city, but then at the same time it's just like… I could never go, not to stay. I was thirteen when we moved. Whatever I left back there, it can't even begin to compare to what I'd be leaving here if I went and followed that whim."

"Yeah, that's kind of her thing, too," Dylan nodded, brushing at Riley's hair, loosening the untied braids until they became a dark brown curtain all over again.

"You know, the two of us have been talking about spending our summers out there, maybe, in a few years," Lucas shared. "Maybe… you guys would like to come, too," he suggested. Maya looked instantly on board with this plan, looking from Lucas to Dylan.

"Oh, she would love that," Dylan smiled. He almost woke Riley to run it by her before choosing to let her sleep a while more. "Maybe we could take August with us, if he's up to it."

"Yeah, that might be good for him, too," Maya smiled at the thought. He had still been a little kid when the Matthews family had moved out here, but he still had some distinct memories of his time in New York. Much as he had acclimated to his Texan life to an even larger degree than either his big sister or his art teacher, he had those roots in him. "You could take him out there _this_ summer, just you three."

"Why not you guys, too?" Nadine asked the obvious question.

"I just figure it would be a good thing for the three of them to have, family and all…" Maya shrugged. Dylan looked at her a moment, at Lucas, at Nadine, before checking that Riley was genuinely still asleep. Taking even more chance on his side, he signed rather than spoke.

_"I might need your help soon. I haven't worked out the whole plan yet and I really want to get it right."_ The quiet trio shared a look. Was this what they thought it was? Was he finally looking to make his proposal? Dylan saw these looks and pleaded with his eyes: don't wake her up, let her be surprised.

_"Don't worry, we're great with secrets," _Maya signed with a barely contained smile. Knowing how much it would mean to her oldest friend, she would never dream of taking the slightest bit of that surprise from her.

Almost to challenge this, Riley woke with a start, not a minute later. She was worried that she might have missed the call from Farkle about the baby, and they had to reassure her, over and over again, that she had not in fact missed a thing.

"Okay, I think we need to get some air to wake us up," Maya moved to rise from the couch, pulling Riley to join her first, and then Lucas, and Dylan, and Nadine, who made the call to wake Zay, too.

One by one, the group was recruited into this waking exercise, and they went walking around the house, past the Hex and toward the lake shore, all of them ensuring that their phones were in working order so they would not miss the call.

"I really love it out here, when it's this early…" Maya hummed, looping her arm with her best friend from New York. "Almost like when I used to go to your house in the morning before school," she went on, then, after a beat, "Looking back on it now, it's a wonder I'm still around today." Riley laughed, but at the same time she had to nod and agree. "Hey, so how are things with August and your parents these days?" Maya asked.

"Really good, actually," Riley smiled. "None of them can believe it, I think. Like, they feel as though they should be mad about what he did, but then they're just happy that he's better now than he was all that time so they _can't_ be upset."

"Yeah, I can picture that," Maya nodded. She would tell herself that the entire ordeal was behind them now, and the more time went by the truer it would become. At the same time, she couldn't shake the thought that there were still missing parts to the story, and they all existed out there, like a second shoe waiting to drop. And as the days went on, Maya was growing more and more certain that the person holding that second shoe was Milena Janacek. Some things still didn't add up, and every time she tried to piece together that equation, it came back to her.

They had just made it to the lake when the silence of the very early morning was broken with a ringtone. On reflex, several phones were pulled from pockets, or lifted when they had just been kept in hand, even though the ringtone had already identified it as being Maya's phone. Just as she answered, the others started to crowd around her so they might see her screen when Farkle's tired but elated face appeared on it.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	239. Their Record of Family

_**A/N:** The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

August 26th 2020

_Chapter 239  
Their Record of Family_

There was really nothing like long-time friends to keep them going from feeling their growth to wondering how on Earth they were not kids anymore. And as direct hits went, watching their friends become husband and wives went just several clicks below watching them become mothers and fathers. For Maya and Riley both, to look at their dear Farkle friend on that screen, calmly wrangling his barely awake two-year-old daughter as she moved to sit next to him, all the while keeping his newborn child cradled in one arm… It all felt like someone was playing tricks on their eyes. Surely, they were all still ten years old and running around New York together. How could he already be a father of two?

"The baby!" Ada kept stating, as she'd stretch to look or point at the sleeping babe in her father's arm. They'd seen so many videos lately, where she would do the same thing, only pointing to her mother's belly. She had been made to understand that her little sibling was in there, and eventually would be out in the world where she could see it, and by the looks of it she had handled the transition very well.

"She makes a valid point," Rosa declared, caught up in trying to get a better look at the small bundle just as the others on the Austin lake shore were. Eventually, Farkle's father had come into frame and scooped up his small granddaughter, much to her displeasure. Farkle could be seen looking after her as the retreating cries suggested she had been taken out of the room, the better to let her father talk with his friends.

"Sorry about that," Farkle finally turned to look at the screen. They had _all_ been up all night, but where the rest of them had been playing music, or basketball, or sitting around on the couch with a movie, he had been standing by his wife as she gave birth, and his exhaustion easily toppled theirs. Still, it could not vanquish his happiness in that moment. He looked to the baby in his arms, and his smile was endless. "She just woke up, and…"

"No, hey, don't worry about it," Lucas insisted. "How did it go?"

"It was slow going in the beginning, we thought we were going to be at this for hours still," Farkle breathed, recalling. "But then it all started picking up, and next thing we knew, here he was," he looked back to the screen, just barely, his gaze held entirely by his newborn son.

Even as the group on the other side of the call was sent buzzing for that small tidbit of information, Farkle moved up closer to what they guessed had to be his laptop, turning so that they might see the baby better. It didn't matter in that moment who had won or lost the pool. All that mattered was that sleeping little guy. Not one of them remembered or cared how tired they were anymore, though it could easily account for the amount of happy tears on several of their faces.

"Tell me he's not called Cupid or Valentine or anything," Maya chuckled, brushing at her eyes to nudge away some tears getting in the way.

"Isadora made me promise I wouldn't let her do that if the drugs got to her," Farkle promised.

"Does that mean he _does_ have a name?" Riley asked.

"He does," Farkle smiled. "He is going to be Albert Isaac Minkus," he introduced the boy to his many aunts and uncles far away, who all appreciated how Farkle and Isadora had followed up their choice of scientist namesakes for their son as they had done for their daughter. "We've been calling him Bertie," Farkle added, gaining more noises out of the viewing side. "Isadora wasn't sure about it at first, but she came around to it pretty quick. She might change her mind later on, but he's very much Bertie to me."

"Bertie Minkus, I love it already," Maya beamed. "We're going to come out to New York to see this kid as soon as we can," she promised.

"I can't wait," Farkle nodded to her. "I can't believe you guys are still up, what time is it out there?"

"Coming on six," Nadine replied, the first to get a look at her watch.

"There's really not much I can say, but I really appreciate that you all waited up for us," Farkle breathed out, the emotions of the night deeply set in him.

"We would have been out there at the hospital with you two if we could," Lucas reminded him.

"Thank you," Farkle nodded. "All of you, thank you very much."

"You let Isadora know we'll call her tonight, okay?" Maya told him. "How's she doing?"

"Sleeping now. She made me swear not to go too far with him, so we're just out here," he looked to the side, which they imagined was where the new mother was, sleeping in her bed. "She was more worried this time around, not that she needed to be, everything was textbook the whole way, the pregnancy, the birth, and now he's here and he's perfect."

There was little more for them to go on after this, so they'd said their goodbyes, right after getting a look at baby Bertie waking up and giving them a taste of his lungs' capacity, which woke his mother and sent his father to quickly finish his own goodbye and thanks before ending the call.

"Wow, it's morning…" Zay yawned as the group started back for the house. He wasn't the only one suddenly fighting sleep again. Much as some of them had gotten a bit of a nap in earlier, every single one of those ten who'd waited out the birth of Bertie Minkus was left feeling as though the exhaustion had now truly and properly set in, as they no longer had to wait. Now, they were facing what was bound to be a very groggy Valentine's Day.

Their plans as to the rewards and 'punishments' of the baby pool may have fallen through, but it was more than worth it in the end, as they walked back through the kitchen door to find Sam waiting with breakfast. He was the only one of them to have gotten a relatively full night's sleep, as he had a test in one of his classes today and both Maya and Lucas had insisted on his going to bed. When he had gotten up and found the house empty, he had managed to piece together where they might have gone, even as he took it upon himself to fire up the waffle maker.

The meal was a mix of silences – as they all worked to get through their food quickly enough before they had to go – and bursts of conversation, as they shared their brief 'meeting' with the newest member of the Minkus family. Food soon gave way to a very quick refreshing, with clothes borrowed here and there. Finally, Sam had borrowed the minivan and played chauffeur to half the group, while Ramona had come along to do the same with the other half, the better to prevent any of them from getting behind the wheel when they all looked one good blink away from dozing off.

"I know it's not like a reward system or anything, but sometimes I really feel like I need to buy him something…" Maya hummed, as she and Lucas rode in the back of Ramona's car, on their way to the high school. She had her head on husband's shoulder, which very much felt as though she was playing with fire if her intention was to stay awake. Possibly to counteract this, Lucas kept prodding her palm with his finger.

"Who, Sam?" he asked, and she nodded. "What'd you have in mind?"

"I don't know, just something that says… You're a really good little brother and an even better human being… Not sure what the price range is on that, what do you think?"

He smiled, looking over at her. He always sort of admired how she'd grown to reach this point in her life where she'd gone from having barely enough growing up, to leading a comfortable life, to now having more than enough for herself, for their family, and being both financially responsible and eager to treat others, be they family, friend, or stranger when she knew she had the ability to do it. And right here, where Sam was concerned, where he would never demand or require any physical token of their gratitude, she really only wanted to treat him anyway, like something less invasive than a three-hour-long hug and more permanent.

"Well… he may have mentioned something to me the other day…" Lucas revealed, right before lifting his hand to his mouth as he stifled a yawn.

"He did?" Maya sat up, curious now. "What did he say?"

"Just that he had been thinking about tattoos for a while, and since he's turning eighteen this year, he would like to finally get one, but he doesn't think it would make sense for him to spend his money on it, when he is starting to think about his last year of school coming up, and what he'll do after that…" Lucas relayed, trusting that this information had not reached him in confidence and was thus free to be shared.

"That… that is a good place to start," Maya slowly nodded, smiling with intrigue.

Arriving at the school, Maya thanked Ramona, wished the others a good day, wished the same to Lucas with a bonus kiss, and walked off toward the building. This was going to be a good day. Actually, it would continue to be a good day, because really how could they top the introduction of that sweet boy back in New York? Alright, fine, they were all going to be exhausted the whole time, but at the very least that would make everything fifty percent funnier, wouldn't it?

The chime of her phone a few seconds later brought the treat of a photo able to lift any tired eye open. It showed Farkle, holding Ada in his lap, even as he helped her hold on to her baby brother. She looked positively thrilled, while young Bertie was staring back up at her with what curiosity he could muster, having been alive for all of three hours, tops.

"Don't start crying now, what are you doing?" Maya muttered to herself, taking a deep breath – and one more smiling look at the picture – before sliding her phone back in her pocket.

Thankfully, she found something to hold her focus elsewhere, as she came up to find a curious mix waiting on the old bench. There were freshmen Stella and Phoebe – as was generally to be expected – sitting next to senior Milena.

"Hey, good morning, all of you," Maya approached them, just barely getting the words out before her hand shot up to cover a yawn.

"Are you okay, Mrs. Friar?" Stella asked.

"Oh, yeah, no, it's fine, didn't sleep last night," Maya explained. The way they were all sitting together, it didn't feel like coincidence. There was no one else around, all the other benches were free, which begged the question. Rather than ask it, she mostly pointed from Milena to the freshmen and back.

"She lives up the street from me," Phoebe happily filled in the blanks. "Sometimes we're on the same bus."

"I've never seen you here this early before," Maya turned to Milena.

"Didn't sleep much either," Milena shrugged. "Figured I'd just come in early." To Maya, that sounded a lot more like 'I need to talk, and I don't want the rest of the class to be around.'

"That's good, you can help me set up the class, make sure I don't just keel over… or eat all the chocolate before the day even starts," she held up her bag. Milena got up at once and after waving to the others, she and her teacher headed into the school. "Friends of mine had a baby this morning, back in New York," Maya told the girl, as a way of breaking the silence hanging in between. "The rest of us out here, we stayed up at my house, waited for news. Had the rest of the band, Riley Matthews, and…"

"August told you what happened, sophomore year?" Milena cut in, just as they were walking into the art room. Maya looked at her a moment, seeing the nervous look in her eyes, before shutting the door again, so it was just them.

"He did," Maya confirmed, watching her carefully now, not so much that she'd get the wrong impression, but still… "He told me about those guys, what they wanted from him, what they did to him and how you stopped it." Milena looked down a moment, looking up again with a sigh.

"One of them, Finn, we were dating at the time," she revealed. "I thought he was a good guy, I mean… he was a junior, and sure I was a sophomore, but if I hadn't skipped a grade I would have been a freshman… Back then I thought I was so lucky that this older guy liked me, now I can't believe how dumb I was… A-anyway, that's not important," she shook her head.

"Not so sure about that," Maya gave her a sympathetic look. There were plenty more questions popping up in her head now, but it didn't feel like the time to ask them. She needed to let Milena say what she wanted to say.

"I knew what they wanted August to do. I told Finn it wasn't right, told him he shouldn't get August in trouble like that, that I'd help him and Jay study if I had to… That really made him angry."

"Milena, did he…" Maya stepped up.

"No… No, never," she shook her head. "Pretty sure he was just scared Tony would come at him if he did," she added, rolling her eyes. "But he told me what he'd do to August if he didn't come through. And I was just… I should have just told someone, should have just _told_ Tony, but I didn't want August to get caught in the middle, so I… I-I helped him… He told you how he took the answers for them, but it was the both of us, Mrs. Friar. I helped him do it, and now he's trying to cover for me, to protect me. And it's eating me up inside, because he's taking all the punishment when it should be me, too… Maybe _just_ me… If I'd been smarter about it, if I'd told instead of letting it happen… I didn't want him to get hurt, but he did, didn't he? It's my fault…"

"Hey, no, hey, come here," Maya pulled the crying girl into a hug, closing her eyes. Here she thought she'd had any idea what today would be. Suddenly, she could hardly feel the exhaustion anymore, and Bertie Minkus was so far away. Life went on, right here in front of her.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	240. Their Question For Spring

August 27th 2020

_Chapter 240  
Their Question for Spring_

When Lucas had come home from a very challenging day at university – for someone who had not slept a wink at least – on Valentine's Day, he had gotten immediately on task. The first thing had been to send Sam packing without telegraphing too loudly his intent on romancing his big sister, even if it would have gone without saying. He would be spending the night at one of his friends from school's apartment. Once this was handled, he'd gone around, in a speed round of cleaning up anything potentially out of place, before dashing up to shower, shave, dress up, and then return down to get started on dinner. It was to his benefit and Maya's that – because of their sleepless night – she had rescheduled her meeting with Lily until after the end of the school day instead of over lunch. This gave him more time to prepare.

He was just checking on the dish in the oven when the barking of the dogs had just barely preceded the sound of the door in announcing Maya's arrival. Eager to make his plans known, he had walked gone out to find her, only to find she was not there at all… Had he imagined it? He hadn't slept in over a day at this point, it wouldn't have been surprising. But, no, there was her bag, and… He heard the distinctive sound of the basketball hitting the back board outside.

Walking out of the house, there he'd found her, dribbling in what could only be said to be a decisive manner. Not just decisive… Pissed off. It showed in the way she threw the ball, too, how it missed the mark, which only annoyed her more. Lucas was left unsure of what to do, of whether he should step in or let her flush whatever this was out of her system. But then Maya's latest toss had rebounded in his direction, just nearly reaching his head until he managed to catch the ball and stop its journey. He looked back up and found his wife now staring back at him, breathing, blinking.

"So who's this supposed to be?" Lucas asked, holding up the ball before tossing it back to her as he moved to join her. She caught it, tossing and catching it a couple times before just holding it in her arms and looking at him again.

"A couple of guys I thankfully never had to teach, because I don't think I could have impartially looked at them for a second if I had them in my class or the school at all," Maya replied. She didn't have to tell him who she meant now; he knew very well. He'd thought maybe they had pushed those boys who'd tormented August out of their lives for good, but now…

"What happened?" As she searched her words, it seemed like she finally _saw_ him more than looked at him, and she caught on to how he had dressed up, thereby reminding her of what day it was.

"I don't have to go into it now," she shook her head, tossing the ball back on the ground. "I'll go change, we can…"

"It's fine, hey, really," he stopped her after she'd taken all of one step toward the house. "I like teacher chic Maya, let's keep her around, please?" he smiled, more so when his words managed to tug a small one out of her, too. "You hungry?"

"I can eat," she confirmed.

"Made your favorite," he revealed, walking her back to the house now.

"Of course, you did," she breathed, catching his hand in hers as they went.

Sitting at the kitchen table shortly after, Maya relayed her conversation with Milena Janacek that morning. Lucas looked near as devastated as she had done. As bad as it had been, trying to find a way to acknowledge what August had done, despite his reasons, when they were so far after the fact and he didn't deserve to suffer much more than he'd already done, they had dealt with it. He was still suffering the consequences, but those were dictated by his parents, and he humbly assumed them all. It was all supposed to be – for all intents and purposes – done and over with.

But now… Milena…

She could have carried on without saying a word, graduated in a few months and moved on with her life. It was certainly what August had wanted, in keeping her part in all this a relative secret. She could have… but she couldn't. It just wasn't in her to let August take all the responsibility. They had both been protecting the other's secret all this time, and now… Now he wanted to take it all for himself, to protect her doubly so. And she couldn't let him.

So what were they supposed to do? Like with August, Maya saw no point in tanking the end of Milena's high school days when the true guilty parties had gotten away with what they had done. This then left the punishments to be given sort of… privately. Maya had known the Matthews family enough to have a general idea of how they would respond, and she hadn't been wrong. When it came to Mr. Janacek however, she really couldn't say how he would take the news of his daughter's misdeeds. What she then feared the most was whether he would receive the information and go to the principal, tearing down all their neatly made plans to acknowledge and move on. Milena needed to feel her actions had been met with consequences, and now it would come down to her art teacher.

X

_Three weeks later_

"Never thought I would be a gardener…" Maya declared as she and Lucas stood back to look upon their pumpkin patch.

Alright, it wasn't so much a pumpkin patch yet, more of a patch… of earth, where they had planted the seeds of what would in time hold – if they tended everything as they should – pumpkins. Come fall, come Halloween… Well, they would see.

"The city mouse joke feels too easy here," Lucas declared, turning to his wife.

"Oh, it does, doesn't it?" Maya turned to meet his gaze. "Here I thought I'd put in enough hours to be upgraded to full on country mouse."

"I'm going to need to have a look at that paperwork, ma'am," he tipped his 'hat' to her.

"You are lucky I don't tax you for that ma'am bit," she squinted at him even as she stretched up to kiss him. He laughed against her lips, holding her close until she teetered on her toes and would have tripped up if not for his hold.

"Mrs. Friar?"

Maya turned to find Milena stood just outside the kitchen door, pencil still in hand.

"I finished the questions," Milena pointed back with the pencil.

"Be right there," Maya nodded at her, and the girl went back inside, shutting the door. "Right, time to switch hats again," she sighed, turning back to her husband. "Maybe I should have given her more to do?"

"I think she's just very prepared," Lucas shrugged. "Go on, I'll finish up here."

The solution Maya and her student had come to in the end had _not_ been reached on Valentine's Day. By the time evening had rolled around, having been awake now for nearly two days, sleep was the only thing that could happen, and so she'd left it to the next morning. Even then, it hadn't been an immediate solution. All she could really do was take away from Milena's free time, what she had of it. She couldn't put her in detention, not without reason, and even if she could, what would it have done? Milena had already done plenty of thinking, already regretted her actions… so much…

So, she gave her assignments, made her research extensively and then presented her with essay questions. If she was going to take free time from Milena, then she'd rather have her use that time to learn something. Once a week, she would come over, and she would sit there at the kitchen table. Maya would give her the questions, and Milena would get writing. When she was done, Maya would read through her work, and then they would talk it over together. In the end, Milena would receive her new research topic, setting her up for the next week. They would continue this way for the remainder of the school year.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather make me… I don't know, do chores or something?" Milena asked today, when Maya came back in from the 'starter patch.' Off her teacher's curious look, Milena sat up straighter. "It's just that… Yes, it's a lot of work, but I don't mind it. I actually kind of love this. Shouldn't I be… I don't know…"

"Miserable, hating every minute, wishing you could be somewhere else?" Maya offered. Milena nodded. "If I hadn't given you this assignment, what would you be doing right now?"

"I don't know… Playing with my cat?" she shrugged. "Doing laps at the pool? I usually take it easy on weekends."

"Right, so there's… not really a point to me finishing what I was about to say," Maya told herself. "Look, I _could_ make you do manual work, sure, but it really wouldn't feel right, especially with how no one else even knows about this… arrangement of ours. "Instead you're here, and I'm 'keeping you out of trouble,'" she air-quoted, "Away from the bad influence of… Muffin," she squinted, which made Milena snicker, thinking of her cat, a wimp if there ever was one. "I could make you research… toilets… but then I'd have to read about them, and I really don't want to, okay?"

"Okay," Milena finally relented.

"Good," Maya smiled, pulling the papers to herself so she could start reading. "Cookie?" she offered, nodding to the counter. "Courtesy of my mother-in-law."

"Punishment," Milena insisted, shaking her head.

"Right, sorry, of course," Maya shook her head, trying not to laugh.

When they were done, Milena headed off with her new topic. As she watched her disappear up the lane, Maya turned to find Lucas coming around the house.

"She's probably off to the library right now," she told him, pointing vaguely to the road. "Do _you_ think I should be harsher with this punishment thing?"

"Not at all," he shook his head.

"Oh, look who I'm asking," she had to smile.

"Did you see what Isadora sent?" Lucas asked, nodding at her. Maya reached into her pocket, pulling out her phone.

"No? What is it?"

Tapping the notification, she was soon treated with a short video, where Ada Minkus – to the best of her two-year-old ability – sang to her baby brother as he was held by their mother. Bertie, at three weeks, already felt just a bit more like his own person, beyond the newborn, the baby of the family. His features had settled in a direction that felt wholly as though he would grow to be very much like his father. For now, that little face was finding its attention divided between his mother, gently rocking him about, and his big sister, following his movements in how she swayed about on her feet, singing along.

"Oh, wow…" Maya laughed. Every last video, every last photo she had received in the last three weeks felt like another nudge for them to book that trip to go and see their friends and their growing family out in New York. How she would juggle this along with her weekly appointments with Milena, she could not say, but she'd just have to find a way, wouldn't she? "Hey, Dylan just wrote," Maya turned to Lucas after her phone chimed.

"Yeah?" Lucas climbed up the steps.

"He wants to know if he can come over right now," Maya told him as she read, turning a shrug to her husband. He shrugged back.

"Sure, yeah."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	241. Their Question For Hope

August 28th 2020

_Chapter 241_  
_Their Question For Hope_

"What part are you at?" Lucas asked, only to be shushed and waved off by Maya as she sat on the couch with his laptop before her.

While they waited for Dylan to arrive, she was looking over a paper he'd just finished the night before. He had come to see her as his good luck charm, like he didn't do nearly so well as when she read him and corrected him. The bonus of course was that she loved doing it. Even after all these years, she would sometimes stop and think how little she used to care for anything remotely academic, and how vastly her views had grown and solidified in a different direction.

Forced to silently wait, Lucas paced the floor, with little Crowley in one arm. The dog kept trying to get at the snacks his human kept springing on him from some unseen source. Every once in a while, Lucas would attempt to get a look to see how the reading was going, only to be given the distinct impression that his wife had the ability to psychically tell him to leave her be until she was done.

"Okay, I'm done," she finally declared, all of two seconds before the doorbell rang. "I'll get it!" she set the laptop down and sprang up to her feet.

"Wait, hold on!" Lucas went after her, but it was no use. Whatever she'd thought about his paper would have to wait until after Dylan had gone along home.

"Hey," Maya smiled, hugging their friend as he walked in. "I'm really trying not to read too much into this, but I have a feeling I know why you're here. Am I right? Tell me I'm right?" she asked, bordering on giddiness.

Dylan looked like the human version of a hyperactive puppy most days, and today – especially with the comparative presence of Crowley – it felt as though that statement had never been so true as it was here and now. Right now, Dylan reminded them of those times when they felt they had to keep Crowley – or any of their dogs – on a leash or in their arms, or else they would let their excitement carry them right off into oncoming traffic or something else equally troublesome.

"I need your help to make sure I don't go off the rails with my proposal to Riley," Dylan smiled and nodded. Maya, tipping headlong into happiness, hugged him once again before ushering him into the kitchen so they could get to work.

"Lucas, the laptop!" she called back, and he spun on his heel to go and grab it from the couch before joining them.

"Want me to take notes?" he asked his wife with a teasing smile. Maya could try not to look like she wanted this, but then she had always had just the sense of humor to see this as the means to play boss and assistant, maybe put on some accent… When she had been handed the frenzied pup, she sort of came off as more of a supervillain, but she did her best to get back on track. This was not the time for villainy. Her oldest friend deserved one fantastic wedding proposal, and on her honor Maya Friar would give her one… or she'd help Dylan give her one anyway.

"Right, so what are we looking at?" Maya asked Dylan. "When do you want to do it? Do you have any ideas yet?"

"Well," Dylan sat up, looking just a bit intimidated by 'villain boss Maya' across from him with the dog. "At first I thought about surprising her at her office, but then I'm not sure if that would really be a good idea. She might be with a patient, or about to see one, and then I'd walk in…"

Maya and Lucas both shook their heads at this, confirming they each thought this would be a bad idea, too.

"And in the morning it would be rushed, and in the evening she would be tired…" Dylan rattled off, like he'd never stopped.

"So, weekend?" Maya guessed, turning to Lucas, who made a show of typing 'weekend,' sitting next to her. Her smile was the definition of precious. "How about a location?"

"Uh…" Dylan considered this.

"Somewhere special to the both of you," Maya suggested, the better to get him thinking.

"When we lived in Houston, a lot of times we would go and have lunch near the university," Dylan recalled almost instantly, his eyes slipping as though they had travelled back into the past and miles away. "She loved to watch the fountain. That's where I told her I loved her for the first time, and she said it back. We haven't been there in ages…"

"Fountain," Maya whispered, tapping Lucas' arm, and he was already on it, adding the word to what was shaping up to be some very brief notes. "Hey, come back," she tapped Dylan's foot with hers. He blinked. "So, you take her there, and you do your thing. Easy," Maya smiled, only to pause a second later. "Although you'd have to make sure she doesn't suspect, so you'd need a reason to be in Houston…"

"Third party reason, less suspicion," Lucas provided.

"Yeah, see, you need to ask him," Maya tipped her head to her husband. "He did this before."

"Said the satisfied customer?" Lucas smiled over at her.

"Very, very satisfied," Maya smiled back at him.

"Okay, third party… I can do that…" Dylan nodded, sitting quietly for a moment again. Maya and Lucas watched him, waited. They looked at each other, both of them agreeing: he wasn't getting this.

"Suggestions?" Maya offered.

"Please," Dylan breathed, and she looked back to Lucas.

"Going to visit to see how Chiara and the others are doing seems like the natural first suggestion, but then she'll get suspicious when you don't go that way and head toward the university instead," he started.

"Unless you're 'meeting' them somewhere close," Maya offered.

"You can get one of them to call you and say that they had to go somewhere and you and Riley should meet them there," Lucas nodded.

"Can't you guys just do it and pretend?" Dylan wondered.

"Please, all it would take would be for Riley to see your phone and then the whole plan would fall apart," Maya shook her head.

"Right… right…" Dylan shook his head to himself.

"Maybe we need to think of another way," Maya looked to Lucas, who nodded in agreement. When she closed her eyes, he asked what she was doing. "I need to remember what's near that fountain that we could use to get her there. It's like right there, I know there's…"

"The theater?" Dylan offered, and Maya's eyes opened again, lifted with the spark of an idea and a smile.

"Yes! It's right up the street, oh…" she looked to Lucas, who set his hands over the keyboard at once, ready for some notes. "Okay, tell me what you think."

The plan didn't take long to piece together from there, and once all those pieces had been shaped into a whole, it felt more real than ever. This was happening, in a week's time… Dylan and Riley, barring any unforeseen road blocks, would be engaged. By the time Dylan left the house, it was really uncertain who was more excited for the big moment, the prospective groom or the long locked-in matron of honor. After they'd seen their friend out to his car, Maya had spun back to Lucas, and he had to laugh.

"What?" she asked, flitting up to him.

"Just that earlier I kept thinking about Dylan reminded me of Crowley when we can't put him down, and now you're giving me that same vibe," Lucas explained.

"Meaning you want to carry me around in your arms?" Maya inquired, ever more curious. "I am trying to think of any reason to be against it, but you know what, I just can't get there."

"Didn't think you would either," Lucas laughed. "Then again, knowing you, you'll make me chase and catch you, and last time we did _that_ it really didn't end well." She recalled the incident at the skating rink over the holidays much too well, but she still couldn't help but snicker.

"I'm just… This is so… _Riley_, and…" Maya told him, any plans for pouncing now set aside, even as her hands kept giving the impression that if she kept going around like this she would take off in flight.

"No, hey, I get it. She pretty much had the same reaction when she found out I was proposing to you," Lucas recalled. Off the look on his wife's face, he realized she had never heard this story. So, he told her how, after his secret had found its way out to a few people, either by accident or on purpose, he'd made up his mind to tell a few more, including Riley and Rosa. He laughed, remembering how Rosa had clamped her hand over Riley's mouth to keep her from bursting out in the middle of the university café, how even after Rosa had let her go Riley had ended up making her put her hand again, knowing she might need it. "I felt bad for breaking up her plan for all of us to be neighbors, with the house and all, but I don't think she even cared anymore, not once she found out what I was working on for you."

Maya could picture it all very clearly in her head, and it made her smile to think of her oldest friend being so overwhelmingly happy for her. Right now, she was experiencing the very same thing in reverse, being so very, very, completely happy for Riley and Dylan both. She knew how much Riley had been left to wonder why Dylan had not asked her yet. She just couldn't have known that the plans were already in motion, but now… Now it was all changing, now her moment was fast approaching.

"How would you have done it?" Lucas asked, as the question came to him. Maya looked back at him. "If you had been the one to ask me," he explained. She smiled, the question being one she had asked herself before, in the near three years since that moment, right back there in the living room.

"Oh, well I can't tell you that," she shook her head.

"Why not?" Lucas asked, stepping up like he was about to catch her and convince her otherwise. She stalled him, clasping both of his shoulders as she looked up at him.

"Well, what if one day I decide that you and I are due for a renewal or something. I can't have you know my plans, then it wouldn't be a surprise."

"I…" Lucas didn't know whether to laugh or play hurt, so he just nodded. "Fine, alright, we'll play it your way."

"Just so you know, it's going to be amazing," she grinned, joining her hands behind him, the better to stretch up and kiss him.

"That is so not fair," Lucas smiled, following her kiss with one of his own.

"You'll get through it," Maya promised him. "Now, come on, we need to go and have a talk about that paper of yours."

"Why, what was wrong with it?" he asked, blinking at this unexpected change of subject.

"Potentially not much, potentially a lot, but I'm not in your classes so I can't say for sure. I'm going to need you to explain a few things, maybe slowly, and with a lot of technical words, which you will then have to explain to me," she requested, leading him back to the kitchen and the laptop. Lucas looked at her like he was really that close to picking her up, Crowley style.

"I had a feeling that was where we were headed."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	242. Their Question For Friendship

August 29th 2020

_Chapter 242  
Their Question For Friendship_

"Woah! What happened here?"

Maya looked up from where she'd been meticulously scrubbing at the floor of her classroom since the end of third period and wondered how much time must have passed already if Riley was here for their lunch together.

"A small incident with the tenth graders," she reported, as her friend came along to help her when she started to rise. Her hands were splattered with so much green paint as to make her consider busting out into something out of Wicked. Song or no, she couldn't put either of her hands anywhere just now. "I think we might have to grab something on the way and go eat at my house so I can change for the afternoon," she looked down at her clothes. They had not been spared the wicked witch treatment.

"Yeah, okay," Riley agreed. "I'll drive."

One stop for food later, they were bound for the house on the lane. As Riley drove, Maya told her about how she'd ended up so verdant.

It had started with Daphne Brett and her depiction of the land she could see from out her bedroom window, which had required more paint than she had and a trip to the supplies cabinet for restocking. It had continued with Dakota Day stopping her as she went, asking if she might bring him some paint, too, while she was on her way. Maya had just managed to get a glimpse of that exchange, catching the spark in Dakota's eye, and the blush in Daphne's cheeks, and doing her best to pretend as though she _hadn't_ seen.

Not giving them that same courtesy however was another of the girls in the class named Candace. Maya had not seen the look on _her_ face when Daphne and Dakota had this small moment, but for what happened next, she would guess it had been one of disdain and attitude of the kind the young teacher was getting to be familiar with. So, when Daphne had returned from the cabinet, paints in hand, and soon found herself flopping to the ground, there was little to no need for Maya to accept the claims given. Candace had tripped her, despite her best efforts at pretending like she had no idea what anyone was talking about. She had been sent off to the principal's along with a VIP summons to detention, even as Dakota, Ariel, and their teacher were looking after the fallen Daphne and anyone who had been caught in the crossfire of the green splatter.

"Hey, you okay?" Maya had asked the blonde as she rose to her feet. Daphne nodded, but it was plain to see that she did so out of an inability to open her mouth and speak, too certain that she might start to cry or that her voice would tremble. If it had been Candace's intention to humiliate Daphne in order to get Dakota to turn his attention away from her, it could not have been a bigger backfire. Seeing how affected the Brett girl was, Dakota had been left with an instant desire to look after her, to ensure that she would be okay.

There had been enough of the group in need of going to the bathrooms to wash up – and possibly change into their gym clothes – that the period had been brought to an early end. Those who had not been hit were told to go ahead and pull out any work they might have had for other classes, while Maya escorted the others out. By the time they'd come back, she'd started at her floor scrubbing… and table and stool leg scrubbing… Some of the kids wanted to help, or at least to call in the janitor, but Maya felt she needed to attend to this herself, and so she did. Once the students had left and it was just her, crouching and kneeling on the floor, she had one sole focus and it was to return her classroom to its previously pristine state. She was so attached to this room, her space within the school, and it mattered a great deal to her that she maintained it.

"Here, I'll go and keep the dogs off you while you go change," Riley hurried ahead of her when they reached the house.

"You just want to play with them, don't you?" Maya laughed.

"Didn't hear you!" Riley called back, already accosted by the happy pair of Archer and Crowley.

Making speedy work of her outfit change, Maya returned downstairs to find Riley was in the midst of setting up their lunch at the table. In what was a remarkably swift maneuver, Maya spotted and carried away Lucas' laptop, which had been left there. It wasn't as though she expected Riley to ever even open it, much less find the notes he had taken when Dylan had been over two days past, but she wouldn't take chances. She told her best friend that he had forgotten it today – which was true – and that she would go and put it upstairs to make sure he didn't forget it again the next day.

Maya had been certain that she would be distracted over this lunch with Riley, that she would just look at her and remember how her long awaited proposal was just days away and then her face would go and spoil the surprise for her. And it wasn't as though she didn't feel a bit of that right now, but then maybe it was the disruption of the paint incident that kept her from swaying too far down the road of telling smiles and accidental spoilers.

The part of her that was still knee deep in repressed giddiness though… That one felt a lot like it had the shape of a thirteen-year-old girl, no longer separated from her best friend but rather cheering for her. So much time had passed since then, half her lifetime… She had known and been friends with Riley Matthews for just about twenty years now, give or take a few months, and that was just… It was one of the most important facts of her life, right up there with how long Shawn Hunter had been her father, how long she had loved Lucas Friar…

Riley had preceded them both, preceded them all in the category of people who had come into her life over the years. Without her, Maya couldn't say just who she might have been. There were all these little things in who she was, she knew, that were just sneakily threaded into her very soul, and Riley Matthews had been their source. She couldn't remember anymore how it had been, the one year when they had been separated, one in New York, the other in Texas. She remembered being sad, remembered being… just torn apart for being away from her best friend, but the actual feelings had no more hold on her. They had been taken from her with each year that followed, building upon one another until they were here, today, with their futures ahead of them and one of them unaware of the moment coming, just days from now.

To know that she would get to be there, to witness it, oh… It was a privilege.

"We need to figure out when we can go to New York and see Farkle and Isadora and the kids," Riley stated, pulling Maya out of her momentary distraction. Even as she nodded, agreeing with this statement, Maya couldn't help but need a moment, to reflect on this fact, that their friends now had _kids_, plural. It was like a constant ring of a bell at their ears, whenever they remembered it.

"Well, I've got spring break coming up," Maya offered, picking up a few bits from her plate and leaning to offer one to whichever dog would claim it first. At this point, she was so used to them being underfoot that it was practically reflex. Much as she'd washed them, her hands still had just a bit of green tinge, but it didn't appear to bother Trix, Lou, Archer, or Crowley. "Lucas will be off at the same time, so I think he'd be good to go, but I'll check. That would leave you and Dylan to see if you're free."

"Yeah, I'll ask him," Riley nodded and smiled.

Maya could see that small flicker in her, the one she'd get, once in a while, whenever she'd end up thinking about her and Dylan, about this still pending marriage proposal. It was easily the part of their lunch together where Maya found it the hardest to hold her tongue. _She _knew that it was coming, literally days away, but as far as Riley knew… Her boyfriend of several years had done nothing to change the status of their relationship, even as they now lived together in a house that they owned together. They were the last of their group as yet unmarried. And all of that didn't change the way she felt about him, or the way she trusted he felt about her… But then could she be blamed for being left to wonder? _Hold on, Riley, just a little longer…_

"Maybe we can do some shows out there," Riley suggested, the new thought bringing an equally new smile to her face. "You, me, Isadora… Wonder if any of the others would be up for coming along, too, then we could have more of us."

"You had me at 'shows,'" Maya tipped her head, which made Riley laugh. The next thing they knew, Riley was composing a message into the band thread as Maya looked on, putting out the call to the rest of the girls to see if any of them would be available and up for joining in on this trip before they could then see about booking some performances out in New York.

"You know what this reminds me of?" Riley asked after setting her phone down.

"That time I went up there with the Basket Cases and we did a show at our old school and I met Sam?" Maya asked. "That's kind of what I'm thinking about," she admitted.

"Yeah," Riley smiled. "Are they still around? I mean, is there still a quiz team?"

"I… I don't know, actually," Maya paused, the thought hitting her like 'huh…' "I should look into that," she followed. She could see exactly where this might end up going if she followed down that route, but it was a sort of inevitable truth that it was already too late. Her mind had already taken the leap, and it would land where it needed to land. Whether this meant her getting involved or not, it would remain to be seen.

"It's still kind of weird, isn't it? Being a teacher at our old school?" Riley inquired.

"It is," Maya agreed. "Especially with things like this, I think, when I still kind of have to stop and tell myself 'oh, yeah, I'm on _this_ side now,'" she mimed. "I think a part of me is always going to be on the first side."

"That might not be the worst thing," Riley pointed out. "Everything you did for my brother…" she shook her head, eyes full of recognition. Maya smiled. "You've always been so important to me, but you know it's the rest of them, too. My parents, August… Even Hunter, he just thinks the world of you, do you know that?"

"I think he's one cool little dude, too," Maya beamed, feeling like she couldn't wait to hug that kid. After a beat, she had to sit back in her chair, chuckling. "When did lunch go and get all emotional all of a sudden?"

"I don't know," Riley laughed, picking up on it, too. "Maybe it's the paint," she nodded to Maya's hands. _I think it might be my fault, for thinking about Dylan and his proposal coming up._

"Yeah, that must be it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	243. Their Question For History

August 30th 2020

_Chapter 243  
Their Question For History_

Working evenings after a day in class was never ideal, especially with the commute to and from school, but Lucas wasn't the type to complain. There was something to be said for those variably occupied hours, walking around his section, spotting items which had been left out of place and returning them where they belonged, adjusting displays… If nothing else, it usually afforded him some time to think about some assignment or another if he had one, and he would scribble down the odd notes when he thought of something.

He was doing just that, bent over the desktop, when he caught someone approaching in his periphery. He closed his notepad and stood up straighter at once, expecting to find a customer in search of some book or another. Instead, he found something which made him smirk at once.

"Where are you going dressed like that at… eight-thirty at night?" Lucas inquired, checking the time on the computer screen next to him.

"Well, I'm going to see Mr. and Mrs. Matthews," Dylan nodded, brushing his hands over his suit in the event that there might be wrinkles. He was going to get their blessing.

"Cutting it a bit close, aren't you?" Lucas smirked. It was Thursday now, and the proposal was all of two days away.

"I had to find a time where I would be free, and Riley wouldn't, and her parents would be home," Dylan counted off, the turn in his voice showing that he was very aware of the fact that he was 'cutting it close' and he was getting nervous.

"Okay, alright, I'm sorry," Lucas lifted his hand, so his friend might breathe. "How can I help you?" he asked, slipping on his bookstore voice, as Maya would call it.

"How do I look? Is this okay? Maybe it's too much?" Dylan wondered, looking at himself again. "Do I need to get my hair cut?"

"What you need is to breathe, okay?" Lucas tried not to laugh. "You look great, I promise, you don't need to change a thing."

"Right… okay… good… good," Dylan blinked.

"You came all this way to ask me that or is there more?"

"I don't know, I guess… You were always the one who spoke the best of all of us. I don't want to mess this up, and you know me, I'm clumsy a lot of the time. I never really mind the scrapes and the bruises, and all my scars come with trying something, having fun, more than falling on my face. I don't want to fall this time, I can't. I have to get this right, for Riley.

Lucas looked at his friend, standing there in his suit, clean shaven, hair so in place that it almost made him look like another person… In his eyes, it was clear how much this meant to him, all of it.

"Why do you want to marry her?" he asked, leaning against the counter's edge. Dylan looked hesitant over the question. "Spell it out for me," Lucas insisted with a nod. 'Trust me,' it said. Dylan thought for a moment before opening his mouth to speak, and he just looked someone trying to collect what was in his heart, even as he had find a way to transform it all into words.

"Because… I love her… more than anything, more than… anyone… Because I would always choose her, no matter what, and I did choose her, for the rest of my life… if she'll have me. No one makes me happy like she does, no one… makes me feel strong like she does. If I didn't have her, I wouldn't be who I am, and I think I'm at my best now, but I can go so much further, too… with her."

When he stopped, Dylan looked back to his friend like he'd forgotten where he was or why he was there for a beat. Lucas just smiled.

"And you say you don't have the words." Dylan looked both relieved and terrified still. "Look, I get off work in less than an hour, want me to go with you? Not into the house, but I can wait outside."

"Yeah… Yeah, that might be a good idea. I'm not sure I should drive," Dylan contemplated.

"Alright, just hang around, browse… The café is still open downstairs if you need anything… On second thought, maybe stick to the books," Lucas quickly redirected his suggestions, looking at his friend in his suit. Knowing him, he just might spill something on himself.

"Yeah, okay, I'll do that… Thanks, man."

"Anytime."

Lucas watched Dylan wander off, looking at this book here, that book there… Once he was off, Lucas pulled out his phone, minding also the potential for customers, or co-workers.

_Lucas: Meet me outside the Matthews' house in an hour?_

_Maya: Okay, but why?_

_Lucas: Dylan showed up at the store. He's going to ask Riley's parents for their blessing. I'm driving him._

_Maya: Oh, sweet baby Dyl… How's he doing?_

_Lucas: He's wearing a suit._

_Maya: SHOW ME._

_Lucas: He's too far away, I'll try later._

_Maya: You better. See you in an hour._

_Maya: 366!_

Lucas had barely put away his phone that he spotted a customer with some distinct 'I need help' eyes, so he went and attended him. Once he was done, finding himself once again on roving mode, he scanned the floor in search of Dylan. He finally spotted him over in the biography section. He'd been reading a lot of these lately, mostly athletes' and other sports personalities'. Right now, he had two of them under his arm even as he leafed through a third.

"The store closes in fifteen minutes, you should get down to cash in ten minutes tops, then come back up and stick with me until I can go, alright?" Lucas went and told him.

"Got it, yeah," Dylan nodded, almost dropping the books under his arm before Lucas managed to catch them. "Thanks. Maybe I should go now, before I pick up three more," he decided, adding the third book to his stack. "I think I might be a nervous buyer."

"Straight to cash, no stops, alright?" Lucas agreed, leading him toward the stairs.

"What's up with him?" Maeve asked Lucas when he returned to the information desk.

"Big night," was all he could really say. The last thing he needed was for the secret to accidentally make its way out, link to link and all the way to Riley. "I'm driving him once I'm out of here tonight."

"Oh, you can clock out now and go with him right now if you need to," Maeve offered at once. Lucas hesitated. "I mean it, go," she chuckled.

"Thanks," Lucas breathed. Under the circumstances, he could accept her offer gladly.

As he went off to clock out and grab his things, Lucas about his friend down there, fretting over what could be nothing but a courtesy. Mr. and Mrs. Matthews were not about to greet his proposal with a no. If they could count on one thing, it was the fact that Dylan Orlando loved their daughter more than life itself, that he would treat her right and be a loving husband for all the days of their lives.

The way he saw it, no one who had known Dylan for any amount of time would be in any way capable of seeing him as anything other than the kind soul he had always been. The Matthews family had known him for near on twelve years, and Lucas… Lucas had known him longer still, almost two decades. He still remembered his father bringing him and Zay out to little league practice that first time. The very first thing he had noticed was a boy with messy chin-length hair, all of seven years old and attempting to balance a baseball bat on his forehead. It kept falling, and he kept picking it up and trying again. The last attempt had been a near success and thus a harder failure, as the bat had tipped and swiped at his ear as it fell. He'd howled, slapping his hand over his ear, while another boy – later to be known as Asher – had come running to get a look.

The first time he'd actually gotten to speak to him, minutes later, he didn't hear any complaints about the incident, oh no. Instead, all he'd gotten was a gap-toothed grin and a proclamation that he would 'totally get it next time.' And that was Dylan, to this day. As to the bat trick, it had taken him a few more weeks – and a few more awkward injuries, but he had gotten that balancing trick down. He could still do it, as he'd show them upon any and all requests. By now, he could even juggle a few balls at the same time. Asher would tease that, if all else failed, he could take that act into the circus. Dylan wasn't opposed to it at all.

The one thing he could ever know to have rattled Dylan, in the whole time they had known one another, was his mother's departure. With good reason, it had affected the then nine-year-old, to have to comprehend why she would just up and leave him, his brother, and their father. Lucas could never forget that day when he'd shown up to school, hand-in-hand with his twelve-year-old brother. When Kyle Orlando had let him go, Dylan had looked near to panic for a few seconds, wouldn't let his older brother go until he promised, triple promised, that he would be back for him at the end of the day. For days, weeks, months, he'd been caught in this state of just needing to know that he wouldn't be abandoned again.

In all that time, Lucas, Zay, Asher, the three of them would do all they could to prove to their friend that no matter what happened he would not lose any of them. They did this with activity and adventure, and so many more occasions to get into some scrapes and _get_ some scrapes, and little by little the old Dylan had returned to them, even as he carried that layer of fear in him. It never felt as though it could ever possibly be a part of him, and yet he had been made to carry it around, the day Jocelyn Orlando had walked out the door, never to return. Oh, they got cards in the mail, every birthday, every Christmas. Dylan didn't know whether his brother ever opened his. He had only ever opened one, the first. After that, he was too scared of what he'd find. He had them all in a box, Lucas knew. He couldn't bear to throw them away. She'd known when he'd moved to Houston, and back to Austin, and now to his and Riley's house. How she knew, he couldn't say. Someone could still have been in contact with her, but whoever it was, they never said, and he never asked.

It was easy to understand how much his family, the one he had and the one he intended to make, mattered to him. It was something he and Maya shared, by their unfortunate common link. For both of them, the abandonment of one parent had forced them to learn early on the fragility of that family unit, but most of all it had made them see its importance, made them eternally determined to get it right when their turn would come along to start their own. By that concept alone, the person they chose to spend their lives with became cherished unlike any other.

By the time Lucas got down to the first floor and found Dylan, his friend had just finished paying and had his books in a bag. Lucas just had the time to pull out his phone and turn on the camera, aiming and snapping the shot just as Dylan turned around. Off his confused look, Lucas smirked.

"Wife's request. Okay, let's go."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	244. Their Question For Blessings

August 31st 2020

_Chapter 244  
Their Question for Blessings_

Maya's arrival was signalled with the flood her minivan's lights sweeping into Dylan's car, where Lucas waited. After she flashed the headlights, he got the message and climbed out of one vehicle's driver's seat to go and settle in the other's passenger seat.

"Hey, you're right on time," he leaned in, smiling as they kissed in greeting.

"What did I miss? Tell me everything," she insisted as soon as they pulled back and settled into their seats again.

"Well," Lucas cleared his throat, looking over to the Matthews house. "He spent the whole ride here checking his hair in the mirror, popping mints… It's like he got it in his head that they were going to tell him no. He's probably not even worried about the proposal, but that part, that's what freaks him out. You'd think he was a kid all over again, instead of an adult, which is what he is, talking to two other adults, doing nothing but showing politeness and respect."

"Have I mentioned how much I love that goober?" Maya hummed, tipping her head against the head rest. "He will make a fine brother-in-law," she declared. "Then what happened? Did he make it to the door on his own or did you have to walk him up, ring the bell, and dive behind the hedges?"

"Uh," Lucas looked down at his clothes, touched the knees of his pants. "No grass stains, no diving," he reported. "I _did_ have to tell him to get out of the car after a while, before any of the neighbors saw us and called the cops and told them we were spying or something." Maya snickered. "He finally got out and went up there."

"So what do you think they think _we're_ doing out here right now?" she asked, her eyebrow arching.

"Focus," he pointed at her. That eye on her, it had been the start of more than one… Alright, maybe he needed to start focusing, too.

"Right, sorry, sorry, back to Dylan. Did he make it up there fine?"

"Well, number of times he tried to fix his hair, I'm afraid he'll start going bald before thirty, but yeah, he made it. He's been in there… twenty-odd minutes? I have no idea what's going on, but I'm not seeing any signs of trouble, so I figure he said his part…"

"How long before he actually started?" Maya wondered, barely cutting in.

"And now they're talking. I'm not completely sure we still need to be here, not sure he remembers _I'm_ here, waiting. Maybe I can leave his car keys in the mailbox or something, then we can go h…"

"Wait, he's coming now," Maya tapped Lucas' arm. He looked up, seeing a decidedly more relaxed Dylan come walking up from the Matthews home. "Does he look like he needs a drink? Maybe we should get him one anyway, it was a big step."

"Save the drinks for after the proposal, yeah?" Lucas suggested as he rolled down the window to call out to Dylan when he seemed to be looking for him back in his own car. "Hey, back here." Dylan turned, saw them, and jogged over to the open window.

"Hey, man, looking sharp," Maya grinned, leaning over to wave at him.

"How did it go?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, yeah, it was great, everything…" Dylan nodded along. The jitters were gone, he was himself again, possibly his peak Dylan self. He had done what he had come here to do, and he had gotten the words he had hoped to get. Now the next step was about standing before the woman he loved and asking her his big question.

"See? You're all good to go," Lucas nodded, and Dylan nodded back, with a smile like the sun resided in him. "You okay to drive home?"

"Yeah, definitely," Dylan promised.

"Alright then, we'll see you on Saturday," Lucas told him.

"Thank you so much for this. I don't know that I would have made it otherwise," Dylan shook his head as he was handed his car keys.

"Text us when you get home, please?" Maya asked him. He promised he would, wishing them a good night and walking to his car. They let him pull away from the curb and on to the road before doing the same, the two vehicles tagging one another until Dylan had to turn one way while they kept going, their paths diverging toward their respective homes.

"You so wanted to be in there, didn't you?" Lucas asked his wife as she drove them along. "You wanted to hear what they all said to each other."

"I mean… He could just have easily asked _me_ for that blessing," Maya grinned.

"Why, because he wouldn't have met her if it wasn't for you?" Lucas wondered.

"No, no, although… that is also true," she conceded. If she had never moved to Texas, neither would have the Matthews family. If they hadn't moved to Austin, Riley and Dylan would never have met, fallen in love, sought to spend the rest of their lives together… "But Riley, she's just…"

"Your sister in everything but blood or parentage?" Lucas provided.

"Very much," Maya smiled.

"He did ask you," Lucas pointed out. "When he came to us, last weekend, it's not me he needed to see, not my help he wanted, to make sure that _she_ would get the absolute best wedding proposal she deserves. He needed you… the sister," he 'bowed.' Maya tried to keep her smile reined in, but oh how was she supposed to do that when he had gone and made her feel so happy, knowing he'd hit the nail on the head about Dylan and this 'sisterly blessing.'

"So… Can we have those drinks anyway?"

It was a breezy night, and sitting out on the porch, just the two of them and a couple of drinks was absolutely the best way they could have ended this evening together.

"So if I remember this correctly, you never actually asked _my_ parents about us, did you?" Maya inquired, that small grin on her face being almost too much. He could just hear her chiding him in her best drawl about propriety and all manners of… well, manners.

"In my defense, someone else got there before me, and those were _my_ parents, when they all went and made the attic for us while I was recovering from that whole mess with my foot." Maya made a small noise at this, like she would have rather not recall this time ever again. "So, I just sort of… had to infer that they we were all on the same page about this."

"We can go with that, sure," Maya fixed him with a look, shifting position a moment later as she turned about to face him and gave the immediate impression that she was no longer herself. She didn't even have to say anything, he could see it in her eyes. She wanted to know what he would have said, and so she presented herself as a collective entity representing her parents.

"Oh, we're doing this, huh?" he asked, chuckling. She nodded. "Alright, I have a feeling I won't get out of this even if I try," he set his bottle down and sat up.

"Such a charmer, such words," she shook her head, resuming her previous impersonation, the better to give him the floor.

"Well… Parents…" he gestured toward her in a general fashion. She nodded. "The reason I am here tonight is Maya. Now, I have known your daughter since I was fourteen years old, and I have loved her… easily just as long, whether I knew it or not. The two of us have been through a lot together over the years, and one thing I know is that I couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life with anyone else. I plan to ask her to marry me, and I would be honored to have your blessing beforehand."

It had been easy to find the words and say them, when she was just sitting there with him, slowly but surely forgetting her 'parental stance' and just smiling back at him. He had come so close to forgetting himself and just speaking on and on. Much as she and others would tease him for always 'having the words,' the way he saw it this talent of his was in great part bound to her. She just inspired it right out of him, his heart connecting with hers.

"Alright, alright, that was pretty good," she replied, and it amused him to see how she struggled to come off as joking as she tried to, so caught up as she was in this moment between them. "I can't stand waiting for Saturday, can't we just do it now?" she 'whined,' moving to rest up against her husband's shoulder even as he lifted his arm to welcome her near.

"Sure, yeah, we'll all pack in the car and head out to Houston, middle of the night, less people around," Lucas humored her, hearing her snicker into his chest.

"We could get some lights up, it'd be romantic," she suggested.

"It would be that, yes," he agreed. "What about school tomorrow? You've got your kids, you've got a lunch date with your loving husband…"

"Oh, him, love that guy," she chimed in as he carefully stretched to reclaim his bottle without disrupting her too much.

"You've made it this far. It'll be Saturday before you know it," Lucas promised, kissing the top of her head.

For a few minutes they just sat there, quietly enjoying the night and the other's presence as it warmed them. Then, just as he thought she was moving to sit up for a second, he heard her clear her throat instead.

"Hello, Parents," Maya spoke.

"What are you doing?" he asked, curious, only to be signalled not to cut her off. "Sorry," he whispered. Soon enough, he understood exactly what she was doing.

"Now, I realize it's not exactly 'the normal way' for me to do this, but I personally don't see why I shouldn't, so here goes." Lucas resisted the urge to commend her on a 'good start.' As much as it could be seen as them just joking around, he didn't doubt for a second that she would find and say these words with the utmost honesty and emotion, so it would not in him to belittle them in any way. "The moment I met your son, my life changed. And sure, people change people, no matter who they are, but it was different with him. He changed my life in ways no one else did or could, and I have known, for a long time now, that if there was one thing that was sure in my life, it was him and how we had this future ahead of us. I'm here today to tell you that I wish to marry your son, and I would be honored to have your blessing to do so."

"And if you listen closely, you can hear… yep, there's my mother crying her eyes out," Lucas whispered at Maya's ear, making her laugh. "Are you going to ask them, whenever you unleash this secret renewal proposal on me?" he wondered.

"You know, I just might have to," Maya slowly nodded. "Would be kind of awkward if they said no though…" she added after a beat.

"What do you think the odds would be?" Lucas pondered.

"Well, considering that this would be years from now, and we'd have kids by then, probably not that high," she had to shake her head. "What's the benchmark for a renewal?"

"I don't know, don't think there's really one, although I have a feeling my father is starting to get some ideas lately, after everything with the fire… He might go ahead and ask my mom again." Lucas could just about feel the intrigue coming from Maya. "One proposal at a time, alright?"

"Right, no, of course. Saturday… Nearly there…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	245. Their Question For Timing

September 1st 2020

_Chapter 245  
Their Question For Timing_

"Hey, you're right on time, get over here," Maya practically pulled Lucas into the classroom. She'd been standing astride her door's threshold, waiting for him to come along even as she looked inside the room.

"On time for what?" Lucas asked, looking into the room to find Phoebe Munroe and Stella Buckley in a small huddle in the middle of the cleared floor.

"The big show," Maya whispered with a grin. Taking him to her desk, she incited him to take a seat, where she explained how Phoebe had come along that morning with a surprise. She had been working on a routine of her very own, all week long, and she intended to demonstrate it to her art teacher/sometime-dance teacher. When Maya had asked if she minded Lucas being there, too, Phoebe had quickly promised that she did not mind at all. If anything, an additional audience member might be just what she needed. Unlike her best friend, she was not shy in the slightest.

Lunch would have to wait until after the big performance, but then once it started, no one could much remember or care whether they were hungry or not. They had been at these lessons for two months already, and Phoebe may not have been ready for any kind of competition, but she had earned the title of being a dancer, and a solid one at that. Was her clumsiness completely gone? No, but then who could say they didn't trip or hurt themselves every once in a while? The biggest sign of her progress on that front came as, on Monday morning, Phoebe proudly revealed that she had left her first aid kit at home.

"Are you going to be okay with that?" Maya had asked, smiling with some teacher pride of her own.

"Oh, yeah," Phoebe had nodded. "I still kept a couple band-aids in my bag, just in case. And if anything goes really wrong, Letitia can patch me up."

"Still just a bit weird that you and the school nurse are on a first name basis," Maya had given her a nod, doing her best to rein in her laughter.

After Phoebe's surprise performance – which had been met with thunderous applause from her audience of three – she and Stella had retreated to their lunch at their usual station, while Mrs. Friar turned her attention to her visiting husband and _their_ lunch at her desk.

"I know you'll tell me that all the credit is hers, but you know you have done so much good work with that girl since the two of you started these lessons, yeah?" Lucas declared with a smile.

"It's been… so much fun," Maya allowed herself this shared smile. "I'm not sure how much longer she's going to need it, and I might be just a bit sad when it's over," she admitted. "I haven't even told her the best part yet," she whispered. "Coach Whitman asked me how she was doing the other day, and when I told her how she'd improved, she said that she would see about getting her on to actually play in an upcoming game." Phoebe had been taken on as an alternate, on that condition that Maya would help her, but up to now she had never been called on to the court.

"That's great," Lucas reacted at once, and Maya quickly shushed him before the girls could turn their focus over to them. "Let me know when it'll be, yeah?" Lucas asked. They both did their best to attend as many of the basketball games, whenever work or other obligations didn't get in the way.

"Count on it. Right now though, I've got another 'game' coming up," Maya told him, pulling out her phone after swallowing her last bite. "Have to… summon my mother's acting spirits…" she fanned herself with a smirk.

"Oh, are you calling…" Lucas asked, looking back to the girls not too far away before turning back to his wife.

"No, no, just a text," Maya shook her head. "Doesn't mean I don't have to get in character, does it?"

"So what's the character?" Lucas wondered.

"Friend in dire need," she replied with an almost panicked gasp before snapping back to herself. "Good?" He gave her thumbs up. "Great, okay," she adjusted her posture in her chair before starting to type.

_Maya: Hey are you busy tomorrow?_

_Riley: Not really. Why?_

_Maya: I need to go to Houston tomorrow. Something's up with Stage Ready over there. I'm kind of nervous about it and I know it's kind of silly but I think I would feel better if you were going to be there with me and Lucas._

_Riley: It's not silly, of course I'll be there._

_Maya: Thanks, Riley._

_Maya: See if Dylan is free, too? I'm taking you guys to lunch while we're out there._

_Riley: I'll check, but I don't think he has anything planned! We can go see how Chiara is doing while we're there!_

"What's so funny?" Lucas asked when he saw Maya bite back a laugh.

"Riley doesn't think Dylan has anything planned for tomorrow," she explained, passing her phone over. "This is going to be so good."

The next morning, after getting up much earlier than either one of them would prefer to on a Saturday – unless it was for a good cause – Maya and Lucas readied themselves to go and pick up their friends. Figuring out what they were meant to wear, to look somewhere between 'this is a normal day' and 'this is the day our friends get engaged' bordered on tricky, but they didn't worry over it for very long. They had a couple of hours on the road ahead of them and as nervous as they might have been, they knew there was someone out there who had more nervousness in him than the both of them combined.

Arriving at the Matthews-Orlando house, they had barely pulled up to the curb that the door opened, and Riley and Dylan exited and marched over to the car. It could have been too funny, seeing one of them just barely keeping himself focused while the other wore the face of a concerned friend.

"She's going to forgive me for pulling her leg a bit, right?" Maya looked to Lucas.

"I think she'll be fine," he nodded. Maya got out of the car to greet them anyway, and before she could speak she was caught up in a hug from her best friend. She had to hand it to Riley, she wore her emotions in her arms when she held you. There wasn't even anything wrong with her and Maya felt comforted anyway.

Before long, Riley had pulled for Maya to sit with her in the back, and so Dylan took up the front with Lucas. This was really the best solution overall. Maya could easily keep her best friend entertained for the next two hours, and all the while Riley would not be in any way aware of anything curious because she wouldn't be able to see Dylan's face. Lucas _did_ see it, sitting in the front with him as he was, and oh what a face it was. He was nervous, as was to be expected, but then it was a good kind of nervous, the one where you just couldn't wait to get to something and it was all about hanging on until then.

Every once in a while, Dylan would turn his head to look at him, and Lucas would give him the most subtle of encouraging nods. _You got this._ Dylan would nod back, though Lucas couldn't say if he did this because he believed it or because he assumed it would help him believe it.

Lucas remembered those jitters, from the day he had finally gotten to propose to Maya. It hadn't been the same for him, had it? He'd had all those months to prepare, all the work he and the others had done on the house, all of it with the outlook that the proposal would be the end goal. It had lasted so long that, by the time he'd arrived on The Day, the one they'd been headed for all along, the moment felt so near by comparison that he was able to hold himself together through the hours preceding, with Zay and Nadine's wedding, and the reception, all before he had taken Maya on her own surprise drive. On that last stretch at least, whatever nerves would show on his face, she had been blindfolded, so she hadn't seen a thing, much like Riley didn't see what was going over Dylan's face as they headed into Houston. Then again, Maya had spent the drive pretending to be Melinda Friar, so she had kept him in such a headspace that there wasn't much room left for nerves at all.

Meanwhile, in the back of the car, Maya was tending to the distraction of Riley Matthews. This was not difficult. Sure, Riley wasn't the girl who would blindly search for a bird if told there was one in the room… anymore… But given something to focus on, especially on a long drive like this one, she would be of a single mind. And right now, with the notion that her best friend was in need of assistance and support, there really was nothing that could come in the way of Riley spending those two hours with Maya, the two of them belting out their 'greatest hits' at the top of their lungs, like they were fifteen again. By the end of the ride, Maya would be left feeling like this had been the most fun ride to Houston she'd had in a while, even if this drive wasn't for her benefit, as Riley had been led to believe.

"So where do you want to go to lunch?" Maya asked, when they both took a break from the singing, the better to catch their breaths.

"Oh, I already made reservations at the Nook," Riley declared at once. Maya just managed not to show anything as she received this information.

"You did?" she asked. Riley nodded and smiled. "For what time?"

"Well, I wasn't sure how long it would take at the theater, but I talked to Chris over there, he still remembers us. He said to call if we had to delay, not a problem. Anyway…" she started to ask, and the way she froze quite suddenly, Maya guessed she'd stopped herself at the very last second before saying something she wasn't meant to say.

"Riley?" Maya sat up. "What did you do?"

"Nothing, nothing," Riley insisted, but Maya had known her much too long to believe _that_, and after a few seconds of trying to swallow down the secret, she must have decided it wasn't worth keeping hidden anymore. So, she just smiled. "I sort of asked around to see if any of the others might want to come and join us, you know, old times' sake and all. I'm pretty sure I saw Zay's car back there somewhere," she turned in her seat. "Yeah, see, there he is!" Maya turned to see for herself. There was the car indeed, just barely visible but entirely recognizable.

"Who else is coming?" she turned back to Riley.

"You'll see," Riley shook her head. She wouldn't say, oh no. She was too happy for this coup she had pulled off, all with the goal of cheering up her friend. Maya wished she could express how much she loved that woman in this moment. Without knowing it, she had gone and collected all their friends in one place, and she had no idea that they would _not_ be there for a bit of cheering up but rather to celebrate the engagement of two of their friends.

Maya caught Lucas' eye in the rear-view mirror and she knew he had overheard everything. He was excited now, just as she was. This was about to get so much better.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	246. Their Question For Always

_**A/N: **The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!_

* * *

September 2nd 2020

_Chapter 246_  
_Their Question For Always_

_Maya: Hey, heads up, whatever Riley told you to get you out here today, it has nothing to do with me, okay?  
__Nadine: What do you mean? She said she wanted everyone together for lunch, she didn't mention you.  
__Maya: Okay, that actually makes sense.  
__Nadine: Are you okay though?  
__Maya: Yeah, yeah, I'm good, but I told Riley there was something wrong at Stage Ready Houston and I wanted her to come with me. That's why she got all you guys, whoever is going to be out at the Nook today.  
__Nadine: Why'd you do that?  
__Maya: Because I'm a sneaky friend.  
__Nadine: Well I knew that!  
__Nadine: OH!  
__Nadine: Is this what I think it is?  
__Maya: I'm pretty sure it is! Can you let the others know?  
__Nadine: On it!  
__Nadine: I'm not going to jinx it, am I?  
__Maya: Guess we'll see!  
__Nadine: That's not helping!  
__Maya: Isn't it though? See you later!_

"Is that the theater?" Riley asked, and Maya looked up, trying not to look like she was trying to keep her screen out of view.

"Uh, yeah, I just had to check in," she lied. Riley just smiled and nodded.

"Well, we'll be there in a minute," she pointed up ahead.

Indeed they _would_ be there very, very soon. They were just now passing the infamous fountain, the site of what was to be Dylan's big moment and hers. Maya could just discreetly get a look at Dylan from where she sat, and she could tell he was very aware that they had just passed it. Minutes from now, they would be back here, as all the steps would fall into place. Before that could happen though, they needed to get to the theater and set everything in motion.

"What do you want me to do?" Riley asked when the car pulled up to the curb outside the theater. She had that look in her eyes, that very caring friend look. If asked, she would have marched right into that theater with her and given a stern talking to on to some unsuspecting 'culprit.' This was not what Maya needed, not in the slightest.

"I think… I mean, it already means a lot to know that you're out here with me, you guys should walk around, it's a nice day out. I'll go in and get things handled as quick as I can, then I can join you and we can head to the Nook."

"Are you sure?" Riley asked.

"Yeah, I'm sure," Maya smiled, giving her best friend's arm a squeeze and working oh so hard not to start blubbering with emotion over what was about to happen for her.

Maya got out of the car, tapping Lucas' window as she went. He'd know what that meant. The plan was for her to go into the theater, and not too long after he would go in after her, under pretext that she had left something in the car which she might need. He didn't even have to go into detail over what it was, just hightail it out to join her. This would leave Riley and Dylan alone in the car, at which point he would find his moment and suggest they go walk around a while, recalling the old days when she'd been a student at the university nearby. This would take them over to the fountain, and then…

"Oh, Maya's going to need…" Lucas exclaimed, a few seconds after the theater door had shut. He grabbed something from the compartment between the seats, before Riley had time to spot what it might have been – it was a roll of mints – and hurried out of the car after his wife. He'd barely gone through the door, not looking back, when he spotted Maya waiting there, hiding behind a plant which allowed her to spy out the window.

"Get over here," she whispered, waving him over. Lucas hurried up, standing behind her.

"Your mints," he offered the roll. She snickered.

"Are you saying my breath stinks?" she joked.

"Not that I've ever noticed, but I can check," he tossed back.

"Later, later," Maya turned back to look out the window. "Still in the car…"

"Yeah, give them a minute," Lucas told her.

"Maya?" They both stood up straight and turned. Maya relaxed at once.

"Oh, hey, Janey," she waved to the woman who happened to run Stage Ready at the theater here. "We're just… Our friends are out there, it's a thing, I'll explain later."

"O-okay…" Janey laughed and carried on with her day. Maya and Lucas shared a look before turning again to spy on the car.

"They're out!" Lucas whispered.

"I can see that! Hang on…" Maya whispered back. They moved closer, looking for… "There they go," she pointed to the couple, walking off together, hand in hand.

"What now?"

"Wait until they get far enough, then we get back in the car and drive around that way to get at the fountain from the other side," Maya directed, grabbing his arm so they would step out of the theater, waiting for their moment. "Okay, go, go."

With little to no regard to how odd they must have looked, they got back in the car, where Lucas focused on the road ahead while Maya kept a roving eye to ensure neither of their friends – but especially Riley – would not see them and end up figuring out that something was going on, at least more than what she'd been led to believe.

"Are we good? Do you see them?" Lucas asked. They had made their way around, now parking not too far from the fountain but far enough that they should not have been seen.

"Yeah, I can see them through the… water," Maya mimed the rush of the fountain spray. "They're sitting on the edge there," she pointed. When she climbed out of the car, Lucas hurried to follow.

"We should be able to make it over there without her seeing us," he indicated one spot, moving along a few store fronts. "Then again, maybe we should stay back, give them their… Okay, we're moving," he sprinted off again, when Maya went where he'd pointed without a word.

Sure, they weren't going to interrupt, wouldn't get so close as to hear what was being said between the two of them, but it wouldn't be so bad for them to sneak a peek, yeah? These were their friends, some of their closest. And they _had_ come all this way with them…

From what they could see, they could guess that Dylan had suggested they go for a walk – as had been the plan – after which one or the other of them had seen the fountain. As it held such a place in their relationship, they had gone and sat in the spot where they had sat so many times before, where they had spoken their love for one another once before. Today, they would speak it again, or Dylan would, and if all went well Riley would do so as well.

"I don't know how much longer I can handle this," Maya breathed, an eager little hop in her. Lucas practically had to lock her in place with his arms.

"Almost there," he reminded her. Sure, he was probably just as eager as she was, in his own way, but there was little else for them to do now except wait… and watch.

From what they could see of their friends out there, the smiles on them, Lucas and Maya guessed they must have been thinking back of previous times when they had been sitting here together, and how happy those memories made them. They could also see Dylan's hand as it brushed at his pocket, like he was waiting for just the moment.

"You know, I'm pretty sure we could walk out there right now and she wouldn't notice us," Lucas told Maya. She laughed, just enough that he could hear it. Riley had always had a fine ear for picking up on familiar sounds. Thankfully, just as Lucas said it, she was too focused on Dylan just now.

"Oh, I think he said something…" Maya patted at Lucas' arm with both hands without turning away. "She's looking at him like she knows what's happening now."

"Okay, okay," Lucas whispered, trying to get her to be quiet, as they could hear a thing at all. They could just barely see Riley's face from where they stood. They started forward now, the better for Maya to ever so casually pull out her phone and start recording the moment, for posterity, but mostly for Riley to see it again later. Knowing her, it would all feel like it had happened so fast and she wouldn't remember.

But Maya captured it. She got the moment Dylan stood from the fountain ledge and knelt before the already tearful Riley, producing the small box from his pocket and opening it before her. By this point, Lucas was standing behind his wife, almost holding the phone in place with her as she did her best not to be heard crying on the recording. She just about hit critical by the time Riley gave a very definitive 'yes' looking response. When Dylan stood back up even as she stood from the fountain ledge, they embraced and kissed… And then Riley almost fell back into the fountain, only to be caught by her brand-new fiancé, who pulled her back to himself for a beat before they laughed. Dylan stood back now – once he was sure she was steady on her feet – and he took the ring from the box before slipping it on her trembling finger.

"Honestly thought he'd drop it in the water," Lucas told Maya once she'd stopped the recording. "Almost dropping _her_ in, that one I didn't see coming. Not that it wouldn't have been memorable," he added. They were walking over now, and when Dylan saw them, blurry as his eyes must have been from the tears, he motioned for Riley to look, too.

The way she looked, when she spotted Maya, they rightly guessed that she had figured out the charade all of a sudden. Her face was all aglow with happiness, and she looked to Dylan again for a moment before dashing off headlong into a massive hug with her best friend, who caught her on the fly and gave as much as she got.

"See? What did I tell you?" Maya whispered at her ear and Riley nodded. She'd waited, and the moment had come, and it had been everything she had ever wanted it to be.

"You still breathing?" Lucas asked Dylan, as he moved over to him.

"Yeah… I think so…" Dylan pressed a hand to his chest.

"Congratulations," Lucas clapped him on the shoulder. "What are you thinking right now?"

"Whether it's allowed for someone to have three best men?" Dylan declared, and Lucas laughed.

"I think the rule is 'if you want it, it's your day.'"

How they all ended up walking back to the car and driving to the Nook, none of them really remembered. The part they did remember though, and the one they'd laugh over for a while, was Riley realizing now that their friends would all be waiting for them, which was just as well, because she couldn't wait to see them, to share her good news, as though they wouldn't already have known by now.

Never would it be said that their group wasn't a time-efficient one. In the short time between Maya and Nadine's texts and the quartet's arrival at the Nook, they had gone and scared up some balloons and other sparkly decorations, the better to celebrate the newly engaged couple. When they'd walked in, there were Zay and Nadine, and Asher and Ray, and Sophie and Chiara, and Rebecca and Jax, and Rosa and Jenna, and Kayla and Will, and Willow and Lion, and Leona and Bishop… Everyone cheered, and Maya was once again on chronicling mode, filming everything from the burst of their waiting friends, to Dylan's sheer thrill to see them all, to Riley's slowly but surely turning into a human shaped happy tear.

It was a parade of hugs after this, hugs, and handshakes, and requests to see the ring, and demands for the story of this proposal… All the others really knew was that Riley and Dylan had made their way to Houston, under the pretense of friendly backup for Maya, in order for him to propose to her, in the city where their friendship had gone and evolved into love. Here, the video from the fountain soon found its way back on Maya's screen, placed in Riley's hands for her and Dylan to see, even as the others crowded around to have a look.

The whole lunch was a chaos of conversation, moving from the recounting of the proposal to questions of the wedding. It was all much too soon to even consider any amounts of details, with the bride and groom's heads still spinning over the events of the day, but they promised to let everyone know as soon as there was anything _to_ know.

"Say the word and I'll kidnap you away from here," Maya whispered at Riley's ear at one point, to which Riley only smiled and set a kiss to her best friend's cheek.

They held down the Nook, easily for the entire afternoon and into early evening before they finally had to call it. Many of them were looking to a long drive home. Maya regained the front passenger seat, as Lucas drove them back to Austin. In the backseat, the newly engaged couple sat together once more, the return much more subdued than the morning's ride, the better to give them some much earned peace and quiet. They would take in hushed tones, leaving the pair in the front to catch the occasional laugh, to see them holding hands, every once in a while sharing a kiss… Maya and Lucas both were fairly certain that they had been entirely forgotten, as though the car was driving itself back home and Riley and Dylan were all on their own.

When they were dropped off in front of their home, the couple recalled their friends in the front seats with many thanks before disappearing off into the house.

"So, that happened," Lucas turned back to Maya with a smile before pulling them on to the road. She looked spent, happily so.

"It did… It did…"

"You're going up in the attic when we get home, aren't you?"

"Oh, so fast," Maya nodded, hands practically twitching. "But I can bring the sketchbook down anywhere after that," she assured him with a grin.

"You go wherever you need to go," Lucas insisted. "I'm sure I can find myself a spot near you anywhere."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	247. Their Flight to April

September 3rd 2020

_Chapter 247  
Their Flight to April_

"One small suitcase," Lucas announced, as he pulled it from the closet and over to the bed, as requested.

"Thanks," Maya turned from where she'd been picking out a few things from the dresser. "That should be enough, yeah?"

"Depends. How many wardrobe changes are you planning to have this weekend?" he asked.

"Oh, not that many," she smirked. "It's not just about clothes though," she added, before briefly considering things again. "Lucas?"

"Duffel bag?" he guessed, already picking up the suitcase again and carrying it back to where it had been not too long ago.

"Yeah, that sounds right," she nodded, bringing the small pile of clothes up to the bed. When he brought over the bag, she turned to him and stretched up to kiss him. "See, all this is going to do is to make me want to bring you along."

"You're definitely going to need a bigger bag for that," he joked, making her laugh.

A conversation with the Hart-Lane girls the previous week had led to them all calling on their 'contract' and scheduling Sleepster 2028… or at least _a_ Sleepster, as they would never restrict themselves to a single sister sleepover in a year if the opportunity presented itself for them to have more than one. This April one was the very first of the year, they could say that.

It was hard to believe that they'd made it this far already, but then again, when did they ever feel any different about the passage of time? But here they were now, advancing through the fourth month of the year as though each day could turn into a week in the blink of an eye.

Lucas could believe it had gone by at least, by looking at his parents, back at their house. The new kitchen had gotten to the point where it was just 'the kitchen,' without any of them to call on the fact that it had been entirely redone after the fire. They barely mentioned _that_ anymore, left the traumatic event to the past, where it belonged. Oh, it wasn't as though there weren't any signs of it left. The biggest one of those existed in Thomas Friar's hands. They had healed, on the whole, but they still pained him sometimes, and he would lament the fact that he wasn't as strong as he used to be, had less force in his grip than he had before his hands were burned, no matter how much he worked to regain it.

Still, he tried not to vocalize this if he could keep it quiet, knowing how it would worry his wife, and his son, and his daughter-in-law, and his father… He was alive, and Melinda was alive, and their house still stood, and their new kitchen was beautiful. Really, he saw no reason to complain. As for his wife, well, Melinda Friar had always been known for her skills in focusing on the good and casually ignoring the rest, as she had done in the past. This one may have been the biggest challenge to that skill as of yet, but this only proved the point that they had gotten far enough into this recovery, this return to the day to day, that she was once again able to become the Melinda they knew and loved.

These days, she was caught up on how excited she was to think that her son, her sweet baby Luke, was coming so close to finishing school, to become a veterinarian and joining the team at her mother's ranch. Thomas would tease that she couldn't wait to refer to him as 'my son, the doctor,' and Melinda would 'scold' him, but all the while she'd have a smile on her face.

Lucas had to say, he was getting pretty excited, too, with no need to dip into his mother's anticipation. After all this time, he had just over a year left of school, and he was just itching to get out there, to Sullivan Stables, for good. Every now and then it would feel more and more like a reality. He would be at school, or at the bookstore, and he would be reminded of how that period of his life was drawing to a close, as quickly as those weeks went by, taking them from March into April.

They had not been so eventful for him, as those went, but then he preferred it that way. He was comfortable in just doing his thing, driving to school, joining his friends, attending his classes… And being at the bookstore, after having worked at one or another for seven years, just about, the place felt like second nature to him. He knew that in no time he would be submitted to his wife's teasing, much as he got when they would go to museums and he would say something that gave him up for being a former tour guide. He looked forward to that, actually. It would be a reminder of a good portion of his life, one he could look back on with wonderful memories, thinking about the people he had worked with and those he had worked for, the clients, from his regulars to the occasional odd balls. It had given him an appreciation for books he might not have had otherwise, much as his guide job – and, well, his wife, too – had given him a greater appreciation for art in its various forms.

"Hey, do you have room to bring these with you?" Sam came into the room, carrying a pair of small boxes. Lucas and Maya looked at the boxes, then each other. Without a word, he moved to get the small suitcase again, while she emptied out the bag of the items she'd already packed.

"For the girls?" Maya asked, taking the boxes.

"This one is," Sam pointed to where he'd stuck little post-its on each one. "The other is for Wyatt and Teddy."

"Got it, consider it passed on," Maya nodded.

"Thank you," Sam smiled. "Do you need anything?" he asked, the better to make himself useful in return for the favor.

"No, no, I'm good, go on," she waved him out of the room, and so he went. When he was gone, she let out an all too sigh-filled sound. Lucas turned to her. "I'm being the emotional big sister again, sue me," she shook her head, setting the boxes down as he brought over the suitcase.

"We still don't know what he's going to do when he graduates," Lucas reminded her. "Maybe he'll stay in Austin. He's got plenty of reasons to stay here, with Cecilia, and him wanting to play uncle when the time comes…"

"True, yes, but then one of those reasons might take him out of Austin, and then the other won't hold him back, will it?"

It wasn't about Sam, not entirely. The real culprit for her easy emotions here was the realization that she was about to lose her first group of kids, her seniors about to graduate. Sure, that was always going to happen, and she'd only had them for a year, so it wasn't as though she was saying goodbye to a group she would have followed for the whole four years yet, but that wasn't so big of a comfort as to make things better, was it? She got attached to people, couldn't help it, and saying goodbye was her least favorite thing to do.

She comforted herself in the knowledge that their departure meant they were all going off on the next step of their journey, that this was always where they'd been headed and she should be happy to have been a part of getting them there. But they had all just become so important to her, every single one of them, and now she was supposed to set them aside, to stop thinking about them and replace them with a new batch of kids… Alright, she was kind of excited at the prospect of welcoming new students, but still, her seniors…

She continued to have her weekend sessions with Milena Janacek, and much as those were about the girl writing out her answers to the essay questions given to her by her teacher, and then the two of them going over what she'd write, sooner or later, as their work would be finished, they would just keep chatting. More than once, Milena had joined her teacher and her family for dinner. This weekend, while Maya was gone, she was to go to Mr. Matthews' house for him to administer the questions while she was out of town. She had a feeling that Milena would be all for it. She and August had been growing closer.

He had broken up with Michaela Zhu, not long after Riley and Dylan had been engaged. As far as Maya had been able to overhear, the two of them had been struggling for a while with their long-distance relationship, and by the last few weeks, the extent of their conversations seemed to be centered on status reports for Daisy the parakeet. Finally, the relationship, which had seen some ups and downs in the time it had lasted, had reached a conclusion which felt entirely final. Michaela had reportedly asked if August might just hold on to Daisy for good, as she didn't think she'd be able to get her back any time soon, and by then it would have felt impossible to take her from the home she now knew. Maya and Nadine both were of a mind that the Zhu girl just felt bad for how things had turned, and she wanted to leave August something good to remember her by.

August didn't appear too heartbroken over the break, but then that only went to show how frayed the relationship had already become, like the crack had already run almost to the edge, and the last sliver had released, not with a snap but a whisper. This did not mean that he suddenly flipped gears and started courting Milena, though he clearly had been harboring feelings for her for some time. At the very least though, their friendship had gotten to feel that much more open. They'd had this unfortunate connection, the past few years, with what had happened sophomore year, and what it had led to, so it was almost as though they were getting to start over from scratch, getting to know each other again. They were both Houston bound for college in the fall, and so was Milena's big brother and August's new best friend Tony. The three of them were now talking about getting an apartment together once August's punishment was lifted at the end of the summer.

"There, that should do it," Maya breathed, flipping the suitcase lid shut to make sure it would close, without crushing the boxes she had cushioned among her clothes. "I should really ask him what's in those so I can say in case I get asked at the airport…"

"Dylan's coming out here for the weekend," Lucas revealed, which made her laugh.

"Boys' weekend, huh? When the wife and the fiancée are gone, time to play?"

"That is for us to know, and you to maybe find out, if we decide to tell," Lucas joked.

That might have been the part of this Sleepster she most looked forward to. Riley was coming along. Oh, she had always considered her a sister, the very first she'd had, but then something about the engagement, and 'bringing Dylan into the family' had just renewed Maya's feelings of sisterhood with Riley in ways she could not have foreseen. The two of them had been spending more time together again lately, and it had been a highlight of the March into April weeks. So, when the coming sleepover had been organized, it had felt like an automatic choice. She'd called up her best friend and asked if she was free to come along. Now, they would be Tucson bound together, and neither of them could wait.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	248. Their Flight to Tucson

September 4th 2020

_Chapter 248  
Their Flight to Tucson_

When they were little, back in New York, Maya and Riley had long imagined how fun it would be to go off on a trip together, just the two of them. The places they would choose to go to might be near, or far, or entirely impossible. They had spent a whole summer planning their escape to Narnia. None of these trips had gotten to happen, because of course they had been children and needed adults for any excursions into their own city, so anything beyond that…

Even as they'd grown, there had never been an occasion presented for them to just head out, no one else with them. They'd had plenty of trips with friends and families along for the ride, but not until today did they ready themselves to fly off, just two best friends together. Alright, so they weren't going to be just them for very long, only the space of their flights to and from Tucson, but that was already something, wasn't it?

When Lucas' car pulled up to Riley and Dylan's house, the two of them were already halfway out the door, with Dylan diligently carrying his fiancée's suitcase and bag, along with another bag they guessed to be _his_ belongings for the time he'd be out on the lane with Lucas over the weekend.

"Oh, she's spiraling," Maya detected, climbing out of the car and heading up to Riley as she was almost literally spiraling, standing at the door like she was supposed to lock up but was also debating the need to return inside, like maybe she might have forgotten something. "Hey, come on, don't want to miss our plane, yeah?" Maya asked her.

"I… No, yeah, I'm good, I just…" Riley pointed to the door.

"You've got PJs?"

"Yeah…"

"Other clothes for daytime?"

"Uh-huh?"

"General toiletries, footwear, underwear…"

"Yes, Maya, I have all those things."

"Got your ticket?"

"Right here in my purse…"

"Alright, then come on, you're good," Maya went ahead and shut the door, just as Riley blurted out…

"Door!"

"Yeah, it's locked, see?"

"No, _Door_!" Riley pulled out her keys and one door gave way to another, as the pup scrambled out and around their legs, barking eagerly. Riley picked her up. "She's going to your house with Dylan, remember?"

"You know that name gets very confusing sometimes," Maya laughed, closing the – wooden – door again.

"We tried calling her something else, but the name Missy gave her is the only one she responds to," Riley explained as they headed to the car, where the guys had already loaded the luggage into the trunk. "I read the book it's from, I really enjoyed it," Riley added, smiling down at the dog happily nestled in her arms as they headed to the car. She looked like she knew one of her humans was going away, and she was just a bit fretful, especially after nearly being left behind.

The ride to the airport went by much faster than they'd anticipated it would. They spent most of it with the guys sharing what they planned to do that weekend while the two of them were gone. Maya and Riley would look to one another, and it seemed to be a shared assumption that Zay and Asher – at the least – would be popping over, giving off the general vibe of those four teenage boys from back in their sleepover days. In Maya's head at least, the four of them were all done up like Ninja Turtles.

The goodbyes had to be made outside the airport, as they weren't about to leave Door in the car. This was not such a bad thing in the end, as it allowed Maya and Riley to head off, with suitcases and bags, and kick off their best friend mini-vacation.

"I'm already getting texts. They want to know when we'll be there," Maya smiled, showing Riley her phone as they waited for boarding. Riley looked and smiled, finding the 'summons' from Cara, Eliza, Emma… "And there's Luna's girls now," Maya chuckled, two 'ping!' later. "They're going to want to be at the airport before we're even gone."

Finally, they were boarded, and as they settled into their seats, Maya could just sense Riley had been waiting until this very moment to bring something up. The immediate impression here was that she would not be able to wait much longer.

"Yes?" Maya asked, smiling.

"I have a plan," Riley reported.

"Do you?" Maya humored her. "What is it?"

"When we're in Tucson, I'm going to find my wedding dress," Riley whispered.

Alright, Maya was intrigued.

"You are?" she asked. Riley nodded. "Why there? Why now? Also what about everyone else? Your mom, and Dylan's stepmom, and…"

"Well, the other day, when we were talking about going out there for the Sleepster, and we talked about our 'trips' when we were little, it reminded me of something else, something we also said we were going to do together, just you and me…"

Maya smiled at once. She remembered this, too, as soon as Riley brought it up. They must have been all of eight or nine when Riley had hit a serious case of 'bride play,' putting on her poofiest dress, throwing on a 'veil,' grabbing 'flowers,' and walking down the 'aisle.' Farkle would generally be coerced into playing the role of the groom, whether he wanted to or not… though as time went on he had been just a bit more willing. Maya would usually flit around from role to role, playing the flower girl, and the maid of honor, and the officiant, and the bawling parent in the front row… Sometimes, she played Topanga, too.

One thing that had come out of this – other than more than one ruined flowerbed near the Matthews' home – was a dream of sorts between the two best friends. They imagined themselves, all grown up, when Riley would have finally found the man she would spend her life with. In that vision, it would just be Riley and Maya, because why would they want or need anyone else? And while they had of course grown by now, done almost twenty years of it since those days, this memory was just one of those things where, regardless of how much time had gone by, as soon as they'd remembered it… There was no other way for this to go.

"Are you sure you don't want your mom there? Or the girls from the band…" Maya still had to ask.

"They don't need to see it before the wedding," Riley insisted. "Plus, if they haven't seen it before, they'll all get to be surprised. That's what you did with yours…"

"Yeah, until I changed my mind and showed you guys," Maya reminded her.

"I won't change my mind," Riley promised with a shake of the head. "Anyway, it shouldn't be as long between the proposal and the wedding as it was for you, right?"

"Did you guys pick a date yet?" Maya asked now, thinking this might be what this statement indicated.

"Not exactly," Riley told her. "We're thinking mid to late summer this year, which is all the more reason for me to find my dress as soon as possible. This weekend, we're going to be out in Arizona, just us… It's like the moment just dropped in my lap, and now I have to take it." She was smiling so brightly, so excited at the prospect of trying on dresses to show her best friend… How could Maya have said no to that? Anyway, what she'd said made sense.

"We are going to find you the best dress," she hugged her across their seats, and Riley hugged her back. "Do you have any contenders yet?"

Within seconds, Riley had pulled out her laptop from her carry-on and she opened it to show Maya the various pictures. Just like that, their in-flight entertainment was as good as squared away. The conversation bounced back and forth between Maya recalling the process of designing her own dress and having the costume department from the theater help her bring it to life, and Riley discussing whether she believed this style would be more flattering than that one…

"You never think so much about how expensive these things are until you actually have to go and buy one for yourself," Riley frowned, scrolling through some photos.

"Oh, please let me be your fairy godmother," Maya insisted at once. "We can boost that budget of yours." Riley looked ready to insist back, to say that this wasn't necessary, but Maya shut her down. "I'm not telling you to double it. Just… if there's one that you _really_ fall in love with and it's too far out from your target that you can't see yourself bending the rules to get it… I want you to promise you'll tag me in. Matron of honor privilege," she extended her finger like a raised sword. Riley had about no choice but to respond in kind, and her face said plenty as to her gratitude. There was so much of it.

"Okay, I will," she finally spoke.

"Good," Maya grinned. "Sometimes I still get these moments where it yanks at my heart to remember that you're finally getting married, too. That's usually when I start thinking about all those 'ceremonies' we used to have. Remember that one where you tried to kiss Farkle and he ran away?"

"You almost tackled him," Riley laughed.

"Yeah, maybe not my best moment in hindsight, but what can I say, I was a very dedicated maid of honor-slash-everything. _That_ hasn't changed, except maybe less tackling," Maya tipped her head.

"I know what you mean though. I keep looking at my ring sometimes, and I can barely keep from smiling. It makes it a bit awkward when I'm with a patient and I look down to take notes… But I don't want to take it off at the office, and I _really_ don't want to leave it home."

"Maybe get a glove?" Maya suggested, smiling. "A really fancy one, up to the elbow. That won't be distracting at all."

"With diamonds," Riley chimed in.

"Oh, all over," Maya agreed, as they went back to their browsing. "When exactly are we supposed to go on this trip within the trip?"

"I made an appointment at a shop out there, tomorrow afternoon. That'll be okay, right?" Riley asked, looking like she was starting to wonder if she'd been too hasty and if she should have asked first.

"No, that should be great," Maya assured her. "They'll send it out to you, yeah? Have it sent to the theater, the girls there can do any alterations you'll need."

"Yeah?" Riley blinked, her excitement growing.

"Fairy Godmother says yes," Maya smiled. "They're very good at being covert with these things. Although I'll have to make sure no one stumbles upon it like my mom did with mine… We've got this, alright? Just… Okay, now we're crying, hey," she grabbed a tissue from her bag and passed it to Riley, who brushed away the happy tears.

"I'm really glad we're going out there together this weekend," she nodded, sniffling.

"It's a sister sleepover, you really should have been there from the start," Maya smiled at her. "Now, tell me the truth: If I make score paddles, will that be too weird?"

"Oh, no, not at all, you should do that!" Riley perked up now.

"From 1, 'burn it and shoot it into the sun' to 10, 'who has ever looked better in a wedding dress, really, no one, you're perfect,'" Maya intoned. "I'm pretty sure the girls have some sparkles somewhere in the house."

By the time they would land in Tucson after their short flight, they had a solid plan for this tag team portion of their visit to the Hart-Lane girls. They would not return to Austin before Riley Matthews had found her wedding dress.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	249. Their Flight to Sisters

September 5th 2020

_Chapter 249  
Their Flight to Sisters_

Neither of the arriving duo had to work very hard to locate their ride once they got off the plane. They had barely cleared the gate when they heard a call for Maya from across the mass of people ahead of them. Aiding them in finding the source of this call, they quickly spotted a pair of hopping girls waving their arms at them.

"Woah, is that Emma? She got tall!" Riley blinked, spotting Maya's step-stepsister. Emma had come to use the word as it showed how there had been 'two steps' in between to make them sisters. The sister part was always going to be the most important part.

"Yeah," Maya laughed. "She went and hit that growth spurt. Teddy's so jealous, she's actually two inches taller than him now and she won't let him forget it."

The boy in question could eventually be spotted, along with his father, standing near Eliza and Emma, who might as well have been holding giant welcome signs with the way they awaited the visitors' approach. As soon as they were able to do it, they hurried to pile on for a hug with their big sister. Maya had long declared that this right here was always her favorite part of these visits, no matter who was the visitor or visited, and her sisters did not disagree. The thrill of the reunion was simply the best.

"I'm so glad you guys are here this time," Eliza was all smiles. "Although I wish you could have brought the others, too."

"The others wished that, too," Maya promised her.

It would not have been fair to any of them to always have these sleepovers in Austin, and when the plan had started to come together for them to hold this one out in Tucson, at the Hart-Lane house, there'd been no second thought required. The only hang up came in the form of the Hunter girls, and even Cecilia, who got an invite by virtue of being Sam's girlfriend. But then just because Maya and Riley could decide to fly off to Tucson for a few days, the rule did not apply equally to Nellie, Gracie, or Haley, and there just had been no way to make it happen for them, so they had to stay home. One had thrown a bit of a fit, the other had cried, and the third did not entirely understand what was happening but landed somewhere in the middle.

"Can we see your ring?" Emma asked Riley, once the group had retrieved the luggage and made it into James Lane's truck. Maya tried not to smirk, thinking how her sisters had been sneaking looks at Riley's hand ever since they'd all come together. It was not surprising in the slightest that the two of them had been eager to learn of her engagement to Dylan, which meant another wedding in the offing. Maya was pretty sure they were campaigning to get an invite. She and Riley had already vowed that it would be better not to mention their appointment at the bridal shop, in part, because as soon as the girls knew they would then want to come along, and they wouldn't have it in them to say no.

Riley held up her hand, gladly, and Eliza and Emma both leaned in to get a good look. This led to a litany of questions, the kind anyone newly engaged would soon receive, from any number of people. When was the wedding? What kind of dress would she get? Alright, once they got on to the dress, they didn't wander too far off. They were wholly devoted to their fashion design, as they had been for a while now. For all the knowledge and skill they would take in, their output was evolving, too, as the many, many photos they sent their sister showed.

"So, where's the rest of our Sleepster crew?" Maya asked, when Riley started throwing her 'bail out' eyes. If they went any further, her appointment secret would be teased out.

"Cara took Ginny and Sadie out for 'supplies,'" Emma reported. "Maisie's home with Mom," she went on, and Maya smiled. She didn't know what made her happier, seeing how deeply the Hart and Lane kids had grown to love their respective stepparent or the anticipation to see her littlest sibling.

Maisie Hart-Lane was turning a year old in just a month, which barely felt real, except that naturally it was. They had seen her, in person, in photos, videos and video calls… She had her mother's eyes, and her father's smile, and they weren't entirely sure which side of the family had provided the rest of her features, as both Abigail and James would insist those were his grandmother's ears or her grandfather's, his mother's nose or her father's and all his siblings'. This didn't matter so much. She was a beautiful amalgamation, and they loved her more and more every day she was in their lives.

"I can't wait until she's old enough to remember these sleepovers," Eliza smiled. "When she can write, she can sign the contract."

It already felt like they were _all_ growing up much faster than their big sister was able to keep up with, but then that had always been the case, especially for how they lived in another state, diminishing the amount of times they could be together physically. Then again, it could be just as striking to think of those siblings she got to see weekly, sometimes daily. The twins would be nine soon, MJ would be seven in December, and Haley, her little 4H girl was about to be four years old over the coming summer…

But the Hart-Lanes… Except for Wyatt, who was born the same year as the twins, and Maisie, that whole group had been bigger when she'd even met them. That did not make seeing them grow up feel any less jarring. Sam was going to be eighteen this year, Teddy a year behind him, and Cara another year behind _him_, while Eliza and Emma were breaking into their teens this year… All these times she'd rolled her eyes when her parents would overreact at her own growth, now she wished she could take them back because, yeah, it could really knock the breath out of you sometimes. She couldn't imagine what it would feel like when she'd be having those realizations over her own children.

Arriving at the house, Maya quickly saw hers and Riley's bags disappear through the door, as Teddy, Eliza, and Emma grabbed them and carried them off to the attic.

"Full service siblings," she turned to Riley, who was busy looking up at the house, taking it all in. This was the first time she'd been out here, though she'd heard of it many times in the years since Abigail had moved the kids out here. She pointed to the attic windows.

"The spaceship?"

"And our lodgings and the site of Sleepster 2028," Maya confirmed with a nod.

Walking into the house, it didn't take long for them to find that Cara and her cousins had returned from their errands. They'd just made it over the threshold when Ginny and Sadie Chen came hurrying down the stairs like they'd just learned of the arrival. Luna's girls, aged twelve and eight respectively, did not spare their cousin Maya in striking her with their growth. One could hardly tell they'd only known one another for a little under four years. Maya definitely tried not to think about it too much, mostly because it usually sent her spiraling into the thought that it had been just as many years since Kermit had passed. They were coming up on that anniversary again, and it never got any easier.

"We got so much candy!" Sadie proclaimed, only to shushed by her older sister, like she feared an adult – other than her cousin – would overhear and take it away from them.

"So what I'm getting is there won't be any actual sleeping at this sleepover? Just a sugar crash down the line?" Maya inquired, making the girls laugh. "Everyone's upstairs?" she asked, and the girls nodded. "You guys remember my friend Riley, yeah?"

"She's in the band, too," Ginny stated by way of confirmation. Like the rest of the family, she was a big TXNY fan.

"I am!" Riley confirmed, smiling bright.

"Woah!" Sadie blinked, catching a glimpse of the ring on her hand. "That's so sparkly…"

Making it up the stairs, the quartet continued up the next set of stairs, heading into the attic. As they went, Maya thought she caught a glimpse of a watching eye, from the crack in Wyatt's bedroom door, only to see it disappear. She wondered what sneaky trick her little brother was up to, but for now she had to keep up with the girls and Riley.

Stepping into the attic, Maya and Riley discovered that the girls had already been hard at work, preparing for the weekend. There were inflatable mattresses, and sleeping bags, already laid out on the floor, and Ginny and Sadie's bags were near where they'd sleep. And someone had installed string lights, not unlike the ones they'd had up in attic back at Maya and Lucas' house, when they'd all packed in up there on a previous Sleepster. They had gone and turned it into a staple of these nights they'd share.

"Maya!" She was nearly bowled over as Cara Hart-Lane launched into her sister's arms.

For as long as Maya had known her, it had always felt as though her sister here was her very own clone. The more she'd grown though, it had really started to feel more like she looked a lot like their aunt Luna. Now, at sixteen, the shift felt that much more pronounced. She and Luna could have been twins. Even though Teddy was older than her still, she _was_ the oldest girl, and with Wyatt as the only other boy, this almost gave her precedence as 'the oldest,' with Sam being away from home for nearly three years already. The role suited her better than anyone might have anticipated. For a girl who had sought to bail and go live with her sister in Texas after Kermit's passing, she had now fully embraced her place in this home.

Of course, that would all be brought to change in a year's time. She was finishing out her junior year in high school, and after one more year there, she would be college bound. She still had this goal of moving to Austin, to live with her sister and her husband while she went to college, the same way Sam was doing now. And she was still welcome to do so. Sam may not have expressed where he'd end up after graduation, but he _had_ stated his intentions to move out of the house once he got to that point, so the room would be free and ready to welcome a new lodger.

"I was thinking we could go and have dinner somewhere and then we could go to the movies after?" Cara asked Maya and Riley. Maya looked to her sister's expression, stole a look to Riley, who would know that this was where Cara worked. What she might not know, was that this was also where Cara's boyfriend Declan worked. The two went to different schools, so it was where they'd met, and become friends, and – by her sister's swoony declarations – had started to fall in love.

"You know…" Maya started, after Riley nodded. "A movie sounds fun. Although…" she looked to Teddy, standing there with them. "What about you guys, you and Wyatt?"

"Oh, he won't come," Teddy shook his head.

"He won't? Why not?" Riley asked. Teddy and the Hart-Lane girls shared a look.

"He's kind of upset right now, because Sam and Lucas and MJ aren't here with you. Usually it's us girls doing our thing, and then the boys have theirs, too…" Cara explained.

"Oh…" Maya felt her heart sink just a bit. Suddenly, his spying from his room took on a different meaning. "I'll be right back, okay?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	250. Their Flight to Brothers

September 6th 2020

_Chapter 250  
Their Flight to Brothers_

The first time she had met Wyatt was over a computer screen. He'd been all of a year old, and at the time Maya remembered how much the notion had affected her, in that he was the same age as her little sisters in Austin. Whatever she might have been left to feel about her father and how he had gone and made himself a new family after leaving her mom and her, here was this boy, this babe in arms, smiling with those baby teeth of his and a complete unawareness of the complicated construct of their family. He could not yet even understand that she was his blood relative and not just some random face on a screen.

By that virtue, on the flipside, he did not remember a time before she'd been part of their lives. She was Maya, she was his big sister that lived far away in Texas when the rest of them lived in New York. She was his sister, and he loved her as he loved all his siblings, with all his heart. Abigail would tell her, in those early years especially, how Wyatt had just about elevated her to something like divinity for how he'd go on about what she had said or done after they'd had a call, or a visit. The distance had likely played into this, seeing as he did not get to interact with her in the same way as he did his other brothers and sisters.

And when they had moved from New York to Arizona, after Kermit's passing, part of his coping with the loss, and the move, and then Sam's departure to go and live in Texas, too, had been achieved in letting his imagination turn the attic room, Maya's room, into his very own spaceship. Oh, the adventures he had up there…

Wyatt was eight now, coming on nine. Whether he still went up into the attic and pretended to sail it, standing at the big window facing out to the street below, Maya couldn't say, although according to the girls, he still went and hung out up there a lot of the time, usually when he'd be building things, which explained the big containers full of colorful bricks and drawings in the corner of the room when she'd gone up there today. Sitting on top of one of the clear bins was a half-made rocket. He may not have flown the attic ship anymore, but his love for space and space travel had not gone away.

His room definitely showed this, from the wallpaper to the bedspread, the curtains… and of course the multitude of stars glowing across the ceiling when the room was dark.

When Maya came down from the attic to go and see him, the door still hung open by a sliver, and she could see the lights were off. It wasn't dark outside, but he would have had the curtains drawn, the better to call on his stars. She found him there now, sitting on his bed, flashlight in hand, casting some light around himself. Most of his issues following the loss of their father had subsided over the years, and it was anyone's guess whether his fear for the dark was a remnant of these or just where his eight-year-old brain was at. No one had the heart to ask him how much he remembered of Kermit, as he'd been all of four when they'd lost him, though they only needed to listen to him speak sometimes to know that what he retained of him was not nearly as much as his older siblings. Instead, he had bonded so tightly to his stepfather, James, that he might have been the only father he'd ever known. James took this fact and this responsibility with great care, and still he ensured that Kermit's memory lived on in his young son.

Still, his young life had been the site of so many changes already, people coming and going, that it was no wonder he had attachment issues. Today, it showed in this bit of self-isolation.

"Can I come in?" Maya asked, her voice in quiet, hushed tones as she peered into the room. Thankfully, Wyatt simply nodded and didn't send her away. She walked in, returning the door to the way it had been before. When she went and sat across from him on the bed, her brother set aside his flashlight and moved to hug her, a good tight grip she welcomed with her own hold. "I have missed you so much," she spoke at his ear, rubbing his back and pressing a kiss to the top of his head.

"Missed you, too," Wyatt spoke into her shoulder.

"How come you're hiding in here, huh?" Maya asked as he pulled back. They sat here now, brother and sister in the dark save for a small pool of light from the flashlight on the blanket next to them and the stars on the ceiling. Wyatt lowered his eyes at this, a tiny bit ashamed. "I'm really sorry we didn't have everything the way we had it before. That doesn't mean you have to stay cooped up in here. The way I see it, we're the ones who made the rules, which means we get to decide if we want to bend them a little. We're going to go eat somewhere and then go see a movie. I'm going to need you there, bud, it's been too long, and I didn't come all this way not to spend time with _all_ of you. Please come with us? Please?" she gave her best pitiful smile, bowing her forehead to his. "We get to see Cara be all weird cute around her boyfriend…" she offered as incentive, which tugged a laugh out of the boy.

"I like Declan," he stated.

"Yeah? What's he like?" Maya asked. The only description she'd really gotten had come from Cara, which would possibly skew the results.

"He's nice," Wyatt nodded. "He knows all the best candy mix at the movies. And he has a band, too!" Maya smiled. Of course, she'd heard all about Declan's band from Cara. She would sometimes sing with them now. Declan played the guitar and sang, just as Cara did, just as Maya did. It was one of the first things they'd bonded over. "Cara and him, they took me to the planetarium last week."

"Well now I can't wait to meet him even more," Maya nodded.

"When Sam came last time, he met him," Wyatt jumped in, and Maya chuckled.

"I heard about that, yeah."

"He kept looking at him funny, and Cara would tell him to stop, but Declan didn't mind it. He's got little sisters, he said, so he got it." Even as Wyatt gave this report of the first encounter between Cara's older brother and her boyfriend, he looked like he clearly didn't understand all of it, especially what it was that Declan 'got.'

"How do you think _I_ should be, when I meet him? Scary or nice?" Maya asked, which made her brother laugh. "Oh, what, you don't think I can be scary?" Wyatt shook his head. "See, I'd try to show you, but I can't be scary around you, all I want to do is hug you like this!" she just about pounced on him, making him laugh even harder. "So, are we good?"

"Yeah!"

"Didn't quite get that, you're laughing too much," she smirked, as she went on tickling him. "Good?"

"Good!" Wyatt laughed. He was finally released as Maya's phone rang with the familiar tone of a Skype call. When she took out her phone, she smiled.

"Hey, look who it is… Go turn on the lights?" she asked her brother, who rolled off on to his feet and hurried to flip the light switch, returning them from the starlit darkness, before dashing to hop back on to the bed, making his sister and the phone shake. "Come here, come here," she pulled him until he sat in front of her and she could put her arms and the phone in front of them both, where Lucas, Sam, and Dylan all stared back, smiling and waving and greeting the siblings from back in Austin.

"Hi!" Wyatt waved back at them, his smile big and toothy… mostly toothy… He was missing a couple on the bottom and the top rows. Whenever he'd have straws, his favorite thing would be to stick it in the empty space between two teeth.

"Hey, dude, did you lose another one?" Sam asked his little brother, pointing to his mouth.

"Yeah," Wyatt pointed to the point in question. "That one had a lot of blood," he reported. "It was gross," he added, though this sounded more like 'it was great!'

"Sorry we couldn't be there this weekend, Wyatt," Lucas told him, and Maya had a feeling maybe they'd found out through one person or another back in the attic that the boy was having issues with them not being there, and now they were attempting to remedy the situation. "But you know, it doesn't mean we can't do something, just us guys, right?"

"It doesn't?" Wyatt asked.

"No, come on, it'll be like with you and Teddy and me, when we play video games," Sam pointed out. "Except there'll be all three of us, and you two, and MJ's on his way now."

"He is?" both Maya and Wyatt asked at once.

"Yeah, we called the Hunters a minute ago, he'll spend the night out here, so the six of us can have our thing, even if we're not all in the same place," Lucas explained. Wyatt turned his head up to look at his sister, who had to blink and release the look of amusement from her face. Leave it to those guys to remedy the situation so quickly. Now Wyatt was giving her a look she took to mean 'I know we just said we would bend the rules and I'd go with you, but is it okay if I stay here and do this instead?'

"Look at that," she smiled down at him. "Problem solved."

"Can I…" he pointed to the phone, and Maya handed it over. In a moment, Wyatt had dashed off, carrying three brothers in one hand as he went seeking another.

Maya turned off the flashlight, stepping back into the hall to come upon the last of her siblings in Tucson, presently carried by her mother. With a gasping smile, she happily received little Maisie, who appeared equally happy to see her.

"Hey, you know who I am, don't you? Yeah, you do, hey sis," Maya held the girl, the last of her siblings to be born, in just about every which way. Shawn and Katy had no intention to have another, and Abigail and James already had more than enough though they left themselves the slightest bit of room for a change of mind. As last ones went, Maisie was about the sweetest thing they could have asked for. Right now, she was also throwing Maya's baby fever for a loop, and she had to take a deep breath to focus on her sister and her mother.

"You've barely been here for five minutes and you already fixed Mr. Grumps back there," Abigail laughed, nodding to the attic, where her second youngest had disappeared a moment ago.

"Give me a wrench, I'll fix anything else you got," Maya cooed, lightly prodding Maisie's squishy cheeks, making the girl laugh. "I came this close to getting you and James a mostly kid-free night."

"Oh, no, we're out of here for the night, too," Abigail told her. "We'll be at Luna's. We wouldn't want to intrude on your Sleepster," she smiled, saying the word like she'd been hearing out of her kids all week. Maya chuckled, handing Maisie back to her.

"You could never."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	251. Their Flight to Sleepover

September 7th 2020

_Chapter 251  
Their Flight to Sleepover_

"Can we sit all the way in the front?" Eliza asked as the group marched on its way from the restaurant where they'd had dinner and over to the movie theater. Maya had been to Tucson a number of times, ever since her siblings had relocated from New York to live here, and by now the city had started to feel much less like a place she was still getting to know and much more like an extension of home. That wasn't just her house, up on the lane, with Lucas and Sam and the dogs, was it? It was anywhere her family was, and a sizable part of that family was here, in Tucson.

"You won't see anything," Cara told her little sister. "You'll hurt your eyes… and your neck."

"They wouldn't put seats there if you couldn't see the screen," Eliza countered, with a self-satisfied smirk. Emma, forever on her side, backed this up with a firm nod.

"You can go and sit in that front row if you want," Maya told the girls. "So long as you don't wander off and I always know where you are, okay? That means if you have to go to the bathroom you need to tell me first." The girls looked very satisfied with this arrangement, and they accepted it at once. "Anyway, we'll save you seats with us for when you figure out that the first row is no good," Maya added, almost in the same breath, and Eliza and Emma frowned, while Cara laughed.

"If they go, I want to go, too," Ginny informed her cousin.

"Me, too!" Sadie piped in, only to have her attention pulled ahead of them. "Look, there's Declan," she pointed to the ticket booth. "He's like us, you know?" she told Maya.

"I do, yeah," Maya confirmed with a smile.

"He's half Asian, like us, except we're Chinese, and he's Japanese," Ginny made sure to specify. But the other half is Irish, that part's the same."

"Thanks for the rundown," Maya nodded. "You guys spend a lot of time together?"

"He's there a lot when we go to Aunt Abby's house," Sadie told her.

Maya didn't know what was more amusing here, her cousins' Declan Report, or how Cara looked caught between wanting them to hurry up and get to the booth and wanting to make sure all this talk wouldn't get anywhere awkward. Apart from her, Riley looked like the only one to grasp this, and laughed when she nudged her oldest sister forward as the last people between them and the booth grabbed their tickets and moved along. The boy behind the glass had already spotted the little group coming along, with his girlfriend there among them, and his gaze had been divided between her and his previous customers. Once they'd gone and he could finally give her his complete attention, his whole face seemed to light up.

"Hey!" he spoke, reaching his hand through the opening in the glass, clasping Cara's hand as she came up to the counter and reached in, too. "I didn't know you guys were coming tonight, and…"

When he took in the rest of the group, he noticed Maya at once. There was really no mistaking who she was related to. He would likely have seen pictures, probably more, as Cara was bound to have shown him band videos, and he didn't look so surprised to find her here, so he had to know about the sleepover, but this was the first time they met, and knowing Cara, she would have painted her big sister as nothing short of an icon in her life. This would have stood level with meeting the parents.

"I hear breathing helps," Maya told him, from behind the pack of girls standing between the booth and her. Cara squeezed the boy's hand and he blinked. From what Maya had been hearing, meeting Abigail and James _had_ been like this.

"I'm paying, remember?" Sadie tapped her cousin's elbow.

"Yes, you've reminded me a few times," Maya teased, reaching in her pocket and handing over the money to her eight-year-old cousin, who pushed ahead of the pack now and dropped the bills in front of Declan, telling him what movie they wanted to see. After a beat, he tapped at his screen, took the money, and grabbed the tickets as they printed. He passed the small stack over to Sadie with the reverence of one who had met this request enough times to treat his small customers with the same respect as the adult ones. The fact that he was very good and very familiar with small girls, from dealing with his little sisters, was a bonus.

"Enjoy your movie," he nodded to the whole group. He gave Maya a nod she took to mean 'it's really nice to meet you.' She came very close to borrowing a move from her husband and tipping an invisible hat to him in passing.

"Text me when you're home," Cara told him as she followed the group. Declan nodded, back to reality and his job.

"Is he always this fidgety?" Maya asked her sister as they went in. The rest of the girls had made a run for the concession stand, Riley chasing after them, reminding them of the fact they'd just had dinner _and_ they had all those things back at the house.

"He'll relax once he gets to know you more," Cara explained, almost blushing. "He just wants to make a good impression. Not that he's not good the rest of the time, but well there's you, and there's Sam back in Texas…"

"Team Big Siblings," Maya grinned.

"Ready to kick his butt if he does anything wrong," Cara laughed.

"Who? Us?" Maya 'defended' herself.

"He's going to be applying to go to school in Austin, too, when _I_ do," Cara revealed, and this was news to her big sister. "Which means he's going to be seeing a lot of you two… and Lucas, too."

"Where's he going to be staying, an apartment, or…"

"He and the guys from his band are looking to get a place together, but if that doesn't work out he'll get in the dorms." She spoke with the confidence of one who had worked out this plan well enough already, probably so that, when she did bring it up, she wouldn't show any kind of uncertainty. Maya couldn't deny she was proud of her in that moment, though she tried not to show it too much and end up taking the fight out of her.

"He'll need a place to practice his music if he does that and he still wants to play. Now if only he had access to someone whose sister had a studio at her disposal…" she hummed. Cara just squealed, side-hugging her sister.

Maya had soon discovered, as she'd been put in a position to do so, that going to the movies with her family, with multiple younger brothers or sisters especially, would often be more memorable for what they had all done together than about the movie itself. Oh, it wasn't as though they didn't pay attention or didn't enjoy it, far from that. But if asked 'how was the movie?' tonight, she would first and foremost talk about meeting Cara's boyfriend, and then Eliza and Emma's adventures in the first row. They'd finally decided to give it a shot when they'd walked into the theater and gone to find their spot. The lights had gone down, the previews had started… Before the movie had even started, they had climbed up to rejoin their Sleepster crew and plopped down into their saved seats without a word.

The ride back to the house had been spent belting out one of the songs from the movie, which had been on enough of a radio rotation already as to be familiar to the girls. The Chen girls were particularly thrilled at getting to exceed their normal bed time because of the sleepover. Their mother had told them that they could stay up until Maya told them it was time to go to sleep, and then they had to do as she told. So long as they weren't sleepy zombies on Monday morning when they went to school, then all was well.

They arrived back to find a quiet house. Teddy sat on the couch, headphones on his head to cut the sound of his game on the big screen while he had his baby sister strapped to his chest, his arms around her until they met at the controller in his hands. Maisie slept, and so did Wyatt, curled up on the couch next to him. When he noticed the others had returned, Teddy paused his game and pulled off the headset.

"Hey," he whispered.

"Wild night here?" Riley asked, smirking much as Maya and Cara did.

"He tried to tough it out, but he was nodding off for a while. Finally gave it up, but I left him here in case he woke up."

"As tempting as it would be to wake him, I think he'll be better off heading up to bed," Maya nodded. Teddy stood now, carefully pulling the babe from the sling and passing her over. Cara deferred to her older sister, and Maya gladly took her, the better to enjoy all the Maisie cuddles she could get while she had the chance. Teddy left the sling on the couch before lifting up his sleeping brother and carrying him up the stairs. He let them know he'd be staying up in his own room, so they could have the living room if they weren't going to bed yet.

"Do we have to go?" Ginny asked, her little sister echoing her 'I don't want to go yet' face. Maya looked at the time, shared a look and a silent conversation with Riley, before turning back to her cousins.

"One hour, _or_ whenever I get a yawn out of either of you. Deal?" The girls agreed. "We are way too dressed for this, go on and get your PJs on, all of you," Maya herded them up the stairs.

A few minutes later, they returned down the stairs after having dropped Maisie off at her crib and grabbing the baby monitor. There was a bit of fascination, as was to be expected, from the Chen girls, when they noticed the flowered branch tattoo peeking out of either side of her camisole strap. They had never seen it before. Next thing they knew, Maya was provided with washable markers and put to work in drawing some temporary tattoos for the rest of the Sleepster crew.

She finished Cara's – who asked for music notes, over her heart – when her phone gave off the chirp of an incoming text, and she disappeared up the stairs, promising to be back in a few minutes. Maya watched her go. Whether she liked it or not, her little sister was growing up. It had been a hard truth to come by when it had been Sam, the one she'd been closest to, always, but he'd always been so much more reserved, awkward, and if it wasn't that he kept getting taller, they would hardly notice that he was getting older for a while.

But Cara… Cara had always been bolder than him, something she shared with their big sister. Here and now, it really felt as though Maya was seeing it more than ever. Her sister may still have been a teenager, but in many ways she was so much more of an adult at this age than their brother had been, and he'd already been in college at the time. If it wasn't that she'd already agreed to take her in at the house over her college years, Maya would have wanted it more than ever, just so that she would be provided with a chance to get to know her little sister and the woman she was growing into.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	252. Their Flight to Stories

September 8th 2020

_Chapter 252  
Their Flight to Stories_

"When did you get those?" Riley laughed as quietly as she could when she spotted Maya coming back down the stairs with her bag. She had told her to get back down here after the last of the girls had gone to bed, and now the bride-to-be looked as though she knew exactly what was in that bag. She was not wrong. After getting her to head into the kitchen, Maya unloaded the bag of its contents, of construction paper, and glue, and markers, and – very importantly – of glitter.

"It's all about finding your moment. You know, if we were back in Austin, I could have dipped into my supply closet at school, could have had more colors," she nodded to the small bottles of glitter. "They're more for special occasions… decorations… than the actual classes, but you know, sometimes, you just need something to sparkle, high school or not. Now, would you like to be in charge of that step?" she asked, in a tone overly serious, especially for the giddy way in which Riley nodded in response.

Soon, they had themselves something of an assembly line, as Maya traced and cut out her paddles, adding the numbers in the middle and showing Riley where she wanted her to apply the glitter. When she suggested a handle, Maya blinked a moment before disappearing up the stairs for a new mission. It would be easy enough, as her sisters were not in their room, which would make it that much easier for her to go digging through their supplies again. She had been happy to find they still had a lot of things at her disposal, but then she could just see them using any and all things at their disposal in their fashion explorations, enough that they would have those items for themselves and their little siblings. This made it so that Maya returned victoriously with a load of wooden popsicle sticks.

"You know what these still remind me of?" Riley asked, as she started to carefully add handles to her already glittered paddles.

"That time you made a house with them and Stanley Voss smashed it?"

"Yeah," Riley gave a small laugh which felt entirely more cheerful thinking back on the incident than she had been when it had actually happened.

"Smashed _him_ right back," Maya wiggled in her chair as she traced a number seven on one of the paddles.

"You punched him in the nose," Riley recalled.

"Yeah, and neither one of us got out of that one without some pain."

"You were seven, your hands were tiny."

"They're not that much bigger now," Maya joked, showing her right hand. "Anyway, I didn't mean to punch him, just wanted to scare him a little, but then he moved, and I tripped, and bam, broken little chick fingers," she flexed these long-mended digits. "I think I would have forgotten most of it except I really just remember my mom showing up at school to come and get me. She came in and she looked like she'd been working up something to reprimand me the whole way in, because all they told her was that I'd 'beaten up' one of the other kids. But then the moment she saw me sitting there, all sniffly with my hand all taped up, it was like a switch flipped, and now it was fear and concern and indignation about who had hurt her baby girl, and I remember how I just rambled on and told her what had happened, because I wanted to make sure she heard my side of it first. She took my side, no questions asked. Sometimes I think she could have been a lawyer, in another life, if the stage hadn't called her," she stated with a flair of drama, which made Riley chuckle. "And sometimes I think about moments like those, and it's like I realize for the first time how young she was at the time. When _that_ happened, she was younger than we are now, and that's just…"

"Yeah…" Riley nodded, understanding. After a few seconds, they got back to work on their paddles.

The night had already felt like a rousing success by the time they'd come back from dinner and the movie, so really the time they had then spent with the girls back here at the house had felt like the cherry on top.

The 'one hour or one yawn' rule had been enacted, with the yawn winning out, about halfway through the allotted time. They had all still been in the midst of getting their 'tattoos' from Maya, and she had just finished the requested puppy on Sadie's leg when her sister yawned, slapping a hand over her mouth almost just as soon. It had taken a reminder that the sleepover didn't finish with tonight, and that Maya and Riley would still be here all through the next day and night, for them to agree to go up to the attic and their sleeping bags. This had started a cascade, taking along Eliza and Emma almost at the same time, which had left only the two visitors and the eldest, Cara. They'd checked to see if Teddy was still awake and might want to join them, but he was content playing on his computer, so they let him be.

To sit there in the living room, the three of them, with some of the as yet untouched snacks… It had always been a highlight of their sleepovers, these 'overtime' moments, with whoever of the older kids was able to stick it out. Eliza and Emma might have been here with them for this if they hadn't turned in already, but then Maya was sort of glad it was just her and Riley and Cara, as it put her oldest little sister in a position where she probably felt more at ease discussing certain things with her big sister.

Having seen Cara and Declan together in person for the first time, had hit Maya in a way she had not expected. Sure, she'd been hearing all about how the evolution of their relationship, from when she'd met him, to how great of a friend he had become, to her developing feelings for him, and then him asking her out, and the first date, and the first kiss… It didn't take much in the way of input from the other kids, telling of this time or that time when they or their parents had interrupted some lingering kisses to know that they were getting more and more comfortable with one another, and now tonight, at the theater, after seeing them, after Cara mentioned that Declan was also planning to come to Austin…

Maya had been taken back to a moment, it didn't feel all too long ago, when she'd sat there with Sam and given him 'the talk.' It had been uncomfortable for both siblings, but it had been necessary, as Sam and Cecilia had started circling that subject and Sam was in his sister's care, his sister's home. That one had been her responsibility, and she'd handled it, but Cara… Surely, Abigail or James would have taken on the task, yeah? She had to trust that, when the time came, this would be something else Cara turned to her big sister to discuss, and Maya would be there for her when she did. If this didn't happen for a good while still, she would not be opposed either… but she doubted it would be much longer.

When Cara had called it a night and headed up to the attic, Maya had watched her go, that thrumming of her heart still going. That was the part they didn't prepare you for, wasn't it? That age gap between her siblings and her, it had never felt like so much of a big deal, not until they'd gone and grown into those teenage years, and suddenly they made her feel less like a sibling and more like a parent, before she even had kids of her own. It was the strangest place to be, rewarding when it wasn't completely awkward, as it was here.

"You've got a weird look on your face," Riley told Maya, as she was applying glitter to number nine. She'd finished cutting and tracing the last of the paddles, which left her side of the activity handled. Now she'd just been sitting there, twirling the number one paddle between her fingers like a baton. When Riley spoke, she almost dropped it before swiftly catching it and setting it down unharmed.

"Huh? Oh… No, it's nothing," she shook her head.

"Maya," Riley gave her a look which felt sufficiently Topanga-like to break through, as though teenage Maya had taken control of her brain and opened the door for her, out of reflex.

"Just some uncomfortable big sister/little sister reflections," Maya shrugged. "Really nothing you want to be thinking about… like ever… except sooner or later you don't have a choice." Riley received this with a small nod, and Maya pointed a finger at her. "Do not head shrink me."

"No, no, I would never," Riley assured her.

"Because you only use your superpowers for good?" Maya teased, making her best friend smile. She was fairly sure Riley knew what she'd been saying without saying it, but she knew it for sure once she followed the brief silence with…

"Would I be a bad big sister if I told you about when my parents gave August _his_ big talk?" It was just as well that Maya wasn't the one in charge of the glitter in that moment.

"I… I don't know… Would it be a conflict of interest? I mean he's my student… for a few weeks more… but I've also known him all his life and have, on one or two occasions, helped to change his diaper?"

"Well…" Riley reflected. "No one has to know but us," she pointed out, and Maya smirked. "I probably would have told you anyway, sooner or later, if you _hadn't_ been his teacher."

"You are weird, and I love you," Maya resettled in her chair, like an invitation to hear this tale. "When did they…"

"Oh, he was fourteen," Riley nodded firmly.

"Wait, for real?" Maya sat up now.

"Yeah," Riley chuckled. "I happened to be visiting that weekend, and I think they thought it would make it less awkward if it wasn't just the two of them and him, if I was there, too."

"Oh, Matthews," Maya bowed her head, imagining how traumatized August would have been, receiving the sex talk with his sister sitting right there.

"I think he came this close to developing spontaneous invisibility powers," Riley told her. "My mom was going in there, all business like, and it just reminded me of when they gave _me_ that talk, but I think it was different for her then, because she had that whole 'woman to woman' thing to lean on. With August, it was 'her little boy,' and she kind of went off the rails a bit."

"Did she cry?" Maya tried not to laugh.

"Oh, no, she turned into something like a drill sergeant, about protection, and consent, and waiting…" Riley recalled, putting on a face that felt very much like her mother's.

"Wow… just… wow," Maya shook her head. "Do I dare ask how your father handled it?"

"He definitely went into that one with a plan, but I'm pretty sure the plan was about passing on whatever weird moment he must have had with _his_ dad when he was younger. When it was my turn, he barely said a word, mostly his eyes had a big 'please don't' in them," Riley gestured to her face with a sparkly finger, shaking her head. "Whenever they get on Hunter with all that, they better leave me and August out of it."

"Well that's going to make for some weird dreams tonight…" Maya breathed as they collected the completed paddles and cleaned up the kitchen. Riley grinned.

"Should be even weirder when you see my dad at school on Monday."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	253. Their Flight to Dresses

September 9th 2020

_Chapter 253  
Their Flight to Dresses_

"Pancake… pancake… pancake…" Eliza intoned as she dropped one in each of Abigail, James, and Teddy's plates, while Emma carried the platter. They had tag teamed in making breakfast that morning, chasing off anyone who even tried to help. James had taken much pleasure out of teasing his girls, asking what they were doing, suggesting that he might stir, or measure… They would shoo him and he would laugh, returning to his seat until the next run up.

"Look!" Sadie held up her hands, mystified, to show that there was glitter on her fingers. Surprise glitter was definitely something she liked, first thing in the morning.

"Where did that come from?" Abigail asked, looking from her niece to her baby daughter, who was picking at the bits of fruit she'd been given. Sadie shrugged.

"You have to go wash your hands, don't want to eat any of that," Maya casually told her, taking a sip of her coffee as she turned to look at Riley. She might as well have been whistling.

"That stuff gets everywhere," James prodded at the crack where the table could be opened up to lay an extension panel, his finger coming back sparkly.

"So, what are you girls up to today?" Abigail looked around to her daughters, nieces, and guest.

"We haven't decided yet," Maya looked at the others. "Although… we do have a _lot_ of candy somewhere that needs eating. Oh, and, uh, Riley and I need to go and do this thing later, this afternoon."

"What thing?" Cara asked. Maya had told Riley to let her handle this part. Even after all these years, she was still all too likely to tip her hand and show that she was lying.

"Kind of thing that, if I tell you, it won't be a surprise anymore," Maya told her sister, and that was that. She told no lies, and now they were free to figure out what they'd all do the rest of the morning and up until she and Riley had to head out.

The ideas were tossed back and forth across the table, and it was something of a challenge for them to make a choice. This was nothing new though, was it? They didn't get to see each other nearly enough, so when they _did_ see each other, making up for lost time meant trying to do as much as possible.

"I can cancel the appointment," Riley had whispered to Maya after they left the table. "I didn't think this through, you should be here, with your sisters and your brothers."

"Riley, you're my sister, too, and this is a big day for you. We're going to find your dress today," Maya vowed, keeping her eye. Riley smiled; she knew to trust her word, always.

The morning went by in a flash, but then that was usually the way with these visits, whether Maya was the visitor or the visited. Sometimes, they'd hit these points where they wished, more than anything, that they could bridge the distance even further than they'd done when the Harts had moved from New York to Arizona. But then how could they, right? The Hart-Lanes had their life in Tucson, and they couldn't very well be expected to uproot it all, while Maya had her house, her life with Lucas, her career… careers… All they could really do was take comfort in this shortened distance, as they'd done these past few years.

"Right. Got my paddles, got our notes, got our bride…" Maya counted off as she sat at the wheel. Riley whooped, sitting by her side. "Let's go find you that dress."

"You're going to cry, aren't you?" Riley asked as they took off.

"What's their stock on tissues out there, I might need a few boxes."

Walking into the bridal shop, just the two of them, they might as well have stepped over into another world, filled every which way with those white dresses. Stepping into that world, they were just a pair of small girls, who'd been playing dress up for so long, and now… Now they were stepping up into the big leagues.

"There are so many…" Riley breathed.

"Hey, keep it together, we're good, you're good," Maya promised. "We're going to go in there, and we're going to show them the dresses we were looking at, see if they have any of them, and we'll go from there. Okay? Now, remember what we said? We're going to do our best to find your dress, but you can't just settle for whatever one you liked best by the end of the day. It has to be _the one_. If we have to continue this back in Austin, that's what we're going to do, okay?"

"Yeah," Riley replied, with the kind of fire in her she'd get whenever they convinced her to step out and throw the basketball around, or when they'd get her playing video games. A few of the customers and salespeople turned back almost at once.

"Take it down a notch," Maya mumbled, ushering her best friend forward.

"Sorry," Riley whispered.

"No, that's good, just work that Topanga magic on the inside, and on the outside…"

"You want me to be my dad?" Riley asked, giving a pitch perfect awkward Cory smile. Maya landed between cringing and laughing.

"Teacher mode Matthews," she tapped her friend's shoulders. Riley considered this for a moment before nodding. She had this.

Once they had been accosted by Jordan, a woman who had to be about their age and who would be helping Riley today, they were off to the races. Jordan was shown the dresses they had been looking at, and she immediately went about collecting the ones she had in store, and a few options that came close to the ones she did not. Riley disappeared with her, while Maya was left to settle on to a cushy couch, with her phone at the ready – for comparative photos and notes – and very importantly her paddles for scoring.

Oh, how badly she wanted to tell Lucas about this, or Nadine… But no. This was supposed to be just between them, and that was what it would be. She was good here, cross-legged and riding solo on this couch, waiting eagerly for her first and best friend of two decades to step out here in the first wedding dress she would try on… and…

"Sorry, do you have any tissues handy?" she craned her neck to address one of the other salesgirls passing by. She was passed a box, which she settled in her lap as she turned back around and waited… waited…

Maya would swear to any and all who would listen that she knew Riley was coming, even before she saw even an inch of that flowy skirt or heard so much as a word out of her. She _felt_ her coming, and she looked up, moments before she appeared. The second she did come into view… Maya felt her insides shift, her throat tightening as she pulled a tissue from the box and held it in her grip.

"Woah…" her voice trembled as she smiled. She could tell Riley was riding a fine line between control and chaos, and she wanted to help keep her focused, but it was no use when _she_ was losing it, too.

"It's lighter than I thought it would be," Riley declared. She looked almost scared to touch the fabric, like she might have developed stains to transfer out of nowhere. When she noticed her friend on the very verge of tears, her smile bloomed. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

"It was beautiful on its own. Now it's on you and it defies the word," Maya promised, fanning her face in an effort to regain her composure. This was the first one, and it was natural that it would hit her hard. The other ones would be easier, wouldn't they? Still, she had to think straight, not to let this shockwave dictate her feelings on the dress. Maybe it would score so low as to eventually be insignificant. Alright, no, that wasn't true, it was stellar no matter what.

On the plane, they had come up with the criteria that would help them decide what did or didn't make a dress a standout. Maya ticked through each one in her head, snapping photos from the front and the back as Riley turned about on command. Finally, she considered her friend and the dress long and hard before reaching for a paddle and holding it up.

"Eight," Riley read it and smiled.

"A strong start. Now, go try another one," Maya waved her off. "Hey, Jordan!" she called to the woman, as Riley had already disappeared and she turned to follow. The brunette stopped and turned back again. Maya motioned for her to come closer, all the while checking that Riley wasn't coming back. "I know what she told you, budget wise, but if you have anything back there that fits her likings that… exceeds it… just let me know?"

Jordan understood her loud and clear, and she headed off to find her client. Maya sat back into the couch with a hum. Of all the times this moment might have played through her head, she really could not predict it would play out this way, and the fact that it did… Well, it was pretty good, she couldn't lie.

The first dress had given way to a handful more, and while Maya was glad to see that the 'first dress, big shock' theory proved true, it did not spare her from getting emotional more than once as she watched Riley parade through in her next options. She really didn't know what it was about seeing your friends in wedding dresses that triggered this deluge of feelings, but whatever it was, she was feeling it big time. After the strong start of the first dress, the next few had gotten a six, and then a seven, and then a three, and a five…The lower scores looked like they might have started to bring down Riley's spirits, but then as she'd gone back to the dressing room after the five, Jordan had caught Maya's eye and given her a nod. The next ones were taking on the requested budget nudge. Whether they'd make for higher scores or not…

"Hey, there's that smile," Maya grinned, seeing the look on Riley's face when she next returned. "Better?"

"So much," Riley nodded. "I'm thinking maybe an eight again?"

"Hey, hey, I'm the one with the paddles here," Maya 'scolded' her. "_Your_ sparkles were not stuck on with stick glue." Riley tipped her head, 'relenting,' before looking to her friend in wait of a score. Maya took a deep breath, observing her. "I should have made half-point paddles," she finally hummed. "I'm going to say 8.5."

"Is that just so you don't say eight?" Riley gave her a look.

"No, no, this one is definitely a hair better than the first one," Maya told her. "Anyway, it's clearly not a ten yet, so you have to go back. Go, go."

The next one was a ten. It might have been an eleven, a twelve. The difference was clear as soon as Riley walked back out from the changing room. She walked swifter, a new bounce in her step. And if that wasn't enough, well, Maya had such a reaction to seeing her that she'd just pulled a couple of tissues from the box at once.

"Riley… You look magical…" she breathed, attempting to clear her vision of the blur of tears.

"I think… Is it…" Riley turned from the mirror to look at her, nervous optimism in her eyes. _Is this a ten? Is this The Dress or am I making things up?_

"Can you get her hair up, all the other…" Maya looked to Jordan, who moved at once, knowing exactly what to do next. "Riley, keep your eyes closed, okay?"

"Yes, Mrs. Friar," she intoned, like a student in class.

"Ha, funny," Maya smiled. Did she take the opportunity to wipe tears from her face? Okay, yes.

Maya tried not to look either as Jordan did her part. She wanted to see the finished product in one go, same as Riley would. She was made to open her eyes again by a tap of the salesgirl's hand on her shoulder, and she covered her mouth at once to hold down the gasp as she stood from the couch, swiping up her 10 paddle at the ready. Riley was made to turn toward the mirror, carefully so she would not trip on the dress as she went, and finally she could open her eyes, too.

"Maya…" she breathed, and her best friend came up with the tissues. "This is it, isn't it?"

"I don't know, but if you don't get this one I might not be your matron of honor anymore, because I clearly would have failed you."

When Riley asked and was told the price, she paused for a moment before turning her head back to Maya, who immediately gave her a confident tip of the head that said 'you're fine, don't worry about it, I got you.' She looked ready to cry again, reaching to hug her best friend and matron of honor.

"Love you, sis," Maya whispered at her ear.

They couldn't just up and leave with the dress that day, but by the time they left the shop, everything was set so that, when it was ready, the dress would be delivered to Austin.

"I think I need to lie down for a while…" Riley declared as she and Maya walked back out on to the street, breathing deep.

"Good thing we're headed back to our sleepover then," Maya smiled, locking her arm with her best friend's. "We just need to make one more stop on the way back." Riley looked at her, not following. "Well, I told them there was going to be a surprise, didn't I? I've got just the thing, it's all set for pick up."

"When did you…"

"Well I had to do _something_ while I was waiting for you to change. It was either that or walk around and end up pulling a hundred dresses down for you to try." Riley laughed. "I'm really glad you decided to do it like this," Maya told her. "I'm going to remember this for a long time."

"So will I," Riley echoed the feeling.

"You're going to need to get that look off your face before we get back to the house, otherwise your secret will definitely not stay one for very long." Riley almost whined, as though now that she was back in her regular clothes she missed the dress. "Yeah, that doesn't go away," Maya gestured at her face.

"It doesn't?"

"Oh, definitely not. I may have pulled _my_ dress back on a few times since last summer… That stays between us," Maya pointed. Riley nodded at once.

"Sister secret."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	254. Their Help to Grow

September 10th 2020

_Chapter 254  
Their Help to Grow_

"Hey, come here," Maya called down the hall when she spotted Derek Boggs further out, bag over his shoulder, looking very much like someone who wasn't where he was supposed to be. When she called to him, he turned, saw her, and sighed. Busted.

"I was just going to the bathroom," he hooked his thumb back over his shoulder as he approached her.

"That right?" Maya asked, and the boy nodded. She kept on looking at him, waited for him to see how he'd gone and put himself in a lie. The boys' bathroom was in fact just a few feet past where she stood. "Where did you come from, Science?" she asked.

"Yeah," Derek confirmed.

"And does Mr. Brett know you're not there right now?"

"No," he shrugged. "Class is almost over anyway." Maya looked at her watch. Ten minutes left.

"Alright, come on," she grabbed the stack of notices she'd volunteered to put up over her free period and her roll of tape and started the junior on his way back to his class. Reluctantly, he followed. "Where _were_ you going?" Maya asked him.

"Out," Derek told her.

"Important lunch date?"

"Not exactly."

"Look, I'm not here looking to get you in trouble. You level with me, and I'll smooth it over with Mr. Brett, okay?" He was not one for confiding, that much she'd been able to tell for all the months she'd been his teacher, but right now he'd gone and put himself into a position where he had to choose what was more important.

"Last year, just before Christmas, my best friend had to leave school. She was really sick, for a while they didn't know if she'd make it, but she started getting better." The tone of his voice was so much different than she'd heard out of him before. The only other time she could say she'd heard him speak this way was when he'd come into class on Halloween. Other than that, the story called up another memory, one of sitting up in the attic, going through the files in Mrs. Yang's box. There had been one, in the same folder as Derek's, Leon's, and the rest of this year's juniors' that had a post-it note on top. _Extended absence, see administration._

"Helena Zimmerman," she recalled aloud, and Derek nodded.

"Her parents want to keep her at home, keep home schooling her until she graduates. But she wants to come back, do senior year with us. Today, she's supposed to find out if they'll let her. I just wanted to go over to her house and see her, I would have been back for class this afternoon," Derek insisted. Maya looked at him, and she could imagine what it would be like for him, next year, whether or not his friend was back among them. It gave her an immense pleasure then to be able to give him the answer he'd been so eager to learn. The file wasn't the only place she'd seen that name.

"Don't tell anyone I showed you this, okay?" she reached into her pocket for her phone. A few taps pulled up an e-mail she'd received just an hour ago. It informed her and several other teachers of a student returning after an extended absence, in September, and asked them to get in touch with her about any catching up that might be done over the summer before Miss Zimmerman rejoined the seniors of the graduating class of 2029.

When she handed Derek her phone and he read this, he looked very near to breaking out in tears even as he smiled from ear to ear. It changed his face so completely, and Maya felt those emotions radiating off of him, like he might have hugged her in that moment.

"Good to go?" Maya asked him, smiling back. He nodded, like he wasn't able to muster the words, holding up a finger. She watched him process the relief swirling through him, checked her watch. "Alright, just… go to my class? I'll go talk to Mr. Brett."

As it turned out, the only reason Derek had been able to sneak off from his class was that the science teacher had been distracted, and the cause of that distraction had been that same e-mail Maya had shown her student. Helena had been the top of Brett's class, and he'd been deeply affected by her whole ordeal. Finding out that she was returning had been the best thing he'd heard all year. Derek's 'escape' would stay between them.

When Maya returned to her class, the bell had rung, sending the kids off to lunch, which would mean Stella and Phoebe would either be in the class already or they'd be on their way, and for a moment as she came up to the door and overheard a female voice, she figured it was the former. Instead, she stepped into her class to find Derek standing across from…

"Mom? What are you doing here?" she asked, surprised. "I mean… hi…"

"Stepping in for Lily, she couldn't make it out today," Katy explained. "But that's good, because I needed to talk to you anyway."

"Oh, okay, good, I just… Give me a minute?" Maya asked, indicating Derek.

"Sure, sure, go ahead," Katy stepped back. "I brought lunch, I can set up."

"Great," Maya smiled, pulling her student aside. "Hey, so I talked to Mr. Brett. You two should really have a talk about Helena sometimes," she recommended. "For today you're in the clear, just… maybe don't do it again?"

"I won't," Derek promised. "Thanks, Mrs. Friar." After he left, Maya spun on her heel to look at her mother.

"Still gets me when one of them says that," she beamed.

"Come and eat while it's hot," Katy chuckled.

"So… Business or pleasure first?" Maya asked as they ate.

"Business, get it out of the way," Katy decided. "It shouldn't take too long anyway. Lily only needs you to confirm a few things here." As promised, the theater part of the day didn't take more than a few minutes. In that time, Stella and Phoebe had come along, settling in as they did every day. They were always very respectful when they came into the room and their teacher had someone there with her, whether it was Lily, or Lucas, or Morgan the music teacher…

"Alright, that's done," Maya handed the files back to her mother before taking up her food again. "Now, what's the good stuff?" Katy laughed for a moment, and Maya could sense she'd been pressing down on her emotions all this time. Now that she was allowed to let them out it was all a matter of making it a controlled release. "Mom?" Maya asked. "You're not having another kid again, are you?" she teased, and her mother stared at her.

"No, no, that is done, five is a good number."

"Alright, just checking," Maya smirked.

"It _is_ about your brother and sisters though… sort of," Katy went on.

"Okay?"

"Would you and Lucas be able to have them at your house for a couple weeks?"

"Wait, weeks? What's going on?" Maya sat up, confused. Katy grinned.

"I got a job, I mean… I got a part, a guest starring role, on a tv show," she revealed, and Maya just barely stifled the squeal of surprise that came bursting out of her.

"What… How… When did that happen? _How_…" she blinked.

"Why don't you ask her?" Katy smiled on, nodding past her daughter. Maya turned her head and found the girls staring back, Stella with a small smile of her own. She clearly had not expected to be in the room when her teacher heard the news. Maya waved her over, and she came, her best friend on her heel.

Eventually, the story was pieced together, between Katy and Stella's contributions. All this time, Maya had known that Stella had grown up in Los Angeles. She also knew that she'd done commercials as a kid. She knew her mother would sometimes be absent for some stretches of time, at which point her father would be left to look after her. What she _didn't _know was how all these facts tied together, but today she learned it. Stella's mother was an actress, and a successful one at that. She'd been in the business for nearly three decades, and while she still acted occasionally, she had since shifted to writing and directing. It allowed her, most importantly, to live this quieter life, out here in Austin, with her husband and her youngest daughter.

On the day when Stella and her art teacher had exchanged tales of her commercials and of Katy's acting, the girl had gone home and told her mother what she'd heard, as she told her of all her school days. Nothing had come of it for some time, until a conversation with a friend back in LA had led to Stella's mother remembering Katy. She'd looked her up, when she'd first heard of her through her daughter, and just sort of filed away what she'd seen as a potential for… something. After going from Maya, to Stella, to Stella's mother, Katy's tale had reached a new ear, new eyes, and soon a call was made. An audition was filmed, and sent off, and slowly but surely the process advanced until Katy was told that she'd been cast, and she would need to fly to LA… in two days.

The whole time, from when the offer had reached Katy, she'd been convinced by Shawn not to let the opportunity pass her up, and that they would make it work. When she had been told she had the part, and how soon she was expected to get to LA, they'd needed to figure a few things out right then and there. First and foremost was what this would mean for the kids. Katy could have gone out there on her own, while Shawn stayed back and looked after them, but then he'd just known it would be a lot for his wife to be out there on her own, so he would go along, the better to help keep her going steady through those two weeks. If he would go with her, then they had to make sure the kids would be in the best place possible. There was no question as to who they'd ask first.

"Of course, we'll take them, are you kidding?" Maya laughed. She could count on Lucas being on board for this without asking, though of course she would call him as soon as possible. When it came to family, the answer was always yes. "Have you told them yet?"

"No, and I was hoping you guys could come over for dinner tonight, for when we do tell them," Katy explained.

"Consider us there," Maya nodded, finally blinking and rising to embrace her mother and congratulate her. She wanted to hear everything, about the show, the character, the audition, everything, but it would have to wait until that evening. Katy needed to get back to the theater as soon as they were done eating. Stella and Phoebe were brought into the lunch, gathering their food and bringing it over as a couple of stools were joined to the desk.

_Maya: Get back asap tonight? Dinner at my parents'.  
__Lucas: Got it.  
__Lucas: Special reason? Do I need to pick up anything?  
__Maya: No, I'll go this afternoon.  
__Lucas: So there IS a special reason?  
__Maya: Long story short? Mom got a part. On TV!  
__Lucas: What? That's amazing!  
__Maya: And she needs us to take the kids for two weeks while she and Dad are in LA.  
__Lucas: I'll get the room across the hall set up with Sam. Should we just keep Haley with us?  
__Maya: Yeah, that sounds perfect.  
__Maya: Kind of wish I was kissing you right now.  
__Lucas: I'll take in IOU, cashing tonight.  
__Maya: 366, Huckleberry._

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	255. Their Help to Watch

September 11th 2020

_Chapter 255  
Their Help to Watch_

"Hey, you," Maya laughed, picking up her little sister when she came dashing up and held out her arms. Lifted up at last, Haley Hunter hugged her big sister with great energy. "Did you have a good day?" She nodded repeatedly. "Tell me _all_ about it, spare no details," Maya requested as she started them on their way from the preschool to the elementary school up the street.

Neither she nor Lucas had been there in the morning, as Katy and Shawn had dropped off the kids at their respective schools, but from the text she'd gotten from her mother, confirming they were on the plane about to take off for LA, it had been about as tricky as they'd expected it would be. When they'd told the four of them about Katy's getting the role that would get her on television, they'd all been ecstatic, whether because they understood what this meant or because the rest of their siblings were cheering so maybe that was what they were all supposed to be doing.

Now, when they learned that this meant their mother and father being gone for two whole weeks, the mood had started to waver. As quickly as they could go and wedge in the fact that they would be spending those weeks with Maya and Lucas and Sam, it didn't stop MJ and Haley from expressing immediate distress at the thought of their parents going away. MJ had spent the rest of the dinner like a small ball of a boy perched on his chair, while Haley had gone and burrowed herself in her father's arms and remained there right up until he'd taken her up to her room and she'd fallen asleep.

She had cheered up some, by the look of her now. Haley cheerfully retold her day to her sister, and while she did not discount a bit of a tantrum later in the evening, Maya did nothing to disturb the littlest Hunter's current state of mind. Dropping her off at preschool that morning had given way to such high pitched wailing that Katy had come within a hair's breadth of dropping the whole thing, no LA, no television, and while he hadn't found it any easier, Shawn had been left to convince her to leave their daughter in the care of her very capable teacher.

"That's all," Haley raised her hands as she finished her story, right on time for their arrival at the elementary school.

"Well thank you for telling me all that!" Maya laughed. _With any luck, your big brother will have had a good day, too._ "Let's go find the others, yeah?" she set the three-year-old down and took her hand as they walked into the school to find the twins and MJ.

"Hey, Friar!" a voice called up the hallway. Maya smirked, turning to find Zay jogging up toward them. "What are you doing here, trying to poach some of my kids for _your_ school?" he teased.

"Yeah, three of them, familiar looking?" Maya informed him, gesturing to herself and Haley, who had her best smile on. She loved her Uncle Zay, as he had come to be called. After a moment, Maya came to stand behind her sister, the better to put her hands over her ears, which Haley thought was a fun game. "They're staying with Lucas and me while our parents are in LA," Maya quietly explained.

"Oh, right, yeah," Zay nodded. Maya still felt that reflex of asking if there were any news in the baby department, but she held it down. If they had gotten a call, if it was finally happening, they would have told her and Lucas. "I can hold on to this one while you go look for them," Zay offered.

"That would be good, actually. Wanna go with Uncle Zay?" Maya looked down to her sister, who responded to this question by stepping up to the man and holding up her arms.

"Alright, let's go, lil' Hunter, I'm going to give you a crash course on numbers, you'll be the star of the pre-school set," Zay told the three-year-old as he carried her off to his classroom.

After watching them go, catching Haley's insistence that she could already count to twenty and Zay's request for a demonstration, Maya went to find the rest of her siblings. They were all in the gym today, all those who hadn't been picked up or hadn't gone on the school bus. The twins were soon spotted tossing a ball around with a few of their classmates, while MJ… MJ…

"Where are you, Sneaky?" Maya muttered to herself before she finally spotted the six-year-old sitting on one of the benches lining the wall, holding his star-speckled backpack in his lap. Alright, so maybe he would need a bit more time to adjust without their parents. "Hey, bud," she went and sat with him. He looked up at the sound of her voice and almost instantly reached over to hug her. "You know these two weeks will be over in no time," she assured him, brushing at his hair.

"I know that," he declared. "Mom said she would bring me back all the starry things she could find, and… and there would be a lot because she was going where there's a lot of stars."

"Yeah, she is," Maya nodded. "So, you're not upset about that anymore?" she had to ask. He was clearly upset about _something_, so if this wasn't it… "Did something happen today?" she asked him. He was quiet for a few seconds. "Hey, MJ, it's okay," she spoke in a soft voice, seeking his line of sight. "What happened?"

"Mikey, he said something bad," MJ finally revealed. Maya could see the boy, far across the gym, with the remaining first grade boys. Some of them were looking back, and she did not like the looks on their faces, young as they were.

"To you?" she asked MJ. He nodded. "What did he say?"

"He… He called me something. I don't know what it means, but Ms. Sara heard him say it and she got really mad and made him sit in the corner." MJ's teacher was also in the gym, keeping an eye on the boys. _She_ looked like she was readying herself to talk to Mikey's parents and she did not look forward to it, something Maya sympathized with.

"Okay, come with me," she stood, taking her brother's hand and walking the length of the gym until she reached the teacher. Thankfully, this journey also got Nellie and Gracie to spot their sister and brother. They came running over, and Maya asked them to go get their things and go wait for her in Zay's classroom with Haley.

When the kids had gone, she turned to the teacher, who explained what had happened with MJ and Mikey earlier that day in as calm a tone as she could do, even though she was clearly very upset underneath the surface. She wouldn't be alone in this once she told Maya what word Mikey had called her brother. She couldn't even bear to repeat it, could barely stand to have it in her head.

"I don't think he even knew what he was saying, and MJ didn't understand it either. When I talked to Mikey, he said his older brother is the one who said it, and he was just repeating it," Ms. Sara shook her head. Maya knew Mikey's brother, of course, from anytime she'd picked up MJ from his friend's house. He was a year above the twins, which meant he might be in Zay's class…

"You'll be speaking with the parents?" Maya asked, and the other teacher nodded. "Let me know how that goes tomorrow?"

"Of course," Ms. Sara promised.

The short walk from the gym to Mr. Babineaux' classroom felt like the most abrupt redirection of emotions. She had to process the incident here and now, couldn't let her siblings see. MJ… Sweet star-loving MJ… He didn't know what the word meant, but he was clever enough to see how it had been handled that it had been something bad, told to him by the boy who was meant to be his best friend. Sooner or later, he'd want to know what it meant, and that would be a whole other conversation, wouldn't it? He was only six… Whatever he did or didn't know about himself, up until today it would all have felt normal. It _was_ normal. But now, today, he would start to learn that not everyone thought the same way.

Walking into Zay's class, Maya found her littlest Hunter sister sat on the teacher's desk, legs dangling about, as she recited numbers to her captive audience of four, sat at four front row desks. When she reached the end of the numbers she knew, Haley gave her usual 'that's all!' the way she did whenever she finished doing or saying anything, and her siblings clapped along with Zay, who lead them in this celebration and made them laugh.

"She'll be counting to a hundred in no time, and then watch out," he told Maya, setting Haley back on the ground, where she ran over to her big sister. Maya thanked him for looking after them.

"I'll be writing you later tonight," she nodded to him as the kids grabbed their bags. To his credit, he knew this was more temporary parent-to-teacher than friend-to-friend.

By the time Lucas arrived at the house that evening, he found Sam at the kitchen table, helping Nellie, Gracie, and MJ with their homework, while Haley did her very best to help clean the dinner dishes with her big sister.

"Sorry we couldn't wait for you," Maya told him as he came up and kissed her. He just shook his head, showing he understood she couldn't make the little kids wait the way the rest of them usually did. "Your plate's ready, just needs warming up."

The seven of them had fairly relaxed evening, with homework, and bath time, and eventually bed time. The twins and MJ were settled in the room across from Maya and Lucas' room. They'd brought over the bulk of what they'd need for the next two weeks the previous afternoon, as Maya had gone to grab it from her parents' house in her afternoon break. It was enough of their most favored belongings that they could feel at home while they weren't at their house. Nellie and Gracie insisted they could share one bed, and so they did, with MJ across the room from them. They took it upon themselves to read him a story. Gracie would do the narration, while Nellie would alter her voice and do all the characters. It was quite the show. They promised they'd go right to bed when they were done. While this went down, Maya and Lucas were across the hall, getting Haley to sleep, a tiny girl at the heart of their own bed.

"Been a while since we've had a visitor like this," Lucas smirked.

"Little porcelain doll, look at her," Maya hummed, brushing at her sister's hair of spun gold.

It wasn't until after they were back downstairs and they were sure that all four kids were asleep that Maya told Lucas about what had happened at school with MJ and Mikey. He was as instantly upset as she'd been. This was his little brother, too, by marriage if not by blood, and he couldn't bear to see him in pain of any kind. But now that this first shot had been fired, he needed to know, needed to be ready, for whatever came next while MJ was in their care and beyond.

"I really don't want to have to call Mom or Dad about this, especially on the first day. We can handle this until they get back, right?" Maya asked. Lucas took her hand in his, their rings just clicking together in passing.

"We can, we will."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	256. Their Help to School

September 12th 2020

_Chapter 256  
Their Help to School_

"Hey, how is it out there?" Lucas asked Katy when he answered Maya's phone. The call had come in while she was in the shower, their first morning after Katy and Shawn had flown to LA and left the kids to their big sister and brother-in-law.

"It is… hectic," was the best Katy could think of, description wise, and Lucas could hear a small chuckle in her voice, showing how she did not mind this at all. She was in Los Angeles, and even he knew – thanks to Maya – how much this had been a sort of over the fence kind of dream for her. Now she was out there, even if she hadn't expected it to come at the age of forty-four, with five kids, and a relatively short amount of time away from being someone's grandma. "We settled into the hotel, barely, and I had to get to the studio for fittings, it didn't stop all day, didn't get a chance to check in with you guys last night. I'm on my way back in now, so how are you all doing?"

How were they doing? Lucas knew they weren't supposed to mention the MJ/Mikey incident, that it would only disrupt Katy's mindset and make the next two weeks a nightmare for her and anyone else over at the show she was working for. He and Maya had made up their minds last night. They wouldn't bring it up before she and Shawn came back to Texas, not unless things moved so far out of line that they had no choice. For now, they were still far from hitting red alert.

"Well, everyone's up, the kids are getting dressed for school… most of them," he turned back to the bed, where Haley sat, still in her PJs, hair in need of a brush, staring at him with eyes like she knew he was talking to her mommy. "I think someone wants to say hi," Lucas went and crouched in front of the bed, offering out the phone. Haley instantly reached out her small hands and took the object, bringing it to her ear.

"Hi!" The way her face lit up when she heard her mother's voice… It pulled at Lucas' heart, and he knew he'd have plenty of those instances over the next two weeks. Just last night, when they had gone to bed, Maya and him on either side of her, the littlest Hunter had wasted no time sticking to him in her sleep, and there she'd remained until this morning when she woke, shortly after him. Maya had already teased him, sidestepping the 'future dad feels' and instead mock complaining how her sister had chosen him over her.

By the time Maya came out of the shower, toweled up, she found hers and Lucas' room currently occupied by all four of her Hunter siblings, as they had found their way here, taking the phone in turn to speak to their parents and tell them about their previous day and their morning so far. MJ was on the line when Maya came, and from what she caught of his side of the conversation, he hadn't gone into too much detail about his situation, only saying that he and Mikey were maybe not friends anymore. She wondered if their mother, on the other end of the line, could catch any part of the sad look _she_ saw on her brother's face in the sound of his voice.

Eventually, everyone was dressed, and breakfast was had. Sam was working overtime in his usual breakfast-making duties, now cooking for seven instead of three, but he was completely up to the task. Lucas was soon on his way off to school, and while Sam caught a ride from a friend to get to _his_ university, Maya then had to get her siblings into the minivan and off to their schools as soon as possible, so she would not be late for first period and _her_ students. Haley was dropped off at pre-school, with one hundred percent less tantrum than the day before, and then it was off to the elementary school. Maya barely had time to stop for more than a minute, but she sent off each of her siblings with a well wishes and a big hug. When she had Gracie in her arms, she whispered at her ear.

"Look after MJ today, okay?" Her quiet little sister, coming up on nine years old in just a few months, gave her a nod, no need for explanations. When she then hugged MJ, she also whispered at his ear. She told him how much she loved him. As she watched the three of them head off into the school yard, the twins on either side of their brother and holding one of his hands, she knew that, no matter what she did, she'd be thinking about getting back here this afternoon to pick them up, to hear whether or not the situation had evolved in any way, for better or for worse.

It was some small mercy that her day went by about as smoothly as one could hope. No spills, no drama, just four classes, and some grading, and research… She'd notified the principal that she'd be leaving as soon as last bell was heard, for the next two weeks, and so as she saw her juniors depart, she was also gathering her things, locking up the room after they were all out and heading to the parking lot to drive to the pre-school for Haley. This meant another short walk to the elementary school, another tale from her little sister, and oh how Maya was happy to hear it, like a balm to her nerves.

Though it had hardly been intended to turn into this, it became routine that day, as it would be for as long as Maya and Lucas had the kids, that Zay would be around when she came into the school, and he would take Haley off to his class while she got the others. He was determined, evidently, to get the three-year-old to boost her numbers.

Today, MJ was found tossing the ball with his sisters and their friends, rather than sitting on the bench, and he looked all the better for it. Scanning the gym for the other first grade boys, she found them, though with the noted absence of Mikey. Maya went in search of Ms. Sara, who spotted her and signalled that she'd come to her, the better for them to step in the hallway.

"Hey, is everything alright? Did you speak to Mikey's parents yesterday?" Maya asked.

"I did, and they were very apologetic about the whole thing, said they would speak to Mikey, and they swore they had no idea he even knew that word, or that their other son had told him it, or where _he'd_ picked it up, because they would never use language like that in their home…" Ms. Sara recounted the talking points from the conversation. "Mrs. Winger came to pick up the boys already, wanted to speak to your mother or father if they came around while she was there, but I told them how they were out of town and you had them. She would like you to call her," the teacher pulled out a small piece of paper with a phone number on it. Maya took it, taking a breath.

"Right, thanks, I'll… I'll do that. How was it today? With MJ and the others, did anyone…"

"No one said anything, but then that might just be that no one knew what to say after what happened yesterday. MJ had lunch with the girls," Ms. Sara pointed off to where the twins played with their brother. She had been _their _teacher a couple years back. "I can't say that this means the entire situation is handled and done with, that there won't be another incident, but for now the storm is calmed, and I'm just doing everything I can to keep it that way."

After expressing her gratitude, Maya went and collected her siblings, picked up Haley from her mini lesson with Mr. Babineaux, and they were on their way home. Impulsively, they stopped on the way and picked up pizza for dinner, which was swiftly endorsed by the other passengers in the minivan. Lucas would be home earlier today, and including this small stop, they would be driving up the lane at roughly the same time. In the end, they pulled up to the house, one behind the other, at which point Nellie just about bolted out on to the lawn so she might tell her big brother that they were having pizza.

Dinner was had, with Cecilia joining the seven of them that night. She also stuck around through homework time. Haley aided Lucas with the dishes that night, which left Maya able to climb up to the attic, shutting the trap before pulling out her phone and the paper with Mikey's mother's number. She had to pace the length of the floor a couple of times before she got around to dialling the number.

"Hello?" the familiar voice answered.

"Hey, Mrs. Winger, this is Maya Friar, MJ Hunter's sister?"

"Yes, of course, I… just a moment…" By the muffled sound of her voice, Maya guessed she'd pressed the phone to her chest before speaking to someone else. The tone suggested she'd just told her boys to go do something, taking them out of the room. A few seconds later, she could be heard clearly once again. "Sorry about that, I just needed to…"

"No, it's alright, I get it."

"Maya, I just… I don't know what to say," Mrs. Winger started now, "When Mikey's teacher told me what happened with him and MJ yesterday, it knocked the air out of me, I had absolutely no idea my son had even heard anything like…"

Maya wanted to yell, so much, wanted to ask her how it was possible that she wouldn't know something like this, that she'd just let it happen, and that it would fall on her little brother to feel the effects. Once upon a time, she might have unloaded on her, but this wasn't that time, was it? She'd seen too much, experienced too much, both as teacher and student, and she knew how easy it was for something, almost especially something like that, to slip by. She was not interested in discovering the chain of discovery, of how Mikey's brother had come upon the word, in his case knowing at least some of what it meant, enough to tie it to MJ and pass it into his little brother's vocabulary.

"I know," she told Mrs. Winger. "All I want is to make sure that it won't happen again. I would hate for MJ to lose his best friend because he wouldn't feel safe around Mikey, or Reed."

"And we don't want that either," Mrs. Winger promised, pausing for a moment. "It might be best if we let things settle for a few days, see how it goes. My husband and I are seeing to the boys, making them understand that what they did was wrong. Is MJ alright?"

"He… Yeah… He's confused still. No matter what happened, he misses his best friend." Also, he still didn't know what was the problem with the word Mikey had used, and both Maya and Lucas were waiting for the moment when he would either figure it out on his own or ask them about it. Part of them felt like they should be the ones to speak to him, to explain it correctly, so he wouldn't misunderstand anything or be made to feel bad in any way, but at the same time they hoped to spare him from feeling any worse than he did now. Sooner or later, they'd have to make a choice.

"Mikey misses him, too. I think he's starting to understand why it was wrong now, but… it's a lot. He's still so young…" Mrs. Winger sounded like she was about to cry. Maya closed her eyes, breathing deep. _They both are…_

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	257. Their Help to Sleep

September 13th 2020

_Chapter 257  
Their Help to Sleep_

"Hey, no, hey, Haley, come back…" Lucas chased after the three-year-old as she dashed out of his grip. He'd taken on the task of getting her to bed that night, and no matter how much his tiny sister-in-law had been enchanted by going to sleep at the heart of a giant bed over the last few days, tonight she evidently loved running and being chased around even more. Add to this the dogs, who would trail about the kids whenever they were about to go down for the night and now found the idea of an evening run even more interesting, and then there really was no chance for Lucas to catch her, was there? "Not the stairs, don't go running that way, hey!" he just managed to cut through and scoop up the girl before she got there. Luckily, she only laughed on and hugged her giant of a brother.

"Again!" Haley squealed, and Lucas sighed. His heart was ramming in his chest, the fleeting idea that she might tumble down the stairs needing a little time to settle. It was a good thing they had decided to keep the attic trap shut while the kids were here. It tended to stay open, with the steps unfolded and settled in the hallway, and he just knew Haley would have run into those tonight.

"Enough adventures for you tonight, kiddo, time to go to the big big bed and get some sleep. What story do you want tonight?"

"Again!" Haley still insisted, wiggling her short legs.

"Not if you want a story," Lucas bartered, and after some consideration, Haley made her story pick. "Excellent choice, Ms. Hunter, excellent choice." She smiled, dropping her head to his shoulder and soothing that racing heart right quick. "Earned it," he breathed, kissing the top of her golden crown.

Down in the living room, Maya was brushing out Nellie's hair, as she'd asked for a braid before bed. Gracie was upstairs with MJ while she waited her turn. The only dog who hadn't been part of the Haley Brigade upstairs was here, sitting peacefully with her head in one of her young mistresses' lap, getting her own hair brushed with small fingers. Una, the Hunters' dog, was of course part of their household for the span of Katy and Shawn's absence.

"Maya?" Nellie asked, after having sat quietly so far. When she was younger still, she would be so notoriously bad at sitting without moving when anyone was washing or brushing or doing anything to her hair, even cutting it, but she'd gotten much better at it now. It had certainly helped calm her down when this inattention had nearly cost her a length of hair.

"Yeah?" Maya asked back, setting herself to parting her sister's chocolate hair into three parts to braid it.

"When are you going to have babies?" the eight-year-old asked. Maya's hands jolted, and Nellie yelped just a bit, reaching to the back of her head.

"Sorry, sorry," Maya let go of the hair for a moment, hugging her sister from behind. "Word of advice: timing is everything. Don't ask big questions like that when someone could get hurt, like you."

"I'm sorry," Nellie told her as she pulled back and reached to part the hair once again. "I just wanted to know."

"Why now?" Maya had to know, laughter floating into her voice.

"There's a girl in my class, she has a sister that's a lot older than her, too…"

"Okay, the wording, that was not necessary… I mean, go on," Maya shook her head to herself.

"Her sister is going to have a baby, and she's been going around about how she's going to be an aunt. And, well…"

"And you want to be an aunt, too," Maya guessed. Nellie looked for a moment like she meant to nod, but then thought better of it and responded instead with a 'yes.' "Right, okay, well…" Maya sighed. "You _are_ going to be one, someday… might be a little while, like a… year, or something, but it'll happen, alright?"

"Alright," Nellie replied, with the tiniest bit of disappointment in her voice, like she would have preferred it happening much earlier than that.

"You know what though," Maya told her, when she'd fixed the elastic at the bottom of the braid and her sister could turn to face her, letting that braid flick side to side. "I can't wait for Aunt Nellie to enter the scene," she smiled, and this at least soothed some of the disappointment. Just in time, as she'd finished with one twin, the other came climbing down the stairs. "Braid time?" Maya asked her.

"No, I'm okay," Gracie told her, turning to Nellie. Without a word shared between them, the older – barely – twin hurried up the stairs, possibly to trade places with MJ watch. Braid or no, Gracie came and sat with her big sister.

"What's on your mind, Mouse?" Maya asked her, playfully giving light brush strokes at the girl's hair.

"I know what's wrong with MJ," Gracie told her. None of them, not even MJ, had really relayed the facts of the Mikey incident to the girls. All they really knew was that MJ and his best friend had gotten into an argument and now they were sort of on the outs with each other, which really upset the six-year-old Hunter boy.

"You do?" Maya set the brush down.

"Reed Winger's class is across from ours," Gracie reminded her. "Today, at recess, he followed me, and… he said things," she bowed her head.

"Hey…" Maya sighed, taking her sister's hands in hers. Gracie looked up, with those eyes so like her own. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," Gracie nodded.

"Tell me what happened?"

Evidently, big brother Reed had gotten into his own heap of trouble, when he'd told his little brother Mikey the things which the smaller boy had then turned on his friend. And while Mikey still barely understood what he'd done, Reed knew exactly what _he'd_ said and done, knew what the word meant whether or not he knew or cared how bad it was. He believed wholeheartedly, as much as a nine-year-old boy could, that he was in the right, that he had 'warned' his little brother to stay away from the likes of MJ Hunter, even if Mikey had gone in with skewed information. Now Reed had turned on another Hunter, like the whole family was to blame for his own troubles. As she told her tale, Gracie was only getting progressively more upset, and Maya imagined she might have cried, earlier at school.

"Did you tell your teacher?" she breathed, pulling her little sister into her arms. Gracie clung to her.

"No," Gracie sniffled. Maya was thankful her sister could not see her face. If this kept going and escalated much further, she wouldn't have a choice in telling her parents what was going on. Not even a week into this and now two out of four kids had been traumatized in some way by something at school. Now, Maya was going to have to speak to a couple other teachers, one of them her friend, and possibly have another conversation with Mrs. Winger, which she was really not looking forward to.

"Is it okay if I talk to him for you? Your teacher?"

"But Reed's going to know, and then he'll be angry again," Gracie hesitated. Much as she was always the most level-headed of the Hunter kids, she'd been rattled, and now she was just a kid again, just Maya's Mouse-Mouse.

"If you just let these things happen, Gracie, they'll keep happening," Maya told her. "You have to be smart about it, so you don't get hurt, but I know you can do that. You're like the smartest kid I know. Even smarter than Sam," she whispered, which managed to dislodge a fraction of a smile out of her sister. "Hey, was MJ asleep when you came down here?" Maya asked, brushing Gracie's hair behind her ears.

"Not yet. He's waiting for his story."

"Okay. Can you and Nellie give me a few minutes with him first?" Maya asked. Gracie nodded.

"We can take care of the dogs' bowls," she looked to Una, perched on her slippers and staring up at them, tongue lolling.

So, up Maya went and down Nellie went, to join her twin as MJ was joined by the third of his four sisters. He had his storybook picked out for the night, held in his lap. It wasn't as though he couldn't read it himself at this point, but he really enjoyed hearing stories out loud, especially from people who could read faster than him.

"I taught them everything they know," Maya told her little brother as she sat on the edge of the guest bed and got a look of which book he'd selected. "And do you know who taught _me_?"

"Mommy?" MJ guessed.

"Yeah," Maya laughed. "The great thespian of the family," she intoned, before seeing the confused look on MJ's face. Another word he didn't know… At least this one wasn't bad. "That means that she's an actress."

"Oh…" the boy blinked.

"Hey, so, we didn't really get a chance to talk much about school today. How did that go?" Maya asked, looking over her shoulder when she heard a creak on the floor and believed one or both of the twins had come up. Instead, there stood Lucas in the doorway.

"It was okay, I guess," MJ shrugged.

"Just okay?" Lucas asked, coming closer, sitting on the ground next to the bed to join the conversation. Maya smiled down at him before looking back to her brother.

"I… I wanted to talk to Mikey, but… but he said he wasn't supposed to talk to me because I was a… a… that thing he said," MJ slowly spoke, prodding at his foot.

"You don't have to say it," Maya told him, pulling him closer.

"But why?" MJ looked up at her, down at Lucas. "What does it mean?" he asked, and his sister and brother-in-law both tried not to show themselves as tense. They'd known the moment would come, and much as they'd debated whether or not to go to him first, now here was this moment, where MJ asked the answer from them, and what were they supposed to do except give him the words he needed? _It shouldn't have had to come from us, it should have been Mom and Dad…_

"MJ…" Maya breathed. No matter what, this was a safe, loving space, and on the other side of it, she hoped, her little brother would be better for it, for honesty. "You know how… we love each other," she nodded down to Lucas, "And Mom and Dad love each other, and Riley and Dylan do, too, and Nadine and Zay, and… and Sophie and Chiara, and Asher and Ray, and Rosa… well, she really likes Jenna?"

"Uh huh," MJ nodded.

"That's because me, and Lucas, and all of them, we all know, in our hearts, that there are people out there, who we feel these things for, and it's a part of who we are, how we were made, and it's maybe one of the best things about us, to feel these things for someone and to know that they feel it for us, too. You're still so young, MJ, so all these things, love, not just the way I love you because you're my brother… well, it'll be a while before you really get there, which is normal, but… maybe a part of you is already figuring some of it out.

"Now, there are some people, who… Who don't understand, why some people go together who are like them, like Sophie and Chiara, like Asher and Ray. And sometimes, they'll do things, and they'll say things because of it."

"Like what Mikey said?" MJ quietly asked.

"Yeah," Maya took a breath, rattled by the way her brother was piecing things together and how upset it left him.

"But you can help him understand," Lucas spoke now, and MJ and Maya both looked to him. "If that's what you want." MJ didn't know what he wanted to do, and he wasn't going to choose tonight. That was alright. He just wanted to go to bed. It had been a lot, and he was tired. "Want us to go get the twins for your story?" Lucas asked as he stood, and Maya helped her brother get under the covers.

"Can you do it?" MJ held up his book to them. Maya took hold of it, turning a smile to Lucas.

"I'll do the voices, you narrate."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	258. Their Help to Cheer

September 14th 2020

_Chapter 258  
Their Help to Cheer_

They couldn't say how long it had been since they had been this glad that the weekend had arrived. Usually this came along after a week where they'd had a loaded week at work, or at school, but in this case, both Maya and Lucas were so very glad to wake to Saturday morning because it meant that the Hunter kids wouldn't have school for the next couple of days, and they could take a breather from this entire Winger brothers situation they'd been caught up in all week, all the while having their parents nowhere near them.

When he woke up, Lucas found he was not gripped by the little Hunter girl who'd been sharing his and his wife's bed for the last several days. At some point in the night, Haley had evidently let go of him, flopped on to her other side, and burrowed her way into her big sister's arms instead, at which point Maya had put her arm around her and carried on sleeping, her hand absently cradling her baby sister's head. Even in sleep, there was so much fierce protection in her, telling the world it should think twice, three times, before going anywhere near the girl. After this week, it was no wonder. He almost had to ask himself if some part of Haley Hunter could sense that and now attempted to comfort her. Honestly, he wouldn't put it past her.

The next thing his barely awakened mind caught on to was the sound of voices. As hushed as they might have been, in the pin-drop silence of early morning, it carried very well from one room into the other, across the hall. He counted one, two, three voices, telling him the other siblings were all awake. If he turned his head, he could just barely see three sets of feet dangling from one bed, MJ's bed, which would mean the twins had gone over to sit with him. What the three children discussed, he couldn't say, but then it wasn't his to know.

A moment later, he spotted Sam, coming down the hall and likely on his way down to make breakfast. He stopped as he was coming past the doors, and he looked into the kids' room, finding them awake. He went in, crouched in front of the bed, and now he was the one whispering. A few moments later, Sam and the kids got up and walked out of the room, their steps soon heard on the stairs as they headed down below. Lucas smiled, turning his head back to find his wife's eyes were starting to flutter open as she woke. He watched her discover Haley's presence, watched how it made her smile, stroking the side of her face with her thumb, and this told him that the kid was also awake, staring back at her sister. Mornings like this, oh… They would take as many of them as they could get.

By the time they made their way down to the kitchen, the place smelled like food, and they could feel their stomachs growl in anticipation. Lucas, recalling the scene he'd partially seen upstairs earlier, came up to the counter where, stood on a step stool, MJ Hunter was carefully working to mix together the fruit his sisters had been cutting and dropping in the large bowl before him.

"That looks great, huh?" Lucas told him, and MJ nodded. "How's it going this morning, sleep alright?" Lucas asked, leaning to kiss the top of the boy's head.

"Uh huh," MJ nodded again.

"That's good," Lucas smiled, reaching to swipe a grape from the bowl.

"Hey!" MJ protested, though his laughter severely undercut his complaint.

"The lights are on," Gracie spoke then, and when the others looked at her, she pointed out the window toward the Hex. Both Lucas and Sam figured for a second that Maya had forgotten to turn them off, as this sometimes happened, even though they knew like she knew that this wasn't the case this time. Only she was the one to remember first what this meant.

"Oh sh… oot…" Maya bolted out the kitchen door, with Haley still on her trail following behind. She reached the studio door and found that of course it was unlocked. She opened it, letting out the sound of someone playing guitar before she could look in and find Ree Forster sitting there. Today was to be their third session. She'd meant to push it back, or wanted to at least, but she just didn't want to take the chance, knowing how tight the singer's schedule tended to be.

"One of these mornings, I am going to endorse this casual wear policy and show up in my pyjamas as well," Ree joked, only to give the excited gasp of any affectionate person in the presence of a small child, especially one as sweet as Haley Hunter. "Well hello, love, look how you've grown," she set down her guitar and came to crouch before Maya's sister. "You might not remember, last time I saw you was almost a year ago, at your big sister's wedding."

"You're the singer lady," Haley declared, which made Ree laugh her jolly laugh.

"I am that, yes," she confirmed, and that was good enough to trigger Haley's extended arms.

"That means she likes you," Maya smiled. Ree was not one to be asked twice, and she stood before scooping up the three-year-old.

As cute as it always was to see her do it, they still couldn't help but wonder if one of these days her trusting nature would get her in trouble. They would repeatedly remind her that even if a person proclaimed to know her parents, unless _she_ remembered them, too, she shouldn't just 'arm up.' There were no such concerns today of course.

"I am so sorry, it completely slipped my mind this morning that you were here, with her and the other kids…" Maya explained, gesturing back to the house.

"No, please, it's alright," Ree promised, still enchanted by Haley, who was smiling back at her.

"Did you eat yet?" Maya asked.

"Well, I had thought to take you out somewhere for once, before we started in there, but I imagine that'll be more complicated today, won't it?"

"I have my siblings for a couple of weeks, I'll explain later. Breakfast is almost ready though, please join us."

It was always sort of funny to see the way people reacted to Ree's presence. It all depended on whether or not they knew who she was, but then she was famous enough that, whether they actually listened to her music or not, people were more likely to know her name, or her face, than to not know her at all. Kids though… Whether they knew her or not, they would not go off all starstruck, as Maya and Lucas had seen so many people be. If anything, the older ones might ask her questions, but on the whole, especially once she became a recurring presence, they treated her as they would just about any friend of the family: they treated her like she one of their own.

"We are going to need another plate, guys," Maya announced as she returned, with Ree and Haley behind her. At once, the twins turned to one another and got to whispering before turning again.

"You can sit between us," Gracie told Ree, while Nellie shifted one chair over, only to realize there would not be enough space for everyone.

"I know where they are!" she ran off, without stating what 'they' were. By the time she returned, grunting under the weight of the chair, which was almost as tall as her, Haley had been set down on her own chair, while Ree had taken Nellie's vacated place next to Gracie.

"Hey, I got it, be careful," Lucas moved to help his young sister-in-law.

"Thanks," Nellie breathed before hurrying over to sit on the other side of Ree.

"Do you know, I am also a twin," Ree addressed the girls on either side of her. This easily got their attention; they loved meeting other twins.

"You are?" Gracie asked.

"Yes, well, not identical, not like you two. I have a twin brother. When we were little, we did look enough alike to mess with people though," she added, in a tone of conspiracy, which made the girls laugh. "Here, look," Ree pulled out her phone and showed them a picture of herself and her brother, which appeared to have been taken at Christmas recently.

"He looks like you a lot," Gracie declared.

"But with a beard," Nellie added.

"Looks much better with it, if you ask me," Ree nodded, slipping her phone away just as Sam brought out a load of scrambled eggs, scooping some on to plates where they were requested. After MJ got his portion, he turned to Maya, who picked up the bottle of ketchup with a knowing look.

"You tell me when, okay?" she told him, and he nodded. The red sauce was squeezed on to the heap of yellow eggs, as MJ and just about everyone else at the table soon kept a watchful eye. "Dude, say when already," Maya smirked.

"Okay, now," MJ finally spoke two seconds later. At home, Katy or Shawn would have cut him off long ago, saying that he would end up with more ketchup than eggs if he kept this up, but at his sister's house, especially now, he could count on being given just a bit more leeway.

"You and my daughter would get along there," Ree told MJ, who received this news with a smile before mashing the eggs and ketchup together. He had a whole system, setting his load of ketchup and eggs on to one toast and then mashing another on top. At last, he could dig in. "Now this is new," Ree nodded.

As they ate, the kids happily told Ree about what they were doing that day. Nellie and Gracie were bound for Sullivan Stables with Lucas, for Nellie's riding lessons. Gracie didn't ride, but she preferred to be nearby, to watch her sister. Sam, along with Cecilia, was taking Haley for her swimming lessons, and oh how excited the little Hunter was. She was never so happy as when she was in the water. This left MJ. He didn't have any lessons on weekends, not at the moment, and usually, once his sisters were all at their own things, he would either be going to Mikey's house, or Mikey would be coming to the Hunter house. This had been the case right up until last weekend, but now… Now it had all changed, of course. When asked what he would be up to today, he looked… stuck. Everyone else had something to do, somewhere to be, and he didn't know what he was supposed to say.

"Hey, MJ, you've been in the Hex with me before, yeah? Would you like to come and see what Ree and I will be up to today?" Maya asked her brother, stealing a look to the singer and hoping she had made the right assumption, that she would be alright with this. By the smile she got, she knew that she had been one hundred percent correct. As for MJ, he looked intrigued at once.

"Can I?" he asked, looking to Ree as well.

"It would be my honor," she assured him. She had no idea what this week had been like for him, didn't know how much good it did his young heart. But she had done it anyway, and for that… Oh, Maya was even more excited to get started on today's songs. Of all her Hunter siblings, MJ was the first to show any kind of pronounced love for music, and she could just imagine what it would be like for him in there, to experience Ree's magic from up close.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	259. Their Help to Sing

September 15th 2020

_Chapter 259  
Their Help to Sing_

Soon after breakfast was through, everyone else cleared out, headed for riding lessons, and swimming lessons. This left only the duo bound for the Hex, them and their young guest. For Maya and Ree, this was getting to be something they did regularly enough that they would just walk in and start to get ready. MJ had only been here a few times, and he would just sit or stand around, listening to his sister as she played and sang. Today, with the two of them moving around as they did, he must have gotten the sense of this being something else than what he'd seen. He just sort of stood there, like he wasn't sure what to do with himself.

"Come on," Maya turned back to him as she stepped into the booth with Ree. He scurried in at once and again came to a stop, looked at his sister for guidance. "You sit wherever you want, okay? We're just rehearsing right now," she told him, planting her hand on top of his head. After a beat, he went and sat on the small stool behind the keyboard. "Good, okay," Maya smiled, shutting the booth door before picking up her guitar and sitting as well.

Finally, the rehearsal began. They were set to record three songs today, which would likely mean another late night for the two of them, maybe not so for their guest, who would have to go to bed long before they were through. It was great to have him here, Maya found. He was very respectful of the need to stay quiet, even when they weren't yet recording. As silent as he was, he listened with great attention and awe, watched them both as their hands played over their instruments. As they would run through those same songs more than once, he would start to sway along to the music after a while, which had the two singers smiling.

When they then moved on to recording, Maya took MJ out of the booth with her, and he sat down next to her at the console. She tried to tell him a bit of what she was doing, what this button or that button did, and he listened with marked curiosity. They didn't make it too far by the time lunch rolled around, but they ordered pizza, eating back in the Hex with the door open. MJ sat on the ground with his plate on the floor, his pizza cut in bits he then speared and chewed. Maya loved to see him like this, carefree again.

He was back at her side when the recording resumed and the afternoon just flew on by. They were looking to have themselves another meal in the studio, until Lucas came along and 'lightly insisted' for them to come into the house to eat with everyone else, which they eventually did.

"We're going back now?" MJ turned to his big sister after dessert was over and the table was being cleared away. It made Ree laugh, even as she rose to lead the way and the boy followed.

As motivated as he was to be there with them, to see the day through, time and youth caught up with him. He was dozing off on his chair as evening started, and Maya picked him up and kept him in her lap as the session carried on. In no time, he was asleep against her and she held him in place with one arm as her other hand adjusted one thing or another over the console when needed. At one point, Sam came along, asking if she wanted him to take MJ up into the house, but she decided to keep him.

"He misses your parents a lot?" Ree asked as she came from the booth and sat in the empty chair next to her. Maya swivelled toward her, looking down to the sleeping MJ.

"He does, but… it's more than that, I…" Maya hesitated a moment, unsure whether it would be right to unload this on her, but then Ree had always been so open, and they'd spoken about plenty of things over the time they'd known one another, and honestly there was always this ease in speaking to her, like an old friend. "He had a difficult week at school, with his friend. He was called… a bad word…" she shook her head to herself, refusing to even say it in reference. "A hurtful word, about his… his sexuality." She just had to laugh about that part, a wholly mirthless one. "He's only six."

"Oh, the little dear," Ree sighed, as the day and MJ's presence in the studio took a new perspective.

"He didn't know what it meant. His _friend_ didn't know what it meant, but he heard it from his brother, who's only nine, and I don't know where _he_ heard it, but he did, and it came all the way down to my kid brother. I had to tell him and now… I don't know… I think he's still figuring things out for himself. In the meantime, our parents are coming back in a week, I still haven't told them a thing, didn't want to ruin things for my mother… It's just a mess here, and she's been waiting for an opportunity like this… for as long as I can remember, growing up back in New York."

"There is little they could do out there," Ree pointed out. "As far as I can see, you are doing everything for your brother and your sisters that your Mom and Dad would do if they were here with them." Maya looked to her sleeping brother, brushed at his hair.

"Lucas says the same thing."

"Smart man, that husband of yours," Ree smiled. "Good thing he's coming with us, summer after next, I usually need a pep talk or two after a while, being on tour. And this one will be a good one, won't it?"

Maya chuckled, gladly turning her thoughts away from the Winger brothers over to her touring this album of theirs, with Ree, the summer after Lucas graduated. The details were still coming together in some parts, but they had something like a frame in place, enabling them to go on and fill it, all the while knowing the start and end of it. Maya's sole requests had felt like big ones to her, to make it so that, however many cities and countries they travelled to, they would do it all in the summer, meaning that they would start as early as the day after she finished what would be her second year teaching, and they would end no later than four days before she started her third. As terrified as she'd been to present this to her, Ree had accepted it easily. She knew this would likely mean more shows with less time in between, but she was up for it. If anything, she was pumped up at the thought of that bit of whirlwind. Maya also wanted to try and be able to be with her siblings at their birthdays, like Haley in July, and the twins in August, but once they knew more about all the dates, they would figure that part out.

The tour continued to be a secret, and a difficult one to keep at that. It would have to continue to be a secret for a while more. Though some people were aware that a new album was in the works, it wasn't widely publicized yet. Once _that_ happened, then they could look to give word about the tour, too.

Somehow, Maya kept MJ with her, sleeping, all the way through to the end of the session, at which point she saw Ree off to her car and wished her well until the next session, likely to take place sometime in the summer.

"Let me know how it goes with him?" Ree asked, looking to the sleeping boy as she was pulling her car door open.

"I will," Maya promised, smiling. Ree reached out, set her hand to MJ's back for a moment, nodding to his sister, and she climbed into the driver's seat. Maya stepped back and watched her drive off. Feeling him stir in her arms, she looked down to find her brother's eyes were open. "The car woke you up?" she guessed, and he gave a sleepy nod. "Go back to sleep," Maya whispered, kissing his temple and rubbing his back as she carried him back to the house.

"Want… play music…" MJ mumbled.

"You want me to play you some music or you want to play music?" Maya inquired.

"Both," MJ decided, making her smirk.

"What do you want to play?"

"Piano," he replied, playing his small fingers at her shoulder.

"Really? You who sits at the keyboard all the time? I'm shocked," she joked. "I think we can make that happen, yeah?" she asked, coming on to the porch and sitting on one of the chairs with her brother. "In the weekends, when the twins are at the ranch, and Haley is at the pool, you can come here, and I will help you," she decided even as she made the offer. After the drums, she had picked up the keys, too, and while she was hardly a virtuoso as of yet, she could absolutely get her six-year-old brother started. "Does that sound good?"

"Yeah," MJ nodded.

"Good, but I'll ask you again in the morning in case you don't remember any of this by then, okay?" Maya looked down, finding he had already fallen back to sleep. "Definitely going to have to repeat that," she told herself, breathing out, before reaching her hand back to rap at the window. A few seconds later, the door opened and Lucas stepped out. "Be a dear and carry this sack of potatoes upstairs for me, will you?" she asked, in her best drawl.

"Don't go anywhere, sweetheart," he smirked, responding in kind as he lifted MJ from her arms. He headed into the house with him, returning two minutes later with a couple of bottles.

"Read my mind," Maya reached out for one. Lucas sat next to her, and for a minute they enjoyed the quiet of the night. "Everyone else get to bed okay?"

"Yeah," Lucas confirmed. "The twins worked their storytelling mojo on Haley. There were costumes involved. It was like a theater in there, with the four of us…"

"The _four_ of you?" she sat up, with instantly gleeful curiosity. Lucas nodded. "You and Sam…"

"Played a couple of grumpy monsters," he mimed. Maya bit back the urge to laugh, but then he kept gesticulating, and then she just burst out into giggles. "It was a big hit, pretty sure we'll be called for an encore tomorrow night. MJ needs to see the big show."

"Ooh," Maya sat up, raising her hand. "Please, can I get a part?"

"I don't know, you might have to audition," Lucas teased, getting a gasp of 'insult' in reply. "Hey, I'm sorry, the director is very demanding."

"The director is eight years old, I'm assuming?" Maya asked.

"Going on forty-five," Lucas nodded.

"I can sweet talk her. I'm her big sister, she loves me, and I know what candies she likes," Maya sat back, taking a sip of her drink.

"You know what everybody likes," he shook his head.

"It's good information to have," she grinned.

When they finally headed back into the house and made their way up to head to bed, Maya briefly checked in on the trio across the hall, finding them all sound asleep before turning over to hers and Lucas' room, finding not one but two occupants in the bed, as Una had climbed up and laid down with the sleeping Haley. She accepted Lucas' summons to climb down again without a sound, after which she walked into the hall and laid to sleep next to the door across the way, where she'd spent all her nights at the Friar house. They were nearly halfway through this time together, before Katy and Shawn returned, and something told Maya and Lucas the house would feel empty without their little guests.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	260. Their Help to Return

**_A/N:_**_ The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!_

* * *

September 16th 2020

_Chapter 260  
Their Help to Return_

The day Maya picked up her siblings from school, knowing their parents would be waiting for them at her house, she played it cool. _They_ didn't know Katy and Shawn were back, not today. They were under the impression they would be returning from LA the next day, which had not so much been their parents and sister's intention, except at one point the misinformation had folded itself into reality, and instead of correcting it, they had let it carry on, because… Well, surprises were always fun, weren't they? This one would be no exception.

The Hunter kids were in a stellar spirit that day. When they had taken off from the school, buckled into Sparkles the minivan, Nellie had demanded 'songs,' and Maya had turned on the radio. And when a song would come on, whether they knew the words or not – which was generally the case – they would bop along to the music, amusing their big sister in the driver's seat. The big miracle came when one of TXNY's songs rolled on through the speakers. The twins absolutely knew every word, and MJ knew them, too, and Haley knew some bits, which she made sure to share, the loudest of all. Maya almost had to pull the car over, the better to enjoy the show.

If they hadn't all been in such a particularly giddy mood by the time they arrived at the house, they might have noticed to other vehicle already parked out front instead of just hopping down from the minivan, still chatting along, and heading up for the house the way they did. Nellie produced her key, with the pride of a kid in possession of a shiny new house key, and opened the door for them and let it swing open, only for herself and her twin to stop, surprised, at the sight of their mother and father standing from the couch where they'd been waiting.

With a squeal, the girls had bolted for their parents as though connected at the hip, reaching them as one and tossing their arms around whichever parent they reached first. If they were speechless in their joy for this reunion, they were not alone. Katy and Shawn had never been away from their kids for so long, and as much as some people might have called it a nice break, they did not see any time away from their son and daughters as something to look forward to. Now that they were back with them, it felt as though they had been incomplete for the past two weeks, and the pieces were finally falling back into place, filling the gaps.

"Did they get taller? They feel taller," Shawn told his wife, bare subterfuge to cover up the swell of emotions as he hugged his young daughter, halfway lifting her up off her feet as he kissed the crown of her head. He had not even seen her face before she'd landed in his arms, but he knew just by the way she held him that this was Gracie. He barely had time to set her back down that he looked up and saw his one and only son, standing there, mouth agape and shocked into immobility which was broken the moment they made eye contact. "Hey, little man," Shawn felt that tremor regain him, as MJ rocketed over and found himself pulled up in his father's arms even as Gracie still held on. He hung on so tight, Shawn might have complained that he was almost choking him if he actually minded it.

Maya wished she could have seen it all. By the time she'd gotten Haley from her car seat and carried her and the abandoned school bags up from the minivan, she came upon this mass hug already in progress. Of course, the moment the youngest Hunter saw this, she was raring to go. Maya barely managed to carry her the short distance until she could be passed into their mother's arms for how much she moved, and then she was clamped on to Katy like a little monkey, while _she_ held Haley as though she hadn't seen her youngest child in years.

It was a simple reminder to Maya of the days when she still lived at home, when not seeing her parents for days on end might have felt so weird. But then she hadn't lived with her mother and father in nearly seven years already, and by now not seeing them for a while was just the norm. Sure, they would text or talk almost every day, but it was something completely different than what those four kids and their parents were living now. They were still in that stage of their lives, and it made her miss it as much as she ever could.

Once they had managed to release one another – barely, as the younger two didn't wander very far from their parents just yet – they had gone and sat on the couch and the floor. The kids wanted to hear about everything their parents had been doing in LA. They'd heard some of it whenever they'd have calls together, though for the most part it had been brief. Now, they were due the whole story, though both Katy and Shawn agreed that they should wait until everyone was there, at dinner. So, to hold them off until then, they broke out some of the souvenirs they'd brought back, which was a very satisfactory substitute. MJ was especially thrilled for the sampling he got of his mother's promised star items.

Seeing him with them now, Maya knew that she'd soon need to bring them all to reality again. She was going to have to tell her parents about what had been happening with their son at school these past two weeks. The thought sat like something rotten in the pit of her stomach, and she barely managed to keep it from rising to her face. There was a plan for how they would handle this, she and Lucas and Sam had discussed it the night before, and it wouldn't be put in motion until the two of them were back.

Sam arrived first, about a half hour after Maya and the kids had come home, and Lucas arrived about forty minutes after that. By then, they had all been thinking about dinner, and Maya had already sown the seeds of a plan to go and pick up something from a restaurant and bringing it back here. When Sam had arrived, he'd done _his_ part, saying he would go and do the pick up and asking the kids if they wanted to come with him so they could pick out a dessert together. The kids were not aware of this plan, but they could be counted on, when presented with this offer from Sam, to give hearty agreement. All they had to wait for was Lucas' arrival.

He'd barely made it through the door that the kids were starting to look to Sam like 'can we go now?' They had all taken a moment to figure out what they wanted to eat, and then Sam had ushered the four Hunter kids out the door, turning a look back to his sister and her husband. Maya nodded to him, eternally grateful as she could only ever be. Much as they had been able to let the kids believe that this was all a natural event, this small look had not been lost on Katy and Shawn, who now looked as though they sensed something was amiss.

"Maya?" Shawn asked his daughter as she turned back to him, her smile faltering.

"We need to talk," she told him and Katy, gesturing for them to follow into the kitchen. Here they sat, the four of them. Lucas had left it up to his wife, whether she wanted to talk to her parents alone or not, but as far as she was concerned, he was as much a part of this conversation as she was. He had been here with her, with the kids, in the thick of it for these past weeks, and he deserved to be part of the conversation. And so he was.

She had to start it, naturally, and that was not easy, but they were on borrowed time already, and it just needed to happen. So she explained it from the start, from the day she'd gone to pick up the kids, that very first day when Katy and Shawn had flown off to California. She told them about how MJ had been upset, not for their departure but for an incident with best friend Mikey. And with about as much ceremony as a revelation like this could afford, she told them what Ms. Sara had told her. Still, she couldn't say the word, and none of them did say it, not once, but it didn't take long for it to be conveyed unspoken on to the startled parents.

This was the thing about MJ. Maybe he was, or at least maybe it was a part of who he was. They'd all been there, they'd all watched him grow, and maybe there were instances where they were left to wonder. But then he was just six years old, and even though they didn't deny that he could already know, consciously or not, they didn't want to rush him. No matter what it all came down to, he would be loved, and he would be accepted, and all they could do as he figured himself out was to be there for him, and to show him these things were true, so that if it did turn out that he was gay, or bi, or anything… he would feel confident in sharing it with them.

But in the meanwhile, as they existed with this… intuition… they had also been cultivating something of dread, because they knew the world would not react as they might, and something like what had happened with Mikey and Reed Winger might happen to MJ. And now here they were. None of them had ever expected it to turn out this way, none of them believed it could come this soon, but it had, and now they had to look into what came next.

Katy looked caught halfway between fury and sorrow. Shawn was giving both Maya and Lucas a flashback to those days and weeks following the car accident where they had been injured – it had been believed – because of Lucas' inattention. They had seen that look in his eyes directed at Lucas, when his daughter had been harmed, and now it was here again, for a word that could pack as much of a punch, directed at his son. Neither parent ever asked why they hadn't been informed earlier. It didn't feel important, and by the time they might possibly ask themselves the question, the answer would be clear.

"We explained to him what it meant, when he wanted to know," Lucas told Katy and Shawn. The memory of that night, and the dawning of realization on the boy's face could only echo on both his and Maya's faces in that moment, which told the parents what they needed to know on how that had gone. "The next day at school, he shared his new knowledge with Mikey. It didn't exactly fix everything, but then the day after _that_ Mikey's mom called and asked if we could bring him home with us. He stayed for dinner and she picked him up after that."

"We've been talking almost every day," Maya added. "She and her husband have been talking with Reed, trying to get to the bottom of this. For the time being, we all agreed that it would be best if MJ and Mikey didn't hang out at the Winger house, only yours, but we're hoping to change that." Looking back at her parents, it almost felt as though she was sitting in the middle of a parent-teacher conference, and it would be one of those times where her adulthood really felt as though it stood out.

"He looked… okay, earlier," Katy breathed, after a beat of silence.

"He is," Lucas assured her, while Maya nodded along. "It definitely helped, once he and Mikey started talking again."

"And he's good with sharing," Maya added. "When you guys get around to discussing this with him, he should be open to it." Her parents looked to her, to Lucas, with so much gratitude in this moment, as though they were coming to the realization that, much as MJ had been dealing with this situation all this time, the two of them had been dealing with it, too, and doing a fine job of it.

By the time Sam and the kids returned 'triumphant,' the four left behind had gotten just enough time to clear the air of any heaviness. Whatever would or wouldn't be said about the incident with MJ, it would not happen here and now, as they all settled to the table for dinner. Katy happily launched into the story of her time on set, knowing it would hold her children enthralled from start to finish. Maya and Lucas could just about see the seem of her mask here, focusing on the good even as the bad lay fresh under the surface. It would be some time before her episodes – two of them back to back – would be on television, and she could hardly give them anything actually plot related, but that was in no way a problem. Between costumes, and hair, and makeup, and other actors, and LA, she had material for days, and Shawn would have plenty of his own to weave along with it, all the better to keep their kids good and captivated. It was the best day they'd all had together in such a long time.

In the end, Katy and Shawn had gone on home and left the kids to spend one last night at their sister's house, keeping the relocation for the following afternoon after school. Maya and Lucas could barely express their gladness for this extra night. They'd become so set in this way, of bath time and bed time, of stories and a tiny girl lying between them, of a crowded table at breakfast… It was like a promise for the future, brought to the present, and the thought of returning it to the future was not one they looked forward to. But then at the same time it was a good thing, wasn't it? It reaffirmed what they had long dreamed for their future, and it also reminded them that it wasn't nearly as far away as it had once been. Just months from now, that was what they held on to, as tightly as Haley Hunter held on to her big sister as she slept.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	261. Their Step to Dance

September 17th 2020

_Chapter 261  
Their Step to Dance_

Lucas would later Maya how much of her agreeing to chaperone the senior prom had to do with her getting to spring a promposal on him. She would play coy about it, which would be almost as much of an answer as if she'd used actual words. He'd also be left to wonder if this would become a regular thing for them, as the years went on and she continued to teach. If it was, well… he was definitely on board. Knowing her, it could be thirty years from now, and she'd still pull stunts because it made her happy… and because she knew it would do the same for him, to see that happy glow in her.

He was at work, a weeknight in May. It was one of those quiet ones, and Maeve had recruited him to use that time and get a few things done on their floor. As they'd go along, the two of them, while the others looked after their few clients, they would talk about this and that. Maeve told him about Erin's first birthday party. The girl was still too young to even begin to understand the entire situation of her life, the fact that the woman who visited her and sometimes babysat her was more than 'Auntie Maeve' and was actually her birth mother, but that was all she could ever be, and so that was essentially how she behaved with her. As hard as it had been in the beginning, after she was born, she had adjusted, they all had, and now she was at peace with all of it. Her baby girl had a wonderful family unit. She had her father, and she had her uncle, and she had her new aunt.

Ramona had married Ben, just at the start of the month. It had been a very short engagement, a small wedding. From what their friends had heard, a conversation had led to Ben asking, and Ramona accepting, and _this_ had led to the two of them deciding they didn't want to wait, and they didn't need a great big ceremony. They had gone to a courthouse, and they'd had a party, and their friends had not been surprised for this turn in the slightest when they'd gotten the invitation. Really, it had felt like they were headed in that direction for months already. It was one of those times when everything fell into place so smoothly that it made time feel insignificant. They were already there, and waiting was unnecessary.

"The way Erin clings to her, sometimes I think she looks at her like she's her mom," Maeve told Lucas, as she moved a stack of books. "Ramona's so good with her, I think she wishes she was that for her, too. If she and Ben aren't having one of theirs before the year's out, I'll be shocked."

Not five seconds later, she looked past Lucas before tapping his arm and nodding for him to look. When he turned around, he came upon a sight that would have stood out regardless, in the middle of the bookstore, but seeing as it was his wife standing there in her sparkly best, her head seemingly crowned by the flowers she barely managed to hold behind herself. She had that grin on her, the one that said she was quite proud of her sneakiness.

"You know, my birthday was last week," he told her, his face trapped in a smile as he approached her. The few people milling about the floor were looking back at them, inevitably wondering what this was about. Some might have believed a different kind of proposal was about to take place.

"Oh, is _that_ why we had that party?" Maya asked.

"Yeah, I think so," Lucas replied, echoing her tone of 'wonder.' "You know, you just come in here looking like this, I'm going to become very bad at my job," he pointed out. He just could not stop smiling. She was the most beautiful person in the world on any day where he was concerned, but then she'd go and throw this kind of play, and he'd feel his knees genuinely looking to give out from under him she was so stunning that night.

"Don't worry then, I'll make this brief, and I won't even raise my voice too much, because from what I see, we've already caused enough of a scene," she indicated their surroundings with a tip of the head before clearing her throat and pulling the flowers from behind her back with a needed flourish for the size of the bouquet, which she then had to pass into her free hand as she shook out her arm. "Heavy…" she laughed, and so did he. "So, dear husband, I have a very important question to ask you."

"Oh, you do?"

"Yes, I do. I would like to know if you would be my date and co-chaperone at this year's senior prom," she declared, presenting him with the flowers and barely contained laughter. Lucas could easily have forgotten he was at work in that moment, for how much he wanted to kiss her. But he contained himself, instead accepting both the flowers and the invitation.

He had to hand it to Maya, she did not lack in surprises. When the night came for them to dress up and head to the school, he sort of expected her to be wearing that very same dress she'd worn when she'd come to the store to invite him. But then when he'd heard her coming down the steps and turned around, he had been treated with a whole new look, which made for a whole new reaction out of him, which had naturally been her intention. He extended his hand to her as she reached the bottom of the stairs, and she accepted it, allowing him to lead her on toward the car.

"You know, this is our second year in a row going to prom," he reflected as they approached the school. "Which means it's also been a year since you got your job up there."

"Yeah…" Maya laughed, realizing it. Now she was even happier to be here.

As she'd done the year before, she had helped with the decorations, along with Miss Alcott, and Morgan the music teacher, and several students, most of them her own. It had been the true first blow, the first big reminder that the year was coming to an end, which meant she was about to see her seniors graduate and leave the school. She tried so hard to play it cool, but to no one's surprise, least of all her own, it affected her emotionally. She did her best to focus on the good parts, the fact that they were all headed into the world, going to college, or chasing some dream… That was just going to be something she needed to get used to, every year gaining new kids, every year losing some old ones, too.

"What do you think, are we too old for this now?" Maya asked, when the gym had grown packed with the students, some accompanied by others of their class, others by juniors or kids who went to different schools than their own.

"To chaperone a prom? No, we're good," he smiled. She gave him a look. "Well I was feeling good about twenty-seven, now I don't know anymore," he gave her a mildly abashed look in return, smirking when she snorted.

"You know what I mean," she insisted, and he hummed, locking his arm with hers as they walked through the gym.

"I don't think you would be able to be anything but yourself, no matter what age you are, and neither could I. I am looking forward to many of these nights with you," he vowed, and she pressed a kiss to his shoulder which felt a lot like 'do you know how much I love you?' His response was to give a kiss of his own, landing at her temple. "We are here, watching over them, and as a bonus we get to look like this, maybe dance a bit, and…" He paused, as the music over the speakers turned to a familiar air that made him smile down at his wife. "And things like this happen." _Keeping Secrets (Hush)… _Performed by the Violets, written by Maya Hart. "Do you think they know?" Lucas wondered, nodding to the students out on the dance floor, bopping along energetically.

"Honestly, I have no idea," Maya admitted, grinning nonetheless. "Most of them know about TXNY, the ones in my class for sure, but the other part, not so much."

"Why not?"

"I don't know, I guess I want to make sure that they just see me as their teacher, that they know when I'm here with them I'm here _for _them, not just… passing time or anything. I couldn't exactly hide TXNY, my face is out there…" The way he tipped his head at this, she could practically hear him formulating a compliment toward said face.

"Okay, well, what happens once they find out about… summer after next?" he asked, sneaking a look around them as she pieced together his reference to the tour, Ree's tour, where she would be heavily featured. Once that happened, yeah, they could very likely discover her other career.

"Crossing that bridge when we have to," she waved this off.

"Uh, is that going to be a problem?" Lucas directed her attention across the way from them, where he had spotted what felt to him like the preamble to the throwing of fists. A trio of boys was giving eyes to where Tony Janacek was dancing a girl Maya didn't recognize, likely a student from another school.

"From those three, I'd say, yeah," she sighed, moving in their direction. Feeling him on her heel, she paused and stalled Lucas. "It's fine, I got it. You're a civilian," she teased before carrying on.

Lucas still felt the urge to follow, but he stayed where he stood and looked on as Mrs. Friar, the art teacher, planted herself before the trio, pulling their attention away from Tony and his prom date. He couldn't help but smile, seeing the boys' stances shift every so slowly. They were taller than her, every one, but they looked small all of a sudden. By the time she turned and started back toward him, the boys had shuffled off, finding girls to dance with.

"All good?" Lucas asked.

"Oh, yeah. Girl used to date one of them and he wasn't too happy to see her show up with Tony tonight. Just one of those few things I have to deal with again now that I teach in a high school."

"High school boys," Lucas nodded, understanding.

"Yeah, well, thankfully they're not all like that," Maya smiled up at him. When the music turned to a slow song, he nodded to himself before looking back to her.

"Do you think it's time for us to get a turn on the dance floor? We can keep an eye out in case those guys try anything? Not that they should, after that talking down you gave them."

"You're a little proud, aren't you?" she chuckled as they made their way to the outer edge of the dancing space and turned to face one another.

"More than a little," he nodded, putting his arms around her.

Of all the things she saw that night, Maya had to say that one of the best she saw was a smiling August Matthews, taking Milena Janacek for many a turn on the dance floor. They had some upbeat songs keeping them jumping around, willing the goofy side to emerge out of August and making Milena laugh, and some slow songs, bringing them closer and warming their cheeks. They had come together as friends, but who was to say what they'd leave as by the end of the night?

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	262. Their Step to Finals

September 18th 2020

_Chapter 262  
Their Step to Finals_

Climbing into his car in late afternoon, knowing he was making that drive from university to home for the last time until fall, Lucas felt just a bit lighter. It wasn't as though the exams had been particularly difficult. A lot of work, yes, but then when was it not? The thought that he would have summer ahead of him though, much more relaxed, more time at home, with his wife, his family and friends… That was enough to lift him up into this airy sensation.

With this semester done, he was now looking toward his final year of school, and he honestly could not wait. He would often waver between two states of mind, between contentment for his ongoing education and a desperate need to be done with this part of his life so that he might begin the next one. Now, with just one year left, he had a feeling he'd be going back and forth between these two, a lot more than he usually did.

The latter half, the discontent half, hardly existed outside the space of this car, this road. So long as it was contained here, he could feel it did not become anything more than it needed to be. It was almost silly anyway. He'd had this dream for his life, for so long, and he was accomplishing it. He'd always known what it would mean, and he was doing it gladly. It still didn't mean he couldn't hit certain patches of time where he would rather skip ahead and be done with this step.

The thing he never forgot… He kept those feelings in the car, yes, but even so, he would arrive back home after one of those days, wouldn't bring it up. And then, sooner or later, Maya would come along, and she'd embrace him in a way, kiss him in a way, and without saying a word either she would have telegraphed to him… _I'm here, I get it._ If he didn't already appreciate the hell out of his wife, he would have been reminded, every last time, just how lucky he was to have her.

After one of those days, the feelings would pass for a while, and he would be pulled to the other side once more, reminded of how genuinely happy he was to be where he was, to be headed toward his goal and being so very close to it. He wasn't just going through the day to day either, he was doing very well, and the more knowledge he gained, the more it got to feel like he'd had no idea all this time just how much he wanted to be doing what he would be doing, which was saying a lot. Those feelings, that sensation of accomplishment and excitement… It made those feelings of frustration feel so very small.

This summer, he would be splitting his time between the bookstore and the ranch in a much more balanced way than he'd done so far. This had not specifically been the plan, not until a few weeks ago, when Juliet Stapleton had called him to ask if he'd be able to work the extra time over the summer. Dr. Alvarez, who presently worked at Sullivan Stables, who Lucas had been shadowing, had to reduce his hours due to a family situation. They needed the extra help.

Lucas accepted at once, always happy to help, especially for his people, and Manny Alvarez was fast becoming one of those. The man had never treated him as though he was coming to step on his toes, that he would steal his job because his grandmother had owned the place and decided he would get this job. He had known for a time now, years sufficient to let his character show, so that by the time he started coming along to work the odd hours at the ranch, it had taken next to no time for him to show that he was truly dedicated to the work and that he would be an asset to their team. From there, they had gotten to develop a solid working relationship, which had grown to expand beyond the ranch. He had come to the house plenty of times now, with his wife, just as Lucas and Maya had been received at _his_ house.

For that connection, it had been natural for Lucas to follow up this call from Juliet with a call to Manny, to find out what was going on. His immediate thought had been that something might have been wrong with him, but when he'd learned this wasn't the case, his thoughts had then turned to his family, and here he'd found he was correct. It was his wife. She'd taken ill, and he would need to be with her, whenever his son could not. Lucas had been sorry to hear about this. Esther was always so good to him and Maya, treating them like her own children. They had actually gone to school with Chris Alvarez, graduated same year as him. Now he was married, with a baby daughter, and as much as he would be there for his mother and father, his parents wanted him to think about his own family, too. That meant less hours at the ranch, and it meant Lucas stepping in.

"Whatever you need, you call us any time," Lucas had told Manny, and the man had thanked him, his voice heavy with emotion.

So, Lucas would be starting on this new schedule, in a few days' time. Weekends at the bookstore, four weekdays at the ranch, one weekday and a couple weeknights at the bookstore again. Even though he would have preferred this all to have happened under much different circumstances, he had to admit he was looking forward to getting started. If he needed something to give him the perspective he needed, to motivate him through one more year at school, on those downer drive days, this had to be it.

There were so many reasons to look forward to this last year at school, and really those were the only ones he needed to focus on. One more year of classes, but also growing responsibilities at his grandmother's ranch. Entering his second year of marriage, starting a family… The idea alone was carrying the bulk of his anticipation for that coming year, he couldn't deny it. He was so ready to be a father, as much as Maya was ready to be a mother. It was all a matter of timing now.

Having Maya's siblings with them for a couple weeks back in April, that had only made them that much more anxious for that step in their lives. For sure, it hadn't exactly been smooth sailing, what with the whole situation, MJ and his friend and the name calling, but they had handled it all to the best of their abilities. Weeks onward, they couldn't well say that it was all behind them. Katy and Shawn still didn't feel comfortable about sending their son to the Wingers' house, so they'd have Mikey come around theirs. But then there was still school, and as much as the boys' parents had worked to get it through their older son's head that what he'd said was wrong, he'd still cause trouble at school. But from everything they'd seen and heard, they knew at least that both MJ and Mikey had taken their families' words to heart, and their friendship was stronger than ever.

"Hey, where's your sister?" Lucas asked when he came home to find Sam and a few of his classmates sitting around the living room, reviewing for their own last finals.

"Attic," Sam pointed up, and Lucas climbed on his way to find her. She had her headphones on, sitting at the drawing desk, which had been moved nearer to the front window, the better to take in the view. She was drawing, zoned in, so he pulled out his phone.

_Lucas: The message is coming from inside the house…_

He watched with a smirk as her screen lit up and she just barely turned her head to read it, paused, and finally swiveled on her chair, pulling her headphones around her neck.

"Oh, hey, I know you," she smiled as he approached and bent to meet her in a kiss hello. "Permanently attached to a textbook, notebook, or computer screen?"

"Not me, not anymore, not for a while again," he assured her, basking in her shining face.

"You promise?" she asked, locking her arms around his waist.

"I can kick out those kids downstairs, I'll show you how honest I am," he teased.

"Tempting, very tempting," Maya laughed, pulling back to pause her music and set her headphones down before standing from her chair. "But see, now, I made all that food, and they're right there, and also your mother will sense my bad hostess manners if I don't feed them."

"Hey, our house, our rules?" Lucas shrugged, getting a laughing gasp in return. "Did I do it? Did I summon her?" he looked around.

"Maybe she won't have heard," Maya whispered. When Lucas' phone rang two seconds later, they both looked entirely unsure anymore. It wasn't his mother.

"Hey… Uh, I don't know, hold on," he looked to Maya after he'd answered. "It's Ramona, she wants to know if we had dinner yet, if we want to go eat somewhere with her and Ben, sort of end-of-year thing."

"Yeah, sounds great, let them have their own thing," Maya gestured in what he took to mean 'Sam and his classmates.'

"We're in," Lucas told Ramona. "Great, see you there," he hung up after she'd told him where to go. Soon, he and Maya were letting Sam know they were heading out, and they were in the car, off to the restaurant to meet their friends.

"Hey, so what's your schedule like next week again?" Maya asked as she drove.

"Mostly open. I'm not starting at the ranch until the week after this one, and my schedule at the bookstore isn't changing until then either, so I can have a breather after the end of the semester."

"Good…"

"Why? What do you need?" Lucas asked, intrigued.

"I don't know about 'need,' but I'm hoping maybe I can talk you into being my… co-host? Co-guide? For Museum Marathon? Mrs. Yang can't make it, and you have experience, and well… Going to a museum isn't nearly as fun without you, especially _that_ museum…"

As an end of year thing, Maya had arranged to take her four groups to the museum. She would be accompanying each group on a separate day, from Monday through Thursday, and what they saw there would factor into their final projects. She'd hoped to have Mrs. Yang join her, as a surprise especially to the seniors, who would have had her for three of their four years at the school. Unfortunately, she was out of town and wouldn't be back until after the school year ended.

"I couldn't pass that up, could I?" Lucas smiled.

"Think they'd let you wear your blazer?" Maya asked, barely containing her excitement. Sure, she'd been about ninety-nine percent sure that he'd say yes, but now it was official.

"Probably not… But I can still wear a different one if you'd like me to," he laughed. _He'd _been sure she'd bring it up. Even after all these years, it remained her favorite thing he had ever worn, and she never lost an opportunity to bring it up. A close second, possibly a tie, would be his uniform from when he'd been working at his aunt's clinic up in Houston.

"I am liking this plan more and more," Maya declared, and it felt to Lucas as though, even if _her _school year was not quite over, their summer was starting, right here and now.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	263. Their Step to Depart

September 19th 2020

_Chapter 263  
Their Step to Depart_

_Monday afternoon – 11th grade field trip_

"Alright, I'm going to need everyone to stop moving around so I can count you off before you get on the bus!" Maya called over the milling group of kids as they stood out in the parking lot. She may have graduated high school seven years ago already, but she remembered exactly what this feeling was right here, as they waited to leave school for a field trip. For that, she couldn't very well blame them for this hyperactivity, but she also developed a brand new bit of sympathy for her teachers, when they'd had to wrangle her and her classmates. This wasn't even like those big outings where they had several bus loads to look after, only one class at a time, and she was used to dealing with those groups one by one.

After a floating chorus of 'Sorry' or 'Okay' or 'Sorry, Mrs. Friar,' they came to a standstill, and she was able to check them off from the list in her head. At the beginning of the year, she had them memorized in alphabetical order, and she would count them out that way. By now, it was more like she would visualize them all sitting at their stations and she'd work through each one, from door side to window side. Everyone was present and accounted for… Well, just about.

"So, we're all here?" Derek Boggs asked, when her hand went down.

"The class is all here, yes," Maya confirmed, and he started to move toward the bus, which led the others to follow. "Hey, now, hold on, not yet," Maya stalled them. "We're still waiting on a couple people, who are running late," she informed them, the latter end of her statement coming as she turned to look at the street, hoping to see a car turn into the lot at that moment.

"Who else is coming?" Leon Morales inquired. Finally, she spotted the familiar car and smiled.

"You're about to find out," she told him. Now the rest of the group was watching the car, too, made curious by the statement. They could all see that there were two people in the front of the car, and when it came to a stop, the passenger door opened. When said passenger emerged, it got the entire group clamoring, none more than Derek, who was suddenly all smiles as he jogged to reach and embrace his best friend.

Almost as soon as the field trips had been approved by the principal, and set up with the museum, the idea had come to Maya. It was the kind of idea you just couldn't abandon once you had it, at least that was the case for Maya. It had been all too easy to pull off, too. She had access to her students' contact information, and so she had reached out to the Zimmerman family, especially to their daughter, Helena. The seventeen-year-old, soon to be eighteen, had come on to the call sounding at once like she knew the stranger on the phone, which told Maya that she'd been kept up to date on school developments by her best friend, everything from the regular gossip to the presence of a new art teacher. The way she spoke, it gave Maya the impression that Derek had mentioned her a lot, and with high standings.

When she'd asked her if she would like to join the group for their field trip to the museum, Helena had jumped at the chance. And then when Maya had suggested they surprise everyone else with her presence, she'd jumped at that, too. No one had known. Derek had definitely not known. As much as he had been looking forward to her return, the others had done so, too. They had all of them been in classes together, most of them as far back as pre-school. Her being sick, her being gone, it had left a void they were very happy to find closed with her return.

"What took you so long?" Maya turned to Lucas after he came over to join her.

"We had to drive back halfway," Lucas explained, before giving her the whole story.

His part of the surprise had been simple enough. Go pick up Helena, bring her to the school. Well, he had gone to the Zimmerman house, and he'd rung the bell, where he'd been greeted by the girl's mother. As it turned out, Helena's mother knew _his_ mother, through some social group or another, so at the very least he came into that house trusted to depart with the woman's teenage daughter.

When she'd been called down, the girl had come practically bounding down the stairs, sending her ponytail swishing along. Her mother had seen her out the door with so many questions and demands, and Helena showed patience mixed with 'oh, please, can I just go already' in her eyes, answering each query as it came before finally kissing her mother's cheek and turning to follow her future new teacher's husband. They got in the car, and they chatted for a couple minutes as they drove off, but then she grew quiet.

"You nervous about seeing them?" Lucas had asked.

"Huh? Oh… A little, I guess," Helena admitted, seeming to realize why he asked a moment later. "But that's not, I…" She hesitated, looking at him, out the window, down at her hands, up at her reflection in the rear-view mirror… "Can you pull over for a minute?" she finally asked, and Lucas did as asked before turning to her.

"What's going on?"

The girl looked nervous now, but only for a moment. After that, she seemed to be admonishing herself for that feeling. Then, she reached up with both hands, her fingers slipping along her hairline. Even as Lucas realized what she was doing, Helena lifted the mass of brown hair from her head, revealing it to be a wig. Underneath, her head was covered by a very short but strengthening bit of hair just a shade or two lighter. She ran a hand over it, like she was still getting used to it being there again.

"I spent all morning deciding whether to wear it or not," she explained, looking to the wig now sitting in her lap, instantly made to look out of place in its heap, even as she tried to maintain its shape. "None of them have ever seen me like this," she pointed to her head. "Only Derek. I don't know if I'm ready, but… it feels like I should." Lucas let her work it through on her own. He would only intervene if he felt she needed him to. "My mom says 'it's just hair,' but it's not, at least not out there. It's like… when I'm at home, it doesn't matter. They've seen me through all of it, the low parts, and the parts even lower than that. But at school, they just… I left one day, looking like me, and now I'm going back like this. I don't want them looking at me like all I am is what happened to me."

"It happened," Lucas nodded. "Past tense. You're here now. You made it through. You get to decide what you want them to see."

A minute later, he was turning the car around, and they were driving back to the Zimmerman house, where Helena dashed out, placed the wig in her mother's custody, and returned to the car. When she stepped out again, in the school lot, she did so with not a hint of a slouch. And whether or not her classmates took notice of her hair, the only thing they expressed was how happy they were to see her, and to know that she would be among them in the fall, for their senior year.

"I've never seen him smile like that," Lucas nodded over to where Derek stood, next to Helena, as everyone took their turn hugging her, greeting her…

"I did, a couple of times," Maya smiled. She was doing her best not to go and get overly emotional, watching her juniors be so happy. "I think I'll be seeing it a lot more now." She couldn't stop thinking of the boy she'd met, at the beginning of the year, how much her perception of him had changed, informed as it was from the journey of all those months from strangers to where they were now, like a family unit that existed within the walls of their school.

"Should we get going?" Lucas asked her, nodding to the bus driver, who was staring back at them and pointing to his watch. Maya blinked and moved.

"Yeah…" she headed toward the students and Lucas followed. "Continue the reunion on the bus, guys, we gotta go," she clapped her hands together to get their attention and they started to move, climbing on to the bus and taking their seats.

The ride to the museum very nearly cost them the participation of their driver for the remainder of the week, as the kids all kept trying to get their turn at talking with Helena, asking her questions, telling her about some thing or another that had happened at school while she had been gone. The girl might have been overwhelmed by it all, but then it soon came to feel as though she was much too happy to be around them all again, and so she welcomed the non-stop conversation. Possibly securing the driver's continued presence was Lucas, talking to him and giving him other things to think about, while Maya tried to get the students to not move around the moving vehicle so much.

Maya didn't get a chance to really speak with the returning girl until after they had returned to the school after the museum. Part of the deal for bringing Helena along with them had been that she would be driven to and from the school, and so as Lucas drove them, Maya sat in the back with her student.

"I never got the chance to say thank you," Helena told her. "I really needed this. I think if I had to see them all again on the first day of school in the fall, I would have been so much more freaked out. Now that part is done at least."

"It was my pleasure," Maya smiled. "And I got to finally meet you. The way Derek, and Mr. Brett, and… pretty much anyone I've talked to have spoken about you, I couldn't wait." Now Helena was the one to smile, like she already felt a kinship to her new art teacher.

"Would it be okay if I did the project, too? The final you talked about back at the museum. I did a lot of drawing when I was stuck at home, or at the hospital, but I'd like to really get to do something more now. Plus, I think I already have a few ideas, from what we saw on our tour."

"Of course it would be okay," Maya nodded at once, opening her bag to find one of the instruction sheets she'd handed out to the group. She also found a pen and wrote down her e-mail address. "When you're done, you let me know, and we'll go from there," she gave Helena the paper. She remembered how Derek had told her Helena was eager to return to school, for so many reasons, and here she definitely saw it in the girl's face.

"Thanks, Mrs. Friar."

"Any time," Maya told her. "I'd really like to see those drawings you did, too, if you're up for sharing some of them sometime." Helena's smile renewed.

"You can come up and see them when we get to my house if you've got time."

"I think I do," Maya looked to the rear-view mirror, getting quick confirmation from Lucas at the wheel. "I can't wait to see."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	264. Their Step to Ride

September 20th 2020

_Chapter 264  
Their Step to Ride_

_Tuesday morning – 10th grade field trip_

The group's departure from school was a smoother affair on the second day, with no delays or surprises. The sophomore's allotted trip time had made it so that, like with the seniors in a couple of days, Lucas simply accompanied Maya as she left the house that morning and headed to school with her. He'd have some time to kill until they left, but that would hardly be a problem. As first period had kicked off, he'd remained out on the old bench outside. The memories came fast, one after the other, enough so that the time really felt like it went by in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, he was getting a text from Maya, telling him they were headed for the parking lot and to meet her at the bus.

Once he'd gotten there and found the driver waiting outside, he was reminded of the previous day's trip, the delay and the chaos, and how the poor guy had come close to quitting on them. Lucas gave him as much of a cheerful greeting and attitude as he could, hoping it would encourage his perspective to turn toward optimism for this second round. He remembered Maya saying something earlier about today possibly going much better than yesterday. He hadn't known what she meant by this, and he didn't find out, not until he and the driver spotted Maya and the tenth graders coming and someone poked their head to the side and waved. Lucas barely had the chance to realize this had been Ariel Su when the driver gave a chuckle and waved back. He turned to the puzzled Lucas and gestured in her direction.

"My niece," he revealed.

When they reached the bus, Maya counted off the kids, ensuring she hadn't lost any of them on the way, and sent them boarding the bus at the same time. Once she'd been counted, Ariel had detoured to go and greet her uncle with a quick hug before marching her way on to the vehicle. Jim the driver, Uncle Jim, was a different man indeed, and he no longer looked about to quit on them, which was a relief. He told Lucas how Ariel was his sister's daughter, and in a few short words it became clear that he thought very highly of the girl, that she was possibly one of the most precious things in his life.

There was no doubt Ariel thought the world of her uncle, too. Both Maya and Lucas remembered enough of being in high school to know what the presence of a family member on school premises usually looked like for the student in question. More often than not, they tried to make themselves very small and pretend as though there was absolutely no familial connection between them. Some of them had no choice, of course, like Riley and August with their father, or Daphne Brett with hers, as they worked here, taught here, but then they hardly made a big deal of it, just went around like 'yeah, that's my dad, so what'd you get on your quiz?'

While the rest of the tenth graders dispersed through the middle and back rows of the bus, Ariel Su dropped herself in the front seat, the better to chat with her uncle the whole way to the museum. Bringing up the rear, Maya and Lucas had climbed on to find her there and she'd looked to her teacher like she wanted to ensure that this was okay. Maya nodded with a smile, tapping her shoulder as she moved to sit behind her. Lucas dropped in at his wife's side and soon they were headed out of the lot. They couldn't say that the bus was that much quieter today, but to look at him, Driver Jim did not seem to give a mind, talking to his niece the whole time while keeping his eyes on the road.

"Can we take her with us all week?" Lucas whispered and Maya chuckled.

"Don't think I didn't consider it," she whispered back, though between them it could be accepted that the previous day had been a fluke and that, on the whole, the guy was just as they saw him now. A bad day happened to everyone. "So, what are you going to be up to this afternoon once we get back here? You're not going to just sit outside the whole time, are you?"

"I don't know, might not be the worst thing. It was very peaceful," he commented, which made her smile in a very 'you are such a nerd, also I love you' kind of way. "I might just stay at the museum, because clearly I still come off like a guide in there. Maybe I walk a different way?" he suggested, his smile increasing for how the mere memory of the 'incident' could still trigger a solid bit of giggling out of her. She tried so hard to contain it, especially around other people, doubly so around her students. It had been hard enough when they'd been at the museum yesterday, and now on the bus she did absolutely get a few looks from some of her students, who'd wondered where the sound came from.

"What's so funny?" Ariel Su turned around in her seat, curious for the nearby giggles coming from her art teacher. Maya waved this off, shaking her head, though she wasn't convincing much of anyone when her cheeks were flushing up from the laughter.

"Long story," Lucas responded, figuring it would be some time before Maya could do so without having some bit of laughter making a run for it. "But she's definitely keeping me next to her the whole time today."

He could have explained it fairly easily, but then he didn't know where Maya would consider the line to be between the things she would or wouldn't share with her students. Their storied years with that museum, with his old job as a guide, with the infamous blazer… It all became necessary background before they arrived to that moment, while the kids had been left to roam freely, the better to find the subjects of their final project, when an old woman had approached Lucas under the impression that he worked as a museum guide.

Maya had been nearby, just not near enough as to appear to be with him, thus making _him_ appear unoccupied and free to assist. The old woman had been so sweet and bordering on frail, and it so happened that Lucas knew exactly what she was looking for and what she wanted to know. So, rather than to disappoint her, and after passing a look to his wife, he had taken the woman off to find the painting she was looking for. He offered his arm for support and everything.

While he'd been gone, Maya had continued to keep an eye on her group, who had been dispatched in trios, the better to reduce their spread. As the minutes had gone on though, she'd started to wonder where her husband had gone off to… only to spot him walking with the old woman and now a half dozen other old men and women, who she'd later learn were here on an unaccompanied tour of their own. To look at him, it was clear he was in full guide mode, as though it was seven or eight years ago all over again. By the time he'd been able to return to her, she was still working to contain her laughter, which finally gained full freedom on the drive home from dropping off Helena Zimmerman.

"You good now?" Lucas asked when the bus had pulled to a stop in front of the museum and Maya moved to stand and face the kids.

"Stop that," she whispered at him, feeling her giggles still very much threatening to be heard. "Hey, guys, okay, eyes on me please?" she called out louder now, clapping for attention and getting it within seconds. "Thank you. Uh, Ariel, can you go and sit where I can see you?" she turned back after a moment. "Here, why don't you hand these out while you're up?" Maya passed her the stack of project instructions, and Ariel gladly did as she'd been asked. "I need you all to get in groups of three, not for the final, just for inside the museum. Mr. Friar and I will be leading the way for a while, but then you'll be allowed to wander around the exhibition. When that happens, you have to stay in your trios, alright? If I catch any of you missing any of your buddies, that's an extra page on your final. That's one page per buddy, got it? It's extra work for all of us, so just stick together, please? There are nineteen of you, so you have a choice, either we have a group of four or one of you gets to join Team Friar. Don't see it as a punishment, _we_ know a lot of things that might come in handy for your papers. We'll be waiting outside, step off once you have your groups."

"Do you know, I never get tired of seeing you in teacher mode?" Lucas told Maya as they stepped out on to the sidewalk and waited. Through the windows, they could see the kids figuring out their groups.

"Not gonna lie, might be half the reason I chose you to step in this week," Maya laughed.

In no time, the trios started to emerge. Most of them were pretty much what Maya had expected, knowing her groups enough by now to guess. There was one she'd had to wonder about though, and when she got her answer, it left her just a bit disappointed, if not for herself. She had known that Ariel would be teamed up with Dakota Day, as the two of them tended to travel together, long-time friends as they were. As to the third member though, she had sort of had her vote down for Daphne Brett, knowing how she and Dakota were taking that turtle race of a journey toward… something… since the days of the green paint incident.

Instead, Ariel and Dakota were accompanied by Candace, she of the errant foot who had caused the incident. Maya didn't _hate_ any of her students, but if she had to be honest, there were a few who challenged her patience more than she could say. Candace was absolutely one of them, and Maya had a feeling she had weaseled her way into Dakota and Ariel's trio in whatever way she needed to in order to make them say yes. Maybe she knew, just as Maya guessed after seeing those three come together, that once this happened, Daphne would not even know how to introduce herself as a potential fourth.

"Hey, you with us today?" Maya asked the girl as she emerged last of all from the bus, looking uncomfortable.

"Yeah, I guess," Daphne quietly replied, shrugging. Seeing the self-satisfied look over on Candace's face, Maya resisted the urge to add her three whole pages just for kicks.

"Don't worry about it," she turned back to Daphne and patted her around the shoulders. "_He_ used to be a guide here. You're on the gold team today, Brett," she quietly told her, grinning when the girl finally couldn't keep from smiling.

About halfway through the roaming period, Candace was spotted having wandered off from Dakota and Ariel's side, having decided she didn't need them after all. Lucas could just see the barely restrained pleasure Maya got in telling her she would have to write two extra pages for the two buddies she was missing. When Candace tried to pin this on Dakota and Ariel and get extra pages added on them, Maya nodded for her to see the others were now a trio once more, as Daphne had now joined them. They were a trio again, the loophole accepted by the art teacher, who had a feeling those three might have been gathering in this way even after they left the museum that day.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	265. Their Step to Recall

September 21st 2020

_Chapter 265  
Their Step to Recall_

_Wednesday afternoon – 9th grade field trip_

"Was it weird for you today?" Maya asked Stella as the freshman group moved into the museum. The number of ninth grade students had left them with several trios and one duo lacking a third. To no surprise, this became Stella and Phoebe. Maya had given the girls the option of an exception, knowing they would never wander apart from one another, or to stick with Lucas and her, as had been offered to Daphne Brett the day before. The two of them had shared a brief look, and then they'd decided to go for option two. They were just getting so used to being around her, weren't they, with all those lunch hours they had spent in the art room.

Of course, today, it had been different. As they had been set to depart for the museum as soon as they all finished lunch, Maya had instructed her ninth graders to come and have their meal in the classroom, with her, with Lucas, and with Stella and Phoebe. It had turned into something almost like a picnic or a sleepover, and loads of them had been amused by this. The thing Maya loved to see the most was just how, no matter what configuration they fell into when they'd eat in the cafeteria, back in her classroom they were much more prone to landing somewhere else entirely. No second guessing, no exclusion. They were in their art family mode, and they ran with it.

Maya had all of her students' interests at heart, and she didn't go around playing favorites. But then managing all those various personalities and quirks she had gotten to know through the year could often get to feel like she had to juggle with precision to ensure none of them collided or got dropped. And the one factor she'd wanted to secure was Stella Buckley, the instigator of the art room lunch club. It may have been nearly a year now since she'd joined the school, moving away from her homeschool setting, nearly a year since she'd been allowed into the room at lunch time, eventually joined by Phoebe.

In the beginning, it had been to counteract how new it all was to her, how the cafeteria was just overwhelming for her. Maya meant to check in with her, as the year was drawing to an end, to see if maybe she'd be ready to reintegrate the cafeteria, but she could never bring herself to do it, too afraid that the question would be misunderstood and the Buckley girl would assume herself no longer welcome in the spot she had adopted back in the fall. But it _had_ been nearly a year, and not much had changed. Now, Maya worried that her enabling this separation for much longer would essentially negate the whole reason why she'd started coming to an actual school in the first place. Her shy little bird needed to fly.

Now, when Maya asked her about her impressions of the classroom lunch they'd all had before getting on the bus, Stella looked at her like she didn't know what to say. She turned to Phoebe, who was looking at her final instruction sheet and chewing at her lip in deep thought, before turning back to her teacher.

"It was… a little louder than I'm used to, but… I don't know, it was okay, I guess," she shrugged.

"You go to the basketball games, those seem to go okay for you, don't they?" Lucas tipped his head to look at her from Maya's side. Stella gave a sheepish smile at this. Phoebe was on the team now, good and officially, and Phoebe was her best friend, her first, her one and only true friend… one who wasn't a teacher, too… So, naturally, Stella wasn't about to miss her games, whether she was on the bench or the court. When she'd be on the court, she could count on _her_ best friend being up in the stands, waving her sparkling sign in the air like she barely knew how to do it but was excited to try. It might have been one of the cutest things anyone had ever seen.

"I wear earplugs when I'm out there," she revealed. "When my hair's down, no one can tell."

"Not a bad idea, your ears do kind of ring for a while after being in there for a game," Maya commented, and Lucas nodded in agreement. "That's a good trick," she told Stella, hoping to convey in some way that she might give this a shot in other locations… say, the cafeteria.

This being their third run of these tours this week, Maya and Lucas really were starting to have their routine down. Having each class separately, rather than to have all four at once, made it easier to concentrate on one group at a time, to give each one the attention it deserved. And after they did their guided group portion, the trios would be sent on their way to do their exploring and researching.

Though they had chosen to follow their teacher and her husband, Stella and Phoebe were very much in their own world, speaking quietly to one another, pointing this way and that, looking at their instructions and taking notes. This enabled Maya and Lucas to keep an eye on the other groups a bit more, and, as on previous days, just enjoy being here together, in this place which had held so much meaning to them both for so many years of their lives and their relationship to one another.

"Where's their third?" Lucas asked at one point, getting Maya's attention until she'd turn and see where he was nodding. Spotting Missy and Kai walking along, hand in hand, she frowned for a moment, seeking their missing partner only to find him a few feet behind, staring into his phone. When she happened to catch Missy's eye, Maya pointed to her and Kai, and then to their third. Missy stopped walking, bringing Kai to a stop along with her, before turning her head to look behind. She saw the guy and huffed, calling out to him twice before she and Kai ended up having to dash back and get him. They made him look to their teacher, and Maya gestured for him to put his phone away right now or he'd have extra pages. He didn't have to be told twice.

"I didn't know they were dating," Phoebe commented, as she and Stella had naturally witnessed the whole thing.

"Who, Missy and Kai?" Maya asked, and the girls nodded. "They're not."

"But they're holding hands," Stella pointed out.

"He told her he always gets lost in museums when everyone was coming off the bus," Lucas revealed. "Might be their way to make sure he wouldn't this time," he shrugged.

"First time I held his hand, we weren't dating yet," Maya beamed to her husband, reminiscing. "Actually, we were right here, in this museum."

"You were?" both girls asked at once.

"Seventh grade field trip," Lucas recalled, with a smile of his own. "We snuck off from the group while no one was looking, ran around the place on our own for a while," he went on, and Maya gave a look as though to ask if it was really a good idea to be telling her students this. In the end though, the verdict just seemed to be that, where _these _students were concerned, they had little to worry themselves over. When the girls started to laugh, Maya turned a finger toward them.

"Hey, it was for the art," she 'defended' herself.

"You guys have been together that long?" Phoebe asked, amazed.

"No, well, we didn't actually get together until… well, until we were in ninth grade," Maya revealed, tipping her head to the two ninth graders. Lucas' response to this was a look which might have been read as 'we might have been together that far back, but…' "You two need to get to work, come on," Maya nudged the girls to move along, and so they went.

"How long do you think it'll take _them_ to get there?" Lucas turned to Maya when the girls had gone far enough out of earshot that he could speak, indicating Missy and Kai off on their own explorations with their third looking like a child tagging along with his parents.

Maya could only let out a sigh bordering on sympathetic frustration. Those two… Oh, she saw them every day, Monday to Friday, right after lunch, but then with Missy living just up the lane from them, and Kai living across from the elder Friars' house, she saw one or both of them most weekends, too. In her classroom especially though… She got to stand witness, front and center, to the progress of their friendship, the very small dips off road toward potential romance… Oh, she saw all of that, whether they noticed or not… probably not… If they kept it up the way they were going now, they would never 'get there.'

"I'm really starting to wonder now," Maya had looked to Mr. Matthews, one day in the teachers' lounge. "When we were out here, in your class, me and Lucas… Was it that obvious? Were _we_ that obvious?" Cory said nothing at first, only drinking from his cup, but then his silence said plenty on its own. "That much, huh?"

"I could fill books, big chunky ones, with all the couples I've seen grow into being before my eyes over the last two decades," Cory finally had to laugh. "I'm not saying all of them have survived the test of time, some of them I couldn't tell you. Sooner or later, they'll go off into the world and you won't get to know what happens next, not for most of them. Now, as far as you and Lucas, well… that one goes in the hall of fame. I did get to marry the two of you," he reminded her, with no small amount of pride.

"Yeah, you did," Maya had laughed.

He wasn't wrong, was he? Missy and Kai, whatever they would or wouldn't become, were not the only ones. August and Milena, Daphne and Dakota… It was almost impossible not to get the tiniest bit invested in seeing what would become of these vibes she would witness radiating through her classroom day by day.

When the time came for everyone to head back to the bus and back to school, Maya counted off the students as they climbed aboard and took their seats. Bringing up the rear, their third having officially retired from following them, Missy and Kai made it all the way to the bus door before they just sort of stopped and realized they were still holding hands. They looked to one another, and as their hands released, they both had themselves a good blush, doing their best not to let the other one see and at the same time paying no mind to their teacher as she shared a look with her husband over their heads. _Are they even serious with this?_ Maya's eyes said, and Lucas could only smirk as he shrugged.

They only had one more of these, bright and early the next morning, with the seniors, and both young Friars felt almost sad for this as they sat on the bus that afternoon. The week was just flying by, and so were these field trips. Lucas could see how much Maya enjoyed bringing the kids here, and he had a feeling tomorrow's final group would hit her the hardest. Her seniors, the first of her kids to graduate and move on from the school… She'd let them all into her heart, and now the first experience of letting some of them go, oh… Maybe that was another reason why she'd recruited him for this.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	266. Their Step to Transition

September 22nd 2020

_Chapter 266  
Their Step to Transition_

_Thursday morning – 12th grade field trip_

"I was thinking…" Lucas declared as he and Maya came to sit at her desk.

They had only just returned from the museum with their final group of the week, timed well enough for lunch that it had already been decided he would join her. When they'd been getting back on the bus, Maya had texted music teacher Morgan, asking if she might add to her usual lunch order. Her boyfriend, as they'd learned, worked at Ma Maggie's, which had made Maya's affections for her colleague and friend increase that much further. Morgan's boyfriend, Paul, would send her something just about every day. Today, she'd called him, putting in an extra order, for Maya and Lucas. After dropping off the kids, they'd gone and picked up their bags from the lounge and retreated to Maya's class.

"Should I be worried?" Maya asked, sounding just a bit closer to 'Is my food going to get cold?' Lucas chuckled, signalling for her to dig in, which she did.

"I'd like us to go out tomorrow night," he went on. Maya smiled. Of course, she would be on board for date night. "Specifically, I was thinking we could go to dinner, before or after going to the museum." Her smile pressed into a curious squint now.

"The museum, as in the place we've been to every day this week?" she asked.

"Yes, that one," he laughed. "It's just that, when we were out there today, I kept thinking how we _were_ there, but we weren't necessarily getting to _be_ there, you know? We were busier looking after the students, making sure none of them wandered off… So, I'd like to go, just you and me, so we can enjoy it all for ourselves… Maybe look around for some 'weird stuff,' too…"

"That actually sounds like a really good idea," Maya decided. "It'll be a nice way to just book-end the week," she added, and Lucas nodded. "And I definitely won't wander off from you, unlike some people who shall remain writing extra pages on their finals."

Today's trip had been possibly the most anticipated and most chaotic at the same time. It was to be a sort of send-off for her first graduates, which was bound to set her up with a number of lofty mental images, with her imparting some final knowledge on to those kids before they left her classroom forever.

What she mostly had to contend with was a bunch of boys and girls on the verge of sitting their senior year finals. It may have been a number of years since they'd gone through that themselves, but it didn't take long for both Maya and Lucas to recognize the stress that resided in most of them. These were possibly some of the most important tests they would have to take in their young lives, and by the time they got on the bus to head to the museum, it left their teacher to wonder if they would really get much enjoyment out of this day.

"Might not be so bad," Lucas told her, when they reached the museum. "They should be a bit more minded, yeah? No wandering off or anything?"

Later, Maya would 'accuse' him of having jinxed them. Already as they'd gone around in the more group/guided portion of their tour, they could both feel that their bunch felt looser than they'd like, with some of the students falling behind and having to be called back, others clearly not paying attention until their name was called and even then needing a tap on the shoulder from their neighbor. Then, when they'd been released into trio mode, the 'madness' had been unleashed. They had gotten the same rules as every other group, including the 'stay in your trio or suffer extra pages' gold rule, which should really have been all they needed to hear, with how busy they already were.

"Okay, those three are all on their own," Lucas pointed out each of the first splintered group, even as Maya had spotted another group in the same conditions, just completely off in their own worlds. It wasn't even that they weren't doing the other thing that they were supposed to do, which was to go and get a look at the works of art, observing the ones they'd choose for their final and taking what notes they might need, but then they had been told to stick to their trios.

"Yeah," Maya sighed, pointing to the second trio. She was conflicted, he could tell. It wasn't that they were slacking off or making trouble, and it would have been very easy to decide to ignore what she'd told them back on the bus. But if she did that, wouldn't that make her a hypocrite? Everyone had gotten the same rule, and all those who had broken it had been punished in the same way. If she exempted them just because they were seniors and they had a lot on their plate, what would it say? "I'll go be the page police with those three, can you get those?" she finally looked to Lucas, who nodded and took off one way as she went the other. Already, that was two more pages for each of those six, which meant twelve more for _her_ to correct.

By the time the groups had to be called to head back to the bus, every last trio save for one had splintered and been penalized for it, and Maya was barely keeping a grasp of her patient teacher mood. Her one unbroken trio, to no surprise, was August Matthews and the Janaceks, though she suspected that if it wasn't for their connection to her and to one another, they might have landed themselves extra pages, too. With the way they had kept together, Maya had half a mind to shorten their finals as an act of gratitude.

It was a wonder that it had taken this long for August to become so close to the brother and sister, Tony especially, as he would have been in classes with him going back as far as when the Matthews had left New York and relocated to Texas, a dozen years ago. All they could guess was that, up until this year, August had had his little group, if it could be called that. He'd quickly made friends with a fellow new kid, and the two of them had been very tight for all this time, until the boy had moved again. And then there'd been Michaela Zhu, of course, who had been his first and so far only girlfriend, up until she'd gone away to college and the two of them had eventually split up. She may have been a year above him in school, but she was still such a big part of his life, and maybe for that, between her and his best friend, he'd been set in his ways.

And then Tony… Tony, as far as Maya could say for having interacted with him all this year, was just a quiet guy. He was tall and could be rather impressive looking, the kind of guy you might assume ready to knock you down if given half a reason, especially for the fact that he didn't talk much, never raised his voice much at all, just kept a very even tone. Oh, he smiled, and he'd give a light laugh from time to time, but he was much more prone to do his own thing, to speak only when spoken to most of the time. The most active you were bound to see him be was on the basketball court, and even there he was precise, not wild and out of control in the slightest, which a very strong asset in making him the effective player and captain he was for his team.

Maya had one clear memory of the Janaceks before they'd become her students, and this one had needed to be brought back to light from one day coming upon pictures of the day in the question. It helped a lot that this day was one of the most pivotal ones in her life. October 31st 2017, commonly known in the Friar household as Spookversary, the day before she and Lucas had gone from friends to boyfriend and girlfriend.

Tony had been in August… Auggie's class, another of the kids for whom the haunted house had been created. Maya and Lucas both had been involved in the creation and decoration of the activity, along with many of their fellow freshmen, but there had also been some parents involved. One of them had been a woman named Magda, who had painted several pieces for them, with some infinitely fine details, impressing the fifteen-year-old Maya to no end.

On Halloween night, she had known to look for Magda's son, as she'd told her all about his desire to go dressed as a magician. She'd told him how her husband had even engineered him a magician's hat, from which he could pull a rabbit as though it had not been there until he spoke the magic word. The eight-year-old had been proud to perform this little trick when the vampire girl had seen him and asked him to do so. Ten and a half years later, and she still remembered the boy's smile, missing several of his teeth. Recalling his mother, Maya had seen to getting him through to where the woman would be waiting, outside. When they'd made it out, the little magician had run toward his mom, who waited with a small girl with a glittery tutu and fairy wings perched in her arms. The kid had a look to her like she'd had just about her fill of Halloween and just wanted to get home, but when her brother had come along, she'd perked up some, especially as he reached into his bag of candy and offered out a small chocolate bar. She'd looked to her mother, who had given her permission to eat it, late hour be damned.

Milena would have been six then, if her math was right. Maya remembered how she'd seen the fairy ballerina struggle with the wrapper and how she'd gone to help her. The girl had gasped and burrowed her face in her mother's neck, scared of the vampire. The chocolate, once opened, had needed to go into Magda's hand and then be handed over to her daughter once more. Milena had only dared to look back at her once, as she was carried off by her mother, who was busy hearing all about the magician's adventure in the haunted house.

She had possibly run into them in other places over the years, though this was the only actual occasion she could recall. Looking back on it now that she knew Tony and Milena the way she did, it was difficult to think how, just two years later, Magda would be gone, taken by illness, leaving her husband and children to cope without her.

However long it had taken for August and Tony to become the tight friends they'd grown into over the school year, it wasn't the years that mattered so much as the fact that they had made it to this point in their lives. The same could be said of August and Milena, more or less. Their situation was different, of course. _They'd_ spent a couple years secretly doing something they now both regretted. Much as it had afforded the two of them to spend time together, it had been a block in what might have been a closer bond, up until this year, when truth had gone and torn it down. They'd walked from the rubble to become as close as they'd yet to be. They hadn't gotten so far as to call it dating, but if they weren't there yet, they couldn't be so far away. Who knew, maybe the museum would work some magic for them, just as it had done for their art teacher…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	267. Their Step to Change

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

September 23rd 2020

_Chapter 267  
Their Step to Change_

_Friday night – Friars' field trip_

"Right, I'm just going up to change and…" Maya started up the stairs, made it halfway before climbing back down and stopping on the bottom step. "Casual or formal? Halfway?" she asked Lucas, looking down at herself.

She didn't have a choice to change. They would joke that, sooner or later, at least one day a week, she'd come home at the end of the day with some 'artistic stain' or another. This week, maybe because of all the field trips, she'd been spared… right up until today, when Lucas had surprised her, meeting her outside school so he might drive her home. She had greeted him by pulling her jacket open to reveal what could only be described as a patchwork of paint and paper across her shirt.

"How?" was all he could say, shaking his head.

"Dude, you wouldn't believe me if I told you," she'd laughed.

She had been looking forward to this night all day long. Sure, she'd loved her time at work, as she did all her days, stains and complications in laundry included. But now the week was over, and she was headed out with her husband for dinner and a stroll through their favorite museum without a pack of wandering teenagers to look after. Casual or formal, well… Lucas would never say no to seeing her in one of her best dresses, but then it was Friday night, she'd been working all week…

"Oh, casual," he nodded.

"Okay, coming up," she smiled before turning again and dashing up the stairs.

"Want me to get that shirt in the wash?" Lucas called up after her. A moment later, the stained shirt came floating down from above and he caught it.

By the time he'd gone down to the basement, treated the shirt as best he could and put it in the machine, he came back up just as Maya came back down, changed and ready to go. Sam and Cecilia were in the kitchen, making dinner for themselves and a few friends who would be coming to join them for the evening, and they were put in charge of looking in on the washing machine. With all this behind them, they were good to go.

"Where do you want to eat?" Lucas asked as they drove off.

"Right now, I don't know about you, but I just really want to grab a booth at the diner," Maya hummed, like she could already smell the burgers.

The diner, the Garcias' diner, had been a staple from way back on her first days with her new Texan friends. It had been where she'd had her very first job, waiting tables, from age fourteen until she'd finished high school and moved to Houston. It was such a symbol of those middle and high school days, for her, for Lucas, for their group of friends, and coming back to it now, the memories were still very much alive.

"Hey, Nando," they both greeted the man when they walked in. Fernando Garcia was as much a staple of those teen years as the building itself, with that laughing, lively voice. He would always ask them how they were doing, what they were up to, and it might have come off as pleasantries from most people, but Fernando remembered it all. Whenever Maya and Lucas walked in, he would welcome them like a father with his kids.

"The usual?" he called to them with that great big smile of his, to which they nodded. "Excellent, I'll be right over."

"Is it weird to think how this place hasn't changed, ever since I first came here as a kid? There _have_ been changes, here and there over time, but to me it still feels the way it did back then," Lucas stated as he and Maya took to their booth.

"Not weird, I get what you mean," she promised. "I mean I worked here all through high school, I can navigate the place blindfolded even now and I know I'll find anything I try to find. Fernando doesn't like change."

"No, he doesn't," Lucas chuckled.

"He'll let the others talk him into some… aesthetic changes, to spruce up the place, but don't go moving the utensils or the packets behind the counter, he believes in the 'efficiency of a long-standing system,'" she quoted, which boosted her husband's laughter. "He really said that," Maya grinned. "He wasn't wrong though, was he? This place is a well-oiled machine, learned a lot from it."

As they waited for their food, and then once they received it and started to eat, Maya and Lucas swapped stories of their days at work, her at school and him at the bookstore. After having had the rest of the week's days free to go as he pleased, whenever he wasn't on one field trip or another with Maya and her students, today Lucas had been working at the store all day. The way he told it, he'd spent so many days vaguely taking in the exhibit that he'd found himself wandering the art section on his lunch break. He would have been at the school, on his usual lunch date with his wife, but then they'd figured that, seeing as they were going out that night, they could skip this one.

"Wait, did you do research?" Maya wondered, amused.

"I might have done, yeah, just a bit," he admitted.

"Does that mean you'll be able to… guide me?" she asked, in a tone that felt almost better attached to a different activity.

"You might need to keep the old ladies away," he replied, pulling her right back into the giggles of a few days past. That memory could probably keep her stocked in laughter for years. "Even though I didn't have you there to do so, it reminded me of when I had just gotten the job, when you would quiz me."

"I loved the quizzing," Maya beamed, recalling as well. His getting the job at the museum had really been something that brought them closer together. It had developed his own love of art, which gave them all the opportunity to have this thing in their lives they could talk about, time and again, with what felt like an endless supply of avenues to travel. Maya loved to imagine them, decades from now, an old married couple, walking the museums together.

While Lucas had been exploring the arts over at the bookstore, Maya had spent _her_ lunchtime without the rest of her usual lunch crew. When the time had rolled around and neither Stella nor Phoebe showed up, she had to wonder what was going on. She'd definitely seen them in the halls that morning, and they were always freakishly punctual, like they might have had super speed powers, taking them from their last morning class within what felt like instants following the bell. When five, then ten minutes had gone by, Maya had gone searching for them, only to find them sat in the cafeteria, among the rest of the students. Alright, maybe not right in the heart of it. They sat on the end of one of the tables next to the big windows, side by side. Stella had her hair up on the sides, which allowed Maya to spot something in her ear. Phoebe was writing something on her phone and Stella spoke when she showed it to her. The plugs meant that she could hear what her friend was saying, but they were clearly making it work.

It was the first step in Stella's evolution, after spending all those months eating in the art room. Maya had a feeling she wouldn't see those two in her classroom every day at lunch anymore, and as easy as it would have been for her to feel saddened by this 'departure,' what she felt most of all was happiness, watching her students grow. She had returned to her classroom, grabbed her lunch, and gone to join her co-workers in the teachers' lounge. She hadn't gotten to eat in there for most of the year, once Stella had joined her, and then Phoebe, and then the dance lessons had happened… She had gotten comfortable in this situation, too, but now she looked forward to spending more time with Morgan, and Cory, and Lindsay, and all the others.

When they'd arrived at the museum, the girl at the front desk, who had been there all week whenever the field trip groups came along, almost did a double take when she saw the pair of them back again.

"We should get a gold star, five days in a row," Maya joked as they moved into the exhibit proper.

"Or a gift shop coupon," Lucas offered.

"Or that," Maya agreed. "Oh, there's this print I keep seeing when we walk by…"

"Oh, I know," Lucas smirked back at her. Like he could go anywhere with her and _not_ notice her roving 'art eyes.' She could only laugh for being 'busted.'

It really was a whole other experience, for them to be here now, on their own, really taking in the various pieces on display. As they walked, arm in arm, Lucas would occasionally lean in to whisper one of his newly acquired facts at her ear, lifting her features into a strong smile whenever he did.

"They're closing in fifteen minutes," Lucas finally had to point out, looking around. Even after all these years, he knew what closing time at the museum looked like. "Do you want to make that stop at the gift shop?" he asked Maya, who had been observing one painting for several minutes already. She blinked, turning back to him like she had heard everything he'd said but her brain needed to let the thoughts connect now that she wasn't looking at the painting anymore.

"Oh, yeah, yeah," she took his hand, leading him along. "I thought it would be a great addition to the house, I'm not sure where yet."

Lucas hadn't even really picked up on what was so special about this print, only that he'd spotted Maya's roving eyes all week long. Now that he did see it, it made him smile, as he understood why she'd been so drawn to the image… Galloping horses… It had made her think of him, and the ranch.

"Aren't they beautiful?" she asked him, with such a happy smile, the kind that always got his heart fluttering.

"They are," he easily agreed. By the time the PA system was letting people know it was time to leave, Maya and Lucas were on their way out with the rolled-up print in hand. They walked back to the car, debating where they might put it. If left to their own devices – Maya for certain – every last inch of their walls would have been covered with paintings, and prints, drawings, photos… They were pretty good at being discerning in their choices, and if they couldn't be, well, they were coming to explore something of a rotation system, swapping some pieces out a couple times over the year.

"Maybe we could wait to put it up," Maya suggested as they drove on toward home.

"Wait for what?" Lucas asked.

"Next year," Maya replied as though it was the obvious answer. Once she said it, he soon connected the dots. Of course, next year, when he would finish school for good, when he would move on to work at Sullivan Stables. It would be a sign of his achievements.

"I do like that idea…" he slowly nodded, laughing a moment later when he saw the look on his wife's face.

"We'll get a frame for it and everything."

Lucas did not lack for times where he would be reminded of how close he was getting to graduation, to moving on to the next step in his life lately. It wasn't a surprise. He'd had those times when he'd been about to start his last year of high school, and his last year at university back in Houston. It wasn't particular to him either, it was any of them about to graduate, and there were plenty more around them who were coming up on those final years. Dylan would be finishing up after next year, too, and so would Rosa, and so would Sam… It felt like just yesterday that they'd all started, didn't it? Just yesterday that Dylan had finally decided it was his time, now that he knew what he wanted to do, just yesterday that Rosa had found her own path, too, after going the undeclared path.

And Sam… Just yesterday, it felt, he had been coming to Maya and him, putting forth this idea of his moving to Austin to live with them while he went to school out here, and now he was one year off from being done, from leaving them. Lucas knew Maya desperately wanted to know what he'd choose to do, whether he'd stay in Austin or not, he didn't blame her. Sam was his brother now, too, and though he would support whatever choice he made, he would be lying if he said a part of him didn't hope this choice would involve him settling down to stay here, in their city.

Well, they'd figure it out soon enough. It all hinged on Cecilia, and what _she_ would do when she finished high school, right as Sam finished college. He'd already told them that he and Cecilia had talked it over, that his being done with school would be a blessing, enabling him to go where she went. Now, all they needed to know was the location of this 'where she went.' With senior year coming in the fall, she'd be sending out college applications, and then they'd have to see where she got accepted. Sam was very Sam-like in his fierce belief that his girlfriend was the smartest cookie in the box and would get in anywhere she applied.

They were in the living room when Maya and Lucas returned. Their friends had gone on home, and now Cecilia was asleep, leaning to Sam's shoulder as he kept on watching the movie they'd been watching, the volume turned low.

"Hey," he whispered, looking back to his sister and brother-in-law. "I know I have to drive her home, she just…" he nodded down to his sleeping girlfriend.

"How about you just call her father and ask if she can spend the night," Maya offered. "On the couch," she specified after a beat. "Actually, why don't you let me take care of that?"

"That'd be great, thanks," Sam nodded. In response, Maya leaned over the couch to kiss the top of her brother's head. "We took care of your shirt," Sam informed her, and it was a mark of the good evening she'd had with Lucas that it took her a moment to remember what had happened with that.

"What would I do without you, Sammy?" she smiled, doubling down with a quick hug.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	268. Their Party For Closure

September 24th 2020

_Chapter 268  
Their Party For Closure_

"Would it be very childish of me if I said I didn't want to go to school today?" Maya asked, after she had prodded Lucas awake. Up to now, she had allowed him to sleep in on those days he could, because it really made no sense to her that he should keep to the early rise if he didn't have to, but today… Today she needed to have a talk before she headed out the door for the day.

"I won't stop you," he mumbled, pulling her closer, catching her in a slow kiss, which could have easily turned into something more if given the chance, but then…

"Yeah, but you're supposed to," Maya sighed, pulling back to look at him. "You're supposed to be good, valiant, honest Huckleberry, who tells me to go to work… do what I have to do… eat my vegetables…"

"Is that who I am now?" he smiled, making a new appeal toward the benefits of just staying here with him by pressing a new kiss to her neck.

"That is not fair…" she breathed, finding it harder to concentrate all at once. "One more day, okay? One more day and you can _absolutely_ wake me up like this… tomorrow. I need the guy with the words right now, please?"

"Oh, that guy," Lucas finally pulled back, propping his head up on his hand. "At your service. Last day of school…" he stated.

"Last day," Maya echoed with a nod.

"Last day until fall, except for the seniors," Lucas continued. She made a sad face. "It will happen whether you're there or not, and if you're not then you don't get to say goodbye?" he pointed out. She stared at him for a moment.

"I think that's a record," she blinked.

"I've had practice," he shrugged humbly.

"Well, you're very good at it," she complimented, stealing at the gap between them once more, with an entirely new drive. "That and other things," she grinned as she kissed him and felt his hands take this as a call to action.

By the time she'd climbed into the minivan and taken off for school, Maya felt about as ready as she would ever be to say farewell to her students, some for a few months, others… Maybe it was just as well that the seniors were in first period. The band aid would be ripped off and then she could go on with the rest of her day, right?

She tried to remember what it had been like, the last day of school when _she_ had been a high school senior. Mostly, she remembered that a sizable portion of her class had not bothered to show up, not unless they had an exam to sit. As far as her class was concerned, everyone had already handed in their final paper, and while she had graded them and would let them have a look, she knew some of them wouldn't necessarily see this as cause to actually attend. _Her_ last day, other than the absences, well… Some of her teachers had already checked out, clearly, but then their presence overall had never been the best anyway. Others sent her off with well wishes and little more. And then the last few – and Cory Matthews had absolutely been one of those – had been going around the school that day with thinly veiled outbursts of 'the feels.' So maybe it wouldn't be so bad if she didn't hold it together the whole time, yeah?

Just walking into her classroom gave her pause. She couldn't believe she'd already made it through her first year as a teacher. She still remembered what it had felt like, when she had found out she'd gotten the job, when she'd even gotten the interview. She remembered how nervous she'd been on her first day, the first time she'd had to stand in front of those kids and be their art teacher. And now… Now she had grown so much into the position, and she loved every second of it, so much that she only mildly looked forward to the summer holidays. Those first kids… Those had been her seniors… She'd only have them for a year, but they would always stay with her. They had been her very first students.

"Maya?"

She smiled. Her very first day had started with August Matthews, started exactly this way, with him calling her name from the doorway. But then boy she found standing there looked almost nothing like the boy who'd stood in that spot back in September. That boy had walked with a weight on his shoulders, with a quietness born of so much quiet pain. _This_ boy walked tall, and he was filled with that light which just came bursting from every part of him.

"Well, if it isn't young Matthews," Maya intoned as he walked in. "Last day, huh?"

"Yeah," he nodded. She just spotted the folder in his hand before he held it out to her.

"What's that?" she asked as she took it.

"You know, the first day, when we all had to introduce ourselves, and then we had to make a sort of… portrait introduction of ourselves?" he asked, and she nodded. "I know it won't count anymore, but I wanted to make a new one than the one I did back then," he explained. "I kept thinking about it, and it didn't feel like it fit anymore."

If she'd had any aspirations for making it through the day without crying, she lost those before first period even had a chance to start. August hadn't stuck around for the part where she opened the folder and looked inside, saying he was going to wait for Tony and Milena, and it was probably a good thing, or she might have ended up hugging him, and even though she'd known him from infancy, it probably wouldn't have been a good idea. Either way, it allowed her that brief moment to discover this new portrait of August Matthews on her own.

To compare the two, the old portrait and the new, she might have said that one had been like a chaotic stormy night, while the other… the other was a peaceful day in spring, a return of colors, of life. It might not have counted toward his grade, no, but it was going up on the attic wall that very night.

When her seniors had come into the room, taking their places, Maya would watch them go and immediately the feeling would be there, rumbling in her chest. It wasn't as though every last one of them had gone through anything the way August had done, but it had still been a year of their lives, a year full of changes, with it being the last one they'd spend as high schoolers. She thought of Milena, who on the whole was not so far off from the person she'd been at the start. Even so, she had shown Maya how some burdens could be harder to spot, that not everyone wore them in their posture, their face, or their work. Maya may always have been one with an open, willing ear for her students to turn to, but Milena had shown her just how important it could be that she was this person for them.

Whether this was proof of that or simply a coincidence, Maya would be able to say that, of all four of her groups, not a single student had been absent on this final day. They had all shown up, even the likes of Candace, who had been something more of a… challenge… throughout the year. They all showed up, and they all went off exchanging wishes for a good summer, until they saw one another again, in the fall.

As for her seniors, her first group of the day, she saw them off with a project she'd cooked up right on the spot, as she'd put August's folder in her bag. They were the exiting senior, so she asked them to put something together for the seniors of the following year, as well as the freshmen who would be coming along for their first year as students at this school. They had all leant themselves to this idea, and when it was all said and done, Maya felt surprisingly more at ease with sending them off at the sound of the bell.

"Long day?" Lucas asked when she walked up to the house to find him sitting on the porch.

"Timewise? Same as usual. Emotions though? Oh boy…" she breathed. "Enjoying the welcoming committee though," she smiled, dropping on to the seat next to him. "Hey," she leaned in and kissed him.

"Hi," he smiled. "How do you feel about pizza tonight?"

"Love it, love it even more if it gets here soon," she nodded. "Sam?"

"Out with Cecilia," Lucas reported.

"You don't say," she leaned back in her seat, enjoying the pleasantly bearable June heat.

"So, how was it today? Besides 'oh boy' on the emotions scale?" Lucas asked, once he'd put in the call for the pizza, which became pizzas, plural, by the look she gave him.

"I have had so many reasons to be happy that I'm a teacher this year, but today might have been the peak of it. If I can keep feeling this way, year after year, I could not ask for more," Maya declared.

"So, you don't want the summer holidays then?"

"Oh, no, I'll have that, thanks," she shook her head. Lucas laughed. "I think we need a party."

"Yeah?" Lucas asked, needing very little to convince him to be on board.

"Yeah, nothing like Halloween in Houston big… or Halloween in Austin either," she amended after a moment, to which Lucas gave a nod. "Your friends from school, and mine, and our usual suspects, and Sam's friends, too, if he wants them over. We get to celebrate just… another year done, summer's here, and so on," she gestured.

"Sounds good to me," Lucas smiled. "When?"

"Tomorrow night? Too soon?" Maya wondered.

"I think we can rally the troops easy enough," he promised. "Hit the stores in the morning for whatever we need… We got this."

"Then that's settled," Maya reached out her hand to shake on it, which Lucas did at once. "You know, it'll be the last big thing before the other big things this summer…"

"How many of those do we have?" he pondered, knowing she would tell him anyway.

"The family trip," Maya counted by tapping her fingers to her thumb, one each to the items, "And Riley and Dylan's wedding, and Chiara having the baby, and then… which one am I missing?" she asked, tapping her ring finger to her thumb as she 'tried to think.'

"First wedding anniversary?" Lucas offered with a smile.

"That's the one," she laughed.

"So, we definitely need a party before that," he agreed.

"We really do."

"And even if we didn't…"

"Party, party! I'll grab my laptop, we need lists."

They would spend much of the next few hours with a session of pizza and planning. The important part was to get the word out as soon as possible, to ensure that everyone could make it on such short notice. It had been so much easier for all of them to just go 'party!' and expect everyone to show up when they'd been back in high school, or even in college, but now so much had changed. Even if they were at heart the same people they had always been, they _had_ grown up, hadn't they? Their schedules and obligations may have changed, but that would not stop them from rounding up the old and the new at every chance they got.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	269. Their Party For Memories

September 25th 2020

_Chapter 269  
Their Party For Memories_

All Maya had said was that she needed to go and find something for the party, and if she had any hopes of getting this thing in time for that evening, she would have to go right in that moment. And so, it would fall on Lucas and Sam to go and do the food and supply run. This was not too big of an ask. Any reason for the brothers to tackle any task together was deemed to be reasonable.

"What do you think she's up to?" Sam asked as they headed toward the car.

"Honestly, with your sister, there are too many options for me to even try to guess," Lucas informed him, and Sam could not deny it.

"Hey!" a voice drew their attention, and they looked to find Missy Sanderson rolling by on her bike. "Where are you guys going?"

"Got some errands to run, why?" Lucas asked their neighbor from up the lane.

"Are you going to the mall?" she asked.

"We are, yeah. You need something out there?" Lucas guessed, and the girl nodded. "Alright, hop in," he tapped the car's hood. Missy grinned, hurrying to stash her bike near the house before moving to climb into the backseat.

It didn't take long, once they took off, for the subject of the party to come up. Missy received this information by sharing how she had just been to a party of her own, a couple days back, when she'd accompanied Kai to the Shelby house for the basketball teams' end of year party.

"They let you go?" Lucas laughed when he heard this, and Missy and Sam looked at him, confused. "When Maya and I were on the teams, the only reason we got to go together was because we were both players. No one got to go unless they were, no boyfriends, no girlfriends, no dates, just the twenty-four of us who were on one team or the other."

"Maya told me about those," Sam recalled. "She said Riley was there, too. She wasn't on the team, was she?"

"Well, no, but they made an exception for her… I don't actually remember why," Lucas admitted. "But she was the only one. How did _you_ get to go?"

"Well…" Missy trailed off, with a look on her face like she was trying to decide whether or not to tell the truth, which only served to put her on the spot. "The captain, Tony, I guess he thought that Kai and I were… together, like dating… so he said I could come, and Kai… didn't correct him?"

"Wait, wait, so you two are pretending to be dating now?" Sam asked, turning in his seat to look at her.

"Uh huh," Missy nodded. Sam made a noise, which Lucas interpreted as a mix between 'you see the irony, right?' and 'this will get weird real quick.' "Stop that," Missy rolled her eyes, making Sam laugh as he turned to face forward again.

It had taken Lucas a while to see it, but then moments like these would come, and it would be so clear, the way that Sam had sort of adopted Missy like an extra little sister. In return, only-child Missy had gone and taken him into her life like the big brother she'd never had. The teasing was always the easiest part to see, but they also could easily imagine how Sam would be prone to step in, if anyone ever dared hurt her in any way.

As Missy went on to tell them about some of what this year's team party had been like, Lucas paid attention, although for the most part his mind would wander back to the days when he and Maya would be in attendance. Even when the teams had been disbanded by the school, the teams would gather at the end of the school year, at the Shelby house. That handful of nights stood easily among his top high school memories. Dancing, swimming, lounging with friends and teammates, and of course the inevitable shoot off competitions that would happen because you couldn't put that many players in one place without someone picking up a ball…

They still saw a lot of their teammates, the ones who were still in Austin at least. Even those who were out of state, out of the country, would be heard from sooner or later, especially that lot of them forever branded as having fought on for the return of the teams… It would never matter how many years went by, all it would take would be the smallest reminder of those old days, and it would be as though no time had passed.

Once they arrived at the mall, Missy went off to get the thing she'd needed, after which she would rejoin Lucas and Sam on their party supply run.

"Do you ever wish you could have gone to those parties when you were in high school?" Lucas asked Sam as they marched off toward the store.

"All the time," Sam nodded. "It was bad enough that I was basically a kid to all of them, but then whenever there'd be a party, I wouldn't be allowed to go because I was only thirteen, fourteen… So then everyone would be excited about the party and then they'd look at me like 'sucks to be you.' I tried to sneak out to one of them a bunch of times, but I either got busted, or I busted myself when I changed my mind and went back." Lucas laughed and, off Sam's look, revealed how his mother had told Maya and him all about their future lodger's attempts at 'rebellion.' "Figures she did," Sam sighed.

"We were being put in charge of a fifteen-year-old," Lucas reasoned.

"In charge of a giant dork," Sam amended.

"Maya would say 'no one gets to talk down to my little brother, and that includes my little brother,' and I'd say the same," Lucas shook his head.

"Not being down on myself," Sam raised his hands with a smile. "Just sort of… looking back from the other side."

"Alright, fair," Lucas agreed. "But we're not on the other side, not just yet. One more year."

"Yeah, one more…" Sam's voice drifted, following the pull of his thoughts. It wasn't the first time Lucas had seen that turn in his brother's expression in recent weeks. As much as Lucas and Maya both were on pins and needles to know what would happen with Sam after this next year, clearly he was thinking about it the most. Whatever he did or didn't think about it, he was keeping it to himself so far, but every now and then he would drop that mask just a bit, enough for Lucas at least to see that bit of uncertainty in him.

"Hey," he tapped his younger brother's arm and Sam looked over. "All good?"

"Yeah, fine," Sam shrugged, pulling a basket to start them down the aisles. "It's just like… so close but so far, you know?"

"You're getting really good at deflecting, you know that?" Lucas pointed out, to which Sam nodded. "If you want to say something to me and not your sister…"

"I know that," Sam insisted. "This one I need to figure out on my own though… and with Cecilia, too," he added.

"Everything alright with you two?"

"What? Yeah, of course, why… why wouldn't it be?" Sam asked, blinking.

"No reason, really," Lucas reassured him at once. "Look, when Maya and I were finishing up high school and we applied for college, we went through that same thing any couple would in that situation, you know? I knew what I wanted, and she knew what she wanted, and eventually we had to realize that… there was a possibility those things wouldn't line up."

"But I'm not going to be in school anymore," Sam cut in.

"That doesn't mean you don't have plans, or desires, for what you want to do with that new degree of yours," Lucas countered, and Sam tipped back into reflection. "What I think I'm seeing here, and don't feel like you have to confirm or deny, is that maybe for as much as you think you'll be happy wherever you go, so long as she's there with you, you're still not sure that there won't be things closer to here you'll regret leaving, and you're worried about what it'll do to you, to Cecilia."

Sam was saved from having to respond – which he did not look eager to do anyway – by Missy's return. She brandished a bag which told them she'd been to the bookstore.

"Did you run?" Sam asked her, eyebrow raised.

"No," Missy squinted at him.

"You are winded."

"Am not," she breathed deep before turning to Lucas. "What's next?"

The errands were a bit more erratic with Missy in tow, but they also probably took less time than without her, so they made good time to then return home and get everything ready for the party. Once they arrived, Missy grabbed her bike, thanked them for the lift, and started back up the lane toward the Sanderson farm.

"What's that noise?" Sam asked. Lucas looked at him for a beat before he started hearing it, too. It was hard to explain or even try and identify, but it definitely came from somewhere behind the house, so the two of them went around until they could find the source of… "What the…" Sam blurted out, while Lucas' shock lasted no more than two seconds before he just had to laugh.

Sitting about twenty feet from either the house or the Hex, surrounded by netting, was a trampoline. Presently, it was being used by Dylan, while both Maya and Riley looked on.

"Hey!" Dylan waved, mid-leap. "Check it out!" he called on the next leap. The girls turned around now, and Lucas and Sam could see Maya's amused face along with Riley's amused/terrified one, as she quickly looked back to her fiancé while her best friend jogged off to meet her husband and her brother.

"It's a rental, I promise," Maya told them. "I figured we've been talking about it long enough, it had to happen sooner or later, and this way it was a surprise." She looked so proud of herself for pulling this off, and Lucas felt that heart swoop as he held his wife in his arms.

"It was definitely that," he agreed.

"What's Missy's bike doing out front, by the way?" Maya asked, following Lucas' line of sight to find he was watching Dylan's journey up and down and up and down again. "Did she go with you two or…"

"Yeah, she had to go to the bookstore," Sam provided. "We told her she could come over tonight, that's okay, right?"

"Oh, of course, yeah," Maya blinked, smiled. Sometimes it would get hard to draw the line, especially where anyone like Missy, or Kai, or August were concerned. Yes, they were her students – or had been, now, with August – but they were also neighbors, and family friends, so she would interact them socially, too. It was in those times more than any others, where she would start thinking about how she was now in the position where Cory Matthews had been, being her teacher but also her best friend's father.

"Do you guys need me?" Sam asked when Dylan finally came down from the trampoline.

"Uh, no, I think we've got it, you… Okay," Maya nodded, as her brother had already taken off at a run, the better to get his turn on the trampoline. "Riley keeps giving me eyes like 'you know how accident prone he is, and we're getting married next month!'" Maya turned back to Lucas, who could only chuckle. It was a reasonable concern. "You guys were fast coming back."

"Yeah, Missy helped with that," Lucas told her. He might have told her about the rest, the part with Sam, and his concerned, but he had promised his brother not to say anything if he didn't want him to. There had not been one clear answer, but for now Lucas had no choice but to assume he had to keep quiet. Whichever way it went, Sam would make the right call in the end, he believed it.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	270. Their Party For Surprises

September 26th 2020

_Chapter 270  
Their Party For Surprises_

Ever since they had moved to Houston after high school, ever since they had gone from being children in their parents' homes to being young adults making the rules in their own homes, they had developed something of a persona: they were the hosts. They'd had so many parties and gatherings, and as much as this pleased their friends and other recurring guests, it made _them_ happy, too. Maya and Lucas had made their home, whether it was the one they shared with their friends for four years in Houston or this home, their own home, back in Austin these past three years, into a place people felt welcome. They had made it into the place to be. Many of those who would be in attendance that night knew without having to ask that they were welcome to drop in at any time. Several of them had been given shelter for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, and any one of the others could count on that same gift, should the need present itself.

Tonight though… Tonight was about nothing more than many friends getting together, several of them celebrating the end of a school year, the rest celebrating… well, the start of summer, or just an invitation from Maya and/or Lucas. That was good enough.

"Oh, they're here!" Maya called, when she happened to see out the window and catch the arrival of the familiar car. She couldn't say whether her words had reached the ears they were destined for, as the guests had already started to arrive and dot the living room, spilling into the kitchen. She didn't wait to know for sure. She was already out the door, jogging down the steps and toward the vehicle, giddily stepping in to offer a hand when Chiara moved to get out from the back, led by a belly seven-month-strong.

From everything Sophie and the guys had been saying, everything they had been seeing for themselves, Chiara had been cruising through this pregnancy in such a way as to annoy some of the expectant mothers she'd run into at prenatal classes, or at the doctor's office. To look at her now, Maya definitely saw it. She wore that infamous glow to the point of being almost intimidating to look at.

"Hey…" Maya laughed as her friend and former roommate hugged her and, pressed to her belly, she felt the echo of a solid kick. "I didn't forget you, kiddo," she promised, pulling back to lay her hand where she'd guess the contact had started. "Oh, what, you're being quiet now, Jujube?"

"If you would like to see some real action, you need to feel for it at about three in the morning. That's when she likes to put on a show," Chiara informed her with a grin.

With not one but two nurseries to set up and decorate, both households in 'Team SCAR' had finally and collectively decided to find out what they were having and received the answer that they were expecting a girl. She was to be called Giulia, and it had taken no more than a day for her Aunt Maya to bestow a nickname upon her unborn head. It had evolved almost in the same breath from Giu-Giu to Jujube, and then it was settled.

Possibly the funniest thing Maya and soon Lucas and the others, too, would look forward to seeing that night once they got a taste of it, was seeing how the other three were doing with their impending parenthood. Sophie, Asher, and Ray all seemed to trail after Chiara like they expected her to either need something or go into labor at any second, when she wasn't due until August. Anyone lacking in any amount of patience would have quickly told them off, but Chiara displayed the patience of a saint, promising at every turn that she had everything she needed, that she would get what she needed should said need arise, and that there were no signs whatsoever that baby Giulia would be born even a minute ahead of her due date.

"I don't know about you, but I feel like I could ask her for the secrets of the universe right now and she would be able to give them to me," Maya smiled when she made her way back to Lucas a few minutes later.

"I think… we have a Code Ninja," Lucas responded, and Maya frowned, not following for a moment. When he nodded past her, she turned and scanned the room until she saw what he'd seen and understood what he meant. It had become less of a factor to think how Rosa was a few years younger than them, but when she had first come into their lives, as Lucas' sixteen-year-old co-worker, it had been more complicated when she'd basically snuck into their first Houston Halloween party, dressed as a ninja, thinking maybe they wouldn't figure her out. That plan might have been more successful if not for her telltale glasses sitting over the mask which covered her face.

The Code Ninja for _this_ party was brought on without the help of a giveaway trait. There were no costumes at this party, and the presence of a cluster of young teenagers was enough to get anyone's attention. As promised, Missy Sanderson had accepted the invitation, and she'd brought along her 'boyfriend,' Kai Avelino, sure. But then they weren't alone. Moving along with them, and looking just a bit more uncertain, were Stella Buckley and Phoebe Munroe. All four of the now former ninth graders looked like they had dressed for a party, whatever their interpretation of that dress code was, so _how_ they had ended up here tonight was easy enough to figure out. Word had travelled from one to the other, from Missy on down, and it was a wonder only these four had popped up, although… No, there weren't any others, but Maya and Lucas both would be keeping a lookout. Until then…

"What are you going to do?" Lucas asked.

"Right now, I'm thinking of going up behind them and shouting 'busted!' Too much?" Maya wondered.

"Well…" Lucas hesitated, and the fact that he actually considered it was almost amusing enough for her to go through with it.

In the end, she decided on something a bit less mean. By chance, the quartet had come across Crowley. Neither Maya nor Lucas generally saw any need to put the dogs in the basement or anything like that whenever they had a party. They didn't need to, as Trix, Lou, and Archer would more often than not go off and hide upstairs whenever there were a lot of people around. Crowley though, he was of a different mindset on most days, and tonight… Tonight he'd been drawn out by a familiar scent. There was someone here he loved very much. He'd found Missy and immediately stood on his hind legs and barked until she gasped and crouched to pet him. The other girls, enchanted with the pup as anyone would be around charming little Crowley, had joined her to say hello.

All Maya needed to do now was to give the short whistle Crowley responded to at once, calling him back to her and in the process making the girls and Kai look up to find where he'd gone off to. Finding the dog now in the arms of their art teacher, they all had more or less the look she would have expected to find on them if she'd pulled her 'busted!' maneuver, minus the shouts of surprise. Set back on the ground, Crowley had gone bounding back to his mother's owner, while both Maya and Lucas walked over to their unexpected guests.

"Hey, uh…" Missy started, and the way she paused showed plainly that she wasn't sure what to call her in this moment. The rule usually was that, when they were at home, she was free to call her by her first name, as she had always done before the two of them had become student and teacher, and to use the more formal surname when they were at school, with everyone else. But now here she was, in her teacher and neighbor's home, but also surrounded by classmates and friends. "Evening," she finally tipped her head with a nervous smile.

"Okay, first of all, you all really need to pause and take a breath. When did I ever give you the impression of being the type to bite anyone's head off?" Maya asked. The quartet breathed, possibly a bit more pronounced than they ever needed to. "Good, keep doing that… at your own pace."

"We can go back to my house, if you don't want us to be here," Missy finally found her voice again. "It's just that I'd invited them over tonight, and then Lucas said I could come here, and I'd forgotten they were coming, and then, well, I thought it might be fun if they came, too."

It was very hard for both Maya and Lucas to keep a straight face, looking at all of them there. Missy had Crowley in her arms, and the dog kept licking at her fingers. Meanwhile, standing at her side, Kai looked very much like a guy ready to defend his fake girlfriend/real crush's honor. Phoebe was trying to pay attention but kept getting distracted by the music playing and also by the snack table just a few steps away, while Stella… sweet, shy Stella looked like she might well succeed in making herself shrink into nothingness if it came to be that she had upset her teacher in any way.

Really, if she had to pick any four students of hers least likely to make waves at a party…

"You guys can stay," she finally put them out of their misery, almost feeling the relief as it settled over them. "What time are your parents expecting you back?" she asked Missy.

"Eleven," the girl replied at once.

"I'll walk you back at a quarter to," Lucas told her, and all four kids agreed gladly. Now that they knew the full story, Maya and Lucas could easily imagine that Stella and Phoebe had been incited to raid Missy's closet for more 'party appropriate' wear, and they both decided in their heads that maybe they could see the whole thing as something good, if it meant it had provided these four with a memory they would share among themselves as friends in the years to come.

"I have to go around and say hi to some people, but please, help yourselves," Maya nodded to the food. "Get dancing," she followed this motion with another toward the 'official' dance floor, turning a smile to Phoebe, who looked momentarily caught between two choices. Sure, she had been making eyes at those sandwiches, but there was another beast in need of feeding, and it was her beast of motion, fed steadily over many a lunch break, in the art room. Eventually, she decided on pulling her best friend off to do a bit of dancing, where she was joined by Missy and Kai. They could work up an appetite, couldn't they?

"What do you think's going to happen when they find out about the trampoline?" Lucas asked, leaning at his wife's ear and making her laugh halfway into a cringe.

"I really don't want to be the one to tell them they can't go in case they get hurt and I get sued or something. I mean, sure, Phoebe isn't nearly as accident prone as she used to be, but then neither is Dylan, and he still almost broke a couple of his fingers earlier."

"Doesn't count, he wasn't on the trampoline anymore," Lucas told her, and she turned a look to him. "I'll keep an eye on them. You'll have plausible deniability or something like that. Come on, go mingle, Mrs. Friar," he kissed the side of her head and she breathed. "Good, keep doing that," he smiled, laughing when she smacked his arm.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	271. Their Party For Students

September 27th 2020

_Chapter 271  
Their Party For Students_

Plenty of people would probably have been annoyed at suddenly finding themselves tasked with being the teenager sitter at their own party. Lucas didn't mind it so much. He had a solid technique down, wherein he would keep an eye on the pack all while chatting with some guests or others who happened to be allowing him to spot Missy, Kai, Stella, and Phoebe and ensure they weren't getting themselves into anything that might come back to bite any of them.

Also, he just liked being around them. These were Maya's students, some of her 'kids.' It had always been and would continue to be one of his greatest joys to see happiness in his wife, and this past year had been one of if not the very best year for that. Ever since she had started her job as an art teacher at their old high school, she had been taken with a most singular purpose, and to see how much she thrived from it… She had become the thing she'd been yearning to be, and she excelled at it as much as she benefited from it. And when Lucas saw those kids, here tonight, it was easy to see they were not here just to say they had snuck into their teacher's house and her party. No, they were here because for as much as they had all come to mean something to her in this past year, _she_ had also come to mean something to _them_, and they wanted to be here.

If they noticed him keeping watch, they never showed any sign of it. They all danced a while, which warranted only the slightest 'surveillance' out of him. He would see Missy and Kai continue to be just completely blind to what was right in front of them. This whole situation of pretending to be a couple, which they somehow seemed to be carrying on here tonight despite there being no one here they needed to fool, was just ridiculous. They had to realize what was happening between them, right? They were smart kids, the both of them, but then… well, he guessed this was the one thing that could make the smartest people turn into some of the dumbest. All he could hope for was the same thing he'd heard out of Maya when he'd shared the conversation he'd had with Missy in the car earlier. He didn't want either one of them to make the wrong move and get hurt.

Balancing that concern, he had the other two to contend with. Stella was clearly not at ease with putting herself on display, even when it meant dancing in the middle of people who would potentially not even notice that she was there. Lucas had seen the girl almost every week this year, most Mondays in the fall, and Fridays in the winter, when he would go up to the school to have lunch with Maya, and it would feel as though he had seen the incremental growth, for her and Phoebe both. As far as Stella went, those increments felt very close to one another, so that by year's end it could feel like she had crossed a much smaller distance than her best friend, but that wasn't the important part, was it? What mattered wasn't the distance crossed but that distance _had_ been crossed. She'd started out the year where the very idea of even introducing herself to her class had sent her hiding in the bathroom. She had ended up where… well, she still looked like she hated every second of it, but at least she was able to stand in front of classmates and give a presentation. She had spent all year eating in the art room, but at the very end of it had reintegrated the cafeteria, if with the aid of earplugs.

If she worried about anyone looking at her, she kind of didn't have to, not so long as Phoebe was there dancing near her. She pulled focus with the power of exuberance. For having seen how much she had grown into her skills as a dancer, the way she went here felt more like something of a happy medium between that and the chronically clumsy girl who had started out the year traveling with a first aid kit wherever she went. Possibly, she was working now to get her best friend to let herself go, whatever that looked like in Stella's case.

When they'd had their fill of dancing, Lucas had watched the group wander off over to the table loaded with food and grabbed some plates. Once they'd grabbed what they wanted, they had made their way out through the kitchen and out the back door, as others had done, to go and eat outside. Lucas moved his 'totally not spying dad mode' off to check in with some of the other guests enjoying the yard. While he got to chatting with Bishop and Simon, he could see Missy and the others as they watched the trampoline. Presently, it was occupied with Jenna, who bounced along and made her watching girlfriend look both amused and terrified.

"Friends of Sam's?" Bishop asked, and Lucas turned back to him.

"Huh? Oh, no, they're actually some of Maya's students," he told his classmates. "Well, Missy there is also our neighbor, you've met her, at the wedding?" They had, and they nodded as the memory came to them. Lucas caught them up on the whole sneaking in situation. The guys laughed.

Much as he assumed the trampoline would be the thing that held their attention, it wasn't long that the group ended up turning to the Hex. Phoebe had spotted the structure adjacent to the house and pointed to it, probably asking the others what it was. Missy knew what it was, of course, as she had been inside a few times by now, and she appeared to tell the others, as they soon made their way over and tried to peek through the windows. After this went on for a few minutes, Lucas pulled out his phone, snapped a picture, and sent it to Maya. _Tag, you're it._

After she'd excused herself from Morgan and her three-dates-coming-on-to-boyfriend friend, Maya wove through the party into the kitchen, grabbing the Hex keys before continuing on her way out. Tossing a few signs toward Lucas where she spotted him in passing, she followed the path. Stella was the first to see her coming, and she immediately tapped at Phoebe's arm, creating a wave of head turns when Missy and Kai each turned as well.

"This place looks amazing!" Phoebe declared.

"The window doesn't do it justice," Maya told her, trying not to feel too much like Santa taking some nosy kids into the workshop. Unlocking the door and tapping in the alarm code just inside – an addition Shawn had insisted on – she flipped on the lights and stepped aside. It might have seemed silly to some, but she decided to let them see the studio for this very moment, this reaction of total awe and surprise. She still got that feeling, every once in a while, but it was never so much as when she'd seen it for the first time.

"Woah…" Kai blinked, walking with the pace of someone very conscious of his surroundings, the better not to run into anything of value and end up breaking it. The champ in this task would naturally be Stella, but then that tended to be her natural pace, so it wasn't as though it stood out from her day to day. While Missy stood watch with Maya, as she'd already seen it all, Kai would peer at the console and all its controls, while Phoebe peered through the booth door at the various instruments either sitting in wait of a player or hung on display. Stella still remained near the door, specifically looking at the print outs and clippings on the walls.

"I met her once," she pointed to a picture on the wall, turning her head to her teacher. Maya stepped up with a smile, looking at the picture of her and Ree, on stage, the night when she'd joined her for a duet. It had been just a year and a half ago, and yet it felt so long ago already, with everything that had happened in between. She could see so much of the nerves and the giddiness in her eyes, still so new to being in direct contact with the singer. And now here they were, about to go on tour together in a year's time.

"You did?" Maya asked Stella, who nodded.

"She did a cameo on one of my mom's movies," she explained.

"Oh, yeah!" Maya recalled at once, laughing at the memory of her mother's surprise upon seeing her. She didn't remember or hadn't known the part about Stella's mother, and with what she'd done for _her_ mother, she was getting to think she needed to remedy that.

"I was six," Stella went on. "My mom would take me to the sets sometimes, and I was there the day she was filming her scene. She was really nice, I remember that."

"Wait, that was you?" Phoebe asked, and Maya and Stella turned now to find she'd wandered over to see the picture, too, and now had awe in her eyes, staring from the picture to her art teacher and back.

"Yeah," Maya laughed. "Were you there?"

"I was supposed to go, but I broke my leg two days before," Phoebe shrugged with her usual casual tone over her various injuries.

"How did _that_ happen?" Kai asked, joining them, too.

"I borrowed my sister's bike. Barely made it out of the driveway and…" she mimed with her hands, recreating as best she could what came off like a spectacular fall. "That's when I got this one," she pointed to a scar on her leg, trailing along her knee from below the edge of her skirt. "My sister and my cousin still went, all they said was that she brought out a songwriter to sing with her, they never told me it was _you_," she went on. Recalling how, unaware of her new teacher's identity, Phoebe had shown up on the first day of school in a TXNY shirt, the small bit of delayed annoyance at her sister and cousin only made it harder for Maya to keep from laughing.

"I know that song," Stella stated, looking back to Phoebe, who had likely introduced her to a lot of her music, whether she realized it or not. Oh, how much she wanted to tell them about the tour right then, just to see the looks on their faces… She resisted, had to.

So, instead, she told them about writing that first song for Ree, and then the one for the Violets, and the one Marika Marsden had recorded for the 'Just For One Day' soundtrack… The way they looked at her, with rising awe in their eyes, like she'd suddenly become so much more than who she'd been a moment ago. As much as she'd been trying to keep that from happening, she knew it could only be a matter of time, especially the closer they got to the tour. Lucas had told her the novelty would wear off in time, and he was probably right. There was no way around it anyway. They would all find out eventually.

"Alright, come on, you guys didn't come out here for this, huh?" she herded her students back out of the Hex and locked up once they'd had their fill of it. "You guys want to say hi to the rest of the band? They're all back there," she nodded to the house.

"Yeah, she knows," Stella nodded, tipping her head to Phoebe. "She wanted to go say hi to one of them but she was near the trampoline and Phoebe didn't want to take the risk." Maya bit back a laugh.

"Wise move, good choice."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	272. Their Party For Friends

September 28th 2020

_Chapter 272  
Their Party For Friends_

Waiting for Maya's return from the Hex, Lucas found himself joining a cluster of their friends, sitting under the big tree by the house. When he had seen them there, Sophie, Chiara, Asher, Ray, Dylan, Riley, Nadine, and Zay, under a tree, it had taken him right back to all those Babineaux summer parties, when they were teenagers. That had been their spot, in Aunt Susanne's yard, the location of many a harebrained plan, and from what he heard as he approached, all their group needed was a tree to sit under and the plans would come.

"… telling you, I could do it," Dylan was telling the others, keeping them – save for his concerned fiancée – in chuckles.

"Do what?" Lucas asked. They welcomed him to their cluster at once. By the looks of the various chairs and improvised seats, including some empty ones, he guessed they had been waiting for him, and Maya, and a few more who might have materialized.

"He thinks he can make that basket while jumping on the trampoline," Zay revealed, pointing from one thing to the other and displaying the not _so_ astronomical but still relatively lengthy distance.

"Downtown Dylan!" Dylan insisted with a firm nod.

"No one calls you that," Asher tapped his best friend's shoulder with a snicker.

"They might, after I make that shot," Dylan affirmed. Riley gave all the guys her most giant 'help me' eyes. They were getting married in a little over a month, and he was gunning for a broken neck.

"That _would_ be a pretty impressive thing if you pulled it off," Sophie declared, getting a rapid nod from Dylan and a baffled look from Riley. "It would be the kind of story you told for years and years, it would be… the summer of your big shot," Sophie nodded to Dylan, who looked ready to agree once again. But then he paused, and he looked to his future wife at his side, and something seemed to resolve itself in him. Finally, he just smiled, reaching for her hand, and her face relaxed as well as she took his. She knew what he knew, which was that this was not going to be the summer of some big stunt, no. This was going to be the summer of their wedding, and nothing else could or should come to stand in its way.

The guys nodded, impressed for Sophie's swift intervention, and they covertly 'applauded' her. Now, all they had to do was hope that Dylan would forget all about the trampoline in the years to come.

"Hey, what did I miss?" Maya asked when she came to join them, stopping to stand behind Lucas where he sat, looping her arms around his neck and resting her chin on his head. He smiled, setting his hand over hers where they met in front of him.

"Nothing much," Riley told her, likely attempting to prevent the trampoline scheme from making a comeback when they'd just sent it packing. "Where were you?"

"Just gave a quick tour of the Hex to my ninth graders," Maya replied.

"Wouldn't those be your tenth graders now?" Nadine asked.

"No, no, they're not there yet, not until the fall," Maya insisted, causing a wave of low laughter to roll over the group. "I heard it," she sighed, hugging her husband closer. She just sounded like her mother, whenever she'd 'complain' over any of her kids growing up. She couldn't help it, could she? Missy, Kai, Stella, Phoebe, all their class, they had been her youngest group, on her first year. She would get a new youngest group in the fall, and that previous group would keep climbing up the steps until they were graduated and gone, too, but she didn't have to think about that yet, nope, not yet.

"Whose turn is it now?" Chiara looked to her wife and the guys at their side. Ray moved to rise.

"Refill?" he nodded to the empty glass in her hand and she nodded back. "Same thing?"

"Yes, please," she smiled as he took the glass and jogged off to the house.

"You all have turns now?" Maya asked the others.

"They have to," Chiara told her. "If not for that, they would all come around like worried chickens," she explained, with an imitation that had the others laughing. "I tell them only one will do, but they round on me in a pack and step over one another. I appreciate the attention, I do, but it isn't necessary," she smiled to Sophie and Asher. "So, now they have turns."

"That is going to be one lucky kid," Zay affirmed, and the group agreed wholeheartedly, even as he turned to look back at Nadine.

She simply smiled back at him, though anyone who was also looking at the pair of them would understand the subtext, the fleeting thought for the child they still waited on. It had been a year of this now, and still nothing but a false hope dashed… and longing… and second guessing… Had they done something wrong? Were they just not good enough to be entrusted with a child? No matter how often their friends would attempt to reassure them, Nadine the most, time carried on stretching away, challenging those reassurances. How long could they maintain those brave faces before it all withered away? How long before it wore away at _them_?

"One of many," Chiara vowed, holding Nadine's gaze from across their circle. Nadine nodded, even as they could feel the resistance against tears. After a minute, by which time Ray had returned with Chiara's refilled glass, she was able to turn to Maya and Lucas and speak with an unwavering voice.

"Now what about you guys?" she asked, and the half-made question remained clear: When were _they_ planning on having kids?

They looked to one another, a brief sort of silent exchange passing between them. They had kept all these plans of theirs so close to themselves, even telling any of their parents had demanded some consideration. But now, sitting here with their friends, it did get to feel like it wouldn't have been out of place to shift the rules a bit. Lucas tipped his head to her, as best he could with her standing behind him still. He was leaving it up to her to tell.

"Well," Maya turned back to Nadine, "Between him finishing up school after this year, and me still being new at _my_ school, we wanted to try and time it as right as we could, as… much as we could." Naturally, they couldn't go on the assumption that they would get it right on the first try, but it didn't mean they couldn't put chances on their side as much as possible. "So, in a few months, we'll just…" she gestured, letting them finish the statement for themselves. "As soon as there's anything worth telling, you will be told."

"What are you all sitting around for?" someone shouted, and they turned to find the unexpected but thrilling presence of two more Avelino.

Kai's older siblings, twins Kamani and Keilani, had been sophomores when Maya, Lucas, and the rest of the remaining players, by then seniors, had been able to reform the basketball teams after two years without them. They had been valued players in the three years they'd played, in bringing the teams' reputations back from that sad chapter where they had been nothing. Kamani looked so much like his younger brother, which was never so evident as when they got to see the two of them near one another.

The group hurried over to greet the pair of them, with hugs, and claps on the back, and a lot of talking over one another which still managed to be relatively understandable. As it turned out, they hadn't been meant to arrive back in Austin until a couple days from now, but then they'd made it out early, and from one source to another, they had worked out that their former teammates were having a party, and that their kid brother was in attendance. So, how could they not spring a surprise on them?

"How's the little zombie doing in class, _Mrs. Friar_?" Keilani intoned with a smirk.

"Model student, give me ten more of him any day," Maya laughed.

"Did he tell you about his 'girlfriend?'" Lucas asked, adding air quotes for good measure.

"His what?" Kamani asked, amused and surprised.

"Did he actually ask her out? Or did she?" Keilani asked, showing how they had been just as caught up in the complicated tale of Kai and Missy's twists and turns as they figured out their feelings for one another.

"Not exactly," Maya had to explain. She might not have felt at ease sharing this information, but then they were entirely out of the realm of Mrs. Friar the teacher and back into that of family friend Maya. All she _would_ say was that, to score Missy an invitation to the teams' end of year party, Kai had not corrected a misunderstanding, and from there the two of them had been carrying on and pretending to be a couple.

"That can't possibly end well," Keilani sighed, turning to give her twin a reproachful look almost before his smirk reached his face.

"No, I think that could work out for them," Kamani insisted. "They'll forget it's not supposed to be real, and then it just will be that. I'd bet on it."

"What are you betting?" Keilani inquired with a spark of competition most often seen either on the basketball court or in challenging her twin.

"Go on and wager, I'm not scared," Kamani responded in kind. They may not have been identical, but on some occasions, they might as well have been, and this was one of them. "Hey, before night's out, we gotta meet back there," he looked to the others, most of them former team members, pointing off to the hanging hoop with a look as though to point out that the occasions were few and very far in between where any of their gatherings didn't include some kind of shoot off or game.

"What about right now, come on," Asher nodded at him, and it was on.

The shoot off had brought along players past and present, and even non-players from among their guests. Looking on as they waited their turns, both Maya and Lucas could look to one another and know they were thinking more or less the same thing. This party, this night, felt so much like… an amalgamation of everything they had been, everything they were, and everything they were looking to be. They never wanted it to be any other way.

"Hey, it's about that time," Lucas came up behind Maya as she stood talking with Ramona and Josie. When she turned around, he nodded over to the quartet of her students. Presently, Phoebe and Stella looked on while Missy and Kai hopped in tandem on the trampoline, keeping a firm grasp on one of the other's hands for balance. Two seconds later, one of them tripped – they weren't sure which one – and they tumbled in a heap on the still bouncing surface.

"Definitely time, go, go," Maya nudged him until he jogged off. Once the 'couple' was helped off the trampoline, they came over and thanked their teacher for letting them stick around, wishing her a good night, potentially a good summer where some of them were concerned, unless they happened to run into one another in town before the fall. Maya watched them go off, eventually joined by Kai's siblings as the kids were walked back to the Sanderson farm for the night.

The party carried on some time longer, even as some of their guests, like those who had come down from Houston, had to depart. When they finally called it a night proper, Sam went off to bed, while Maya and Lucas decided to enjoy the night some more, in what they declared to be the after party.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	273. Their Party For Summer

September 29th 2020

_Chapter 273  
Their Party For Summer_

"I don't know about you, but this feels like the start of a story that ends with 'broke an arm and a leg, ended up in the hospital,'" Lucas declared as he and Maya stood in front of the trampoline.

"Yeah, but when does it not?" she countered, and he smiled. "Come on, I mean the only reason I even got this thing was because of you and you never even got on it once all night."

"I nearly did, a few times."

"So why didn't you?"

"Honestly? I figured if I tried it once and I liked it, I wouldn't want you to return it," he looked at her, knowing it would make her laugh, which it did.

"I mean, we could," she shrugged. "Not this one, it's still a rental, but we could get one that's for keeps. Clearly, it's a crowd pleaser, everyone wants to try it when they see it. And in a few years, our kids will think we are The Coolest Parents," she intoned, and now _he_ laughed, closing his arms around her and kissing the top of her head for a moment before turning back to the trampoline.

"Fine, alright, I'll go."

It was into the small morning hours by this point, the sky was near pitch black, but the lights from the house and the yard were sufficient to illuminate the structure and not make it entirely into a danger zone. Even so, Lucas was very careful as he climbed on to the surface and felt it dip and rise under his added weight as he moved to the center. Looking through the net, he could see Maya was resisting the urge to holler in encouragement, to the point where she had to hold her two balled-up fists up and ready to cover her mouth.

"I can't do flips," he pointed out, testing out a few small hops.

"Not yet," she declared, ever the encouraging one.

"We're never going to be 'The Coolest Parents' if I get killed out here," he warned with a chuckle before going for a bigger bounce.

Lucas had wanted a trampoline at one of his birthday parties ever since he was seven or eight and one of his classmates had had one at _his_ party. He'd asked his mother and father countless times, sometimes tried to appeal to his grandmothers… But it had never come to pass, and it had remained an unfulfilled wish, turned into a silly promise between Maya and him, until that night. Sure, it had been nearly twenty years since that first experience, and it could be said that he had aged out of that part of his life. If that was the case, well… well, he didn't actually care.

"Getting the hang of it, huh?" Maya almost had to shout to be heard as he started getting confident in his jumps.

"Little bit!" he called back.

"Is it bad that I have to resist distracting you?"

"Don't need to try that hard!" Lucas promised, as Maya had to follow his smile up, and down, and up, and down…

"Even up there, you manage to be _so_ Huckleberry," she laughed. In her mind, she wondered how long she would wait to confess that this wasn't in fact a rental and, having had the forethought that it would be a big hit, she had actually bought it, for him, for them, as an early wedding anniversary present.

"Your turn?" Lucas asked and, when she nodded, he slowed his rise until he was able to stop and climb down, landing on his feet a bit wobbly, which still managed to make her laugh. "Worth the wait," he grinned, pulling her into a steadying kiss before he could receive both his shoes to put back on and then hers to hold on to as she climbed on to the trampoline.

"I tried it earlier, when we brought it out and installed it, me and Dylan and Riley," Maya revealed, finding her balance as she started to jump. "Almost got a flip down."

"Well, you're smaller, so it might be easier," Lucas guessed, watching her.

"I can't even protest that, because it's true," she laughed. Even as she jumped, she was able to pull her hair into a quick bun, tying it off with the elastic around her wrist, before working up her leaps until she felt secure enough to give it a shot.

It was not the most graceful turn, and the landing lasted barely long enough to say she'd been on her feet before she dropped at the heart of the bouncing surface with a laugh and a cheer.

"You okay?" Lucas took her response as a sign that she was, but he still had to hear it.

"I am excellent," Maya breathed, flipping on to her stomach and crawling her way over to the edge, where he came to stand.

"You won't see me arguing," Lucas replied, unable to do anything but smile for the sight of his wife's glowing face full of smiles and happiness.

"Tonight was pretty good, wasn't it? Relaxed, some surprises…" Maya reflected, squeaking when she moved and started to roll, before finally deciding to go with it and turn on to her back. "Hey, come here," she reached blindly for Lucas. He climbed up just enough for her to see his face.

"Why?" he asked with a curious lift of his brow. Maya snorted.

"Please, _so_ not what I had in mind. Just that," she pointed up to the sky, the stars.

"Right, no, that's what I meant, too," Lucas went to lay at her side, setting them both in motion until he could be still and the trampoline became less agitated.

"Uh huh, okay," Maya bit back a smile, reaching blindly for his hand. Once she did, he responded by clasping hers, and they lay in silence for a while, looking to the stars, the bright June moon.

"And it was, yeah," Lucas spoke. Maya turned her head toward him. "Tonight, it was really good." She smiled, nodded. "As short notice as this was, we got them all here, we got… this," he indicated the trampoline. Maya moved, the better to disrupt their stillness. "A lot of that was you," he went on, deferentially, which made her smile. "You know, it's going to be something, topping a trampoline." She looked like she didn't follow for a moment, but then she understood, smiled brighter. Their wedding anniversary, just two weeks away now. Lucas lightly brushed at her hair with his fingers.

There had been some debate about who would do the planning, if this was even something where they should split the planning or instead decide together, as it was supposed to be the anniversary of their union. They both kind of liked the thought of crafting themselves a special night together. But they liked surprises, too, so they came down to a compromise. There would be three parts: his surprise, her surprise, and the thing they had come up with together.

"Oh, I don't know about that. You've planned a _lot_ of anniversaries for us before."

"Well, yeah, that's true," Lucas nodded. "But never anything like this, never a wedding anniversary." She laughed. "What?" he asked, unable to keep from echoing her.

"Do you know what your face looks like when you say those words?"

"What do you mean?" he asked, playing innocent.

"Oh, you know. Come on," she sat up, startled momentarily for the new motion before rethinking this new position and tipping to rest her head on his chest. "Wedding anniversary…" she repeated, doing her best to replicate the look on his face, which was not so difficult, with how her own face looked drawn to do the same. He could see _that_ more than anything, and it got him laughing along with her, wrapping her in his arms so he might pepper her with kisses and hear the bells of her giggles.

"I can't help it. As days go…"

"Yeah, that's fair," Maya had to agree. If she still couldn't think back to that day last July without feeling a bubble of happiness in her chest, then was it any wonder he felt the same thing, that he so looked forward to that day coming again, bringing them to the beginning of their second year as husband and wife? "Anyway… we have a little while to go before then. Right now, we should probably get back inside the house before Sam's senses tingle and he comes to tell us to get out of here."

"Yeah, okay. Anyway, I think I found a good position here, I might end up falling asleep," Lucas hummed as they moved to climb off the trampoline. He got there first and helped her down before leading her toward the back door. "I think anytime I saw him tonight he was talking about the trip."

"Sam?" Maya asked. Lucas nodded. "Oh, did they tell him? I wanted to see the look on his face," she frowned in mild disappointment.

"I'm not sure. I just heard him say he was excited about going, and about Cecilia going, too. I don't know if he actually knows yet. How are we going to know without asking him?"

"Leave that to me, I'll figure it out," Maya nodded, her excitement renewed now that there was a chance her brother didn't yet know that Abigail and James and the kids would be joining them and the Hunters and the Elder Friars on their upcoming trip.

"When you say you'll figure it out, you're not going to wake him up and ask him tonight, are you? Because I'm pretty sure if you do that he'll put it all together," Lucas teased her.

"If I woke him up right now, it would be to mess with him, not to interrogate him," Maya promised, which was either very funny or very unfortunate for poor Sam, Lucas couldn't decide.

Sam was left to go on sleeping in peace, especially as Maya and Lucas walked into the house to find he had clearly done a speed round of picking up after the departed party guests before heading up to his room. They had done the same, getting changed, making a stop in the bathroom to brush their teeth… By the time he came back, which could not have been more than a minute after her, Lucas found Maya in a familiar position, sitting cross-legged on their bed, with her sketchbook on her knees as she let her pencil fly over the paper, back hunched over it and a look of deep concentration in her eyes.

"So we're just not sleeping tonight, huh?" he asked, taking a seat at her side to see what she was working on. There wasn't much of it yet, but something about the little face she'd already drawn, and the hair that went along with it, he could recognize Stella Buckley and guess she would soon be accompanied by a few classmates and friends in this image.

"Oh, you can, please do," she looked up, smiling almost apologetically. "I'm not tired, and I just… I'll go to the attic," she insisted.

"No, no, stay," he stopped her before she could go. "You know I like to watch you work."

"I've heard that, yeah," she laughed. "If you feel like you want to sleep though, I'll stop and turn off the lights." Her compromise was non-negotiable.

"Promise," he raised his hand with a tip of the head while she shook hers with a barely concealed smirk as she got back to her sketch. Maybe she would send this one out to those four sneaky kids of hers. From what Lucas had told her of the walk back to the Sanderson farm, Missy, Kai, Stella, and Phoebe had all been so happy that they had gotten to attend tonight's party, that they'd been allowed to stay and to get a glimpse into their art teacher's world.

After an hour of work had brought together the four figures on to the page, Maya looked over to find Lucas had fallen asleep at her side.

"When we get up, first word out of me is going to be 'toldja,'" she whispered, closing her sketchbook with her pencil holding the page, setting it aside and turning off the light as she lay down and carefully pulled her husband's arm around her, bringing his hand to her lips before settling and shutting her eyes. The sun would be up soon.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	274. Their Party For One Year

**_A/N:_**_ The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

September 30th 2020

_Chapter 274  
Their Party For One Year_

They had begun this morning, one year ago to the day, in separate beds and separate houses, as had been expected of them. Now here they were, on the morning of July 2nd, a husband and wife of a year, enfolded in one another's arms, and they woke to that notion with a feeling of complete and unwavering happiness. Maya wriggled her away around until she could be facing toward instead of away from Lucas, allowing her to see his smile even as she showed him her own.

"Is it as incredible to you as it is to me that it's been a whole year?" Lucas asked.

"After the delay, that whole extra year of the engagement, yeah, little bit," Maya nodded. "Isn't that what we've always done? It took us forever to actually get together…"

"For good reasons, both things," he chimed in, and she laughed.

"Yes. What's important though is that we're here, isn't it?"

"It's very important," Lucas agreed.

"Time's always weird like that. But if it flew right by, well, that's really just that it's been a really good year, hasn't it?"

"Except for the fire…"

"Yeah, except for that…"

"… it is definitely in the top five." Though her smile had never gone so far away, it felt brightened at this, and Lucas leaned in to capture it in a kiss. When he pulled back again, he reached to stroke her cheek, looking into those eyes he so loved. "Happy anniversary."

"Happy, happy anniversary," Maya echoed. "So, I know where my bit comes in, and then ours, too, but I don't know what _you're_ planning…" she casually traced her fingers along the back of his neck, his shoulder…

"But you will, when the time comes," he assured her.

"So I take that to mean neither one of us included breakfast in any of our plans, right?"

"Right… But knowing him, I'm pretty sure someone else did…"

He was correct. They were halfway down the stairs when they almost collided into one another, stalling as Sam was coming up the other way. He had meant to check if they were getting anywhere close to coming down to the kitchen so he could carry on with everything without it ending up cold.

"You know, if you're ever looking for a side business, you could totally be a chef," Maya told her little brother after she and Lucas had been served. "Maybe not in a restaurant, but like a food truck or something."

"I don't know that I have anything all that ground-breaking to go and do something like that," Sam pointed out, looking nonetheless honored by this vote of confidence. "Anyway, I've got other plans."

"Which you're being so sneaky about," Maya 'accused' lightheartedly. Sam had gone into his college education splitting his focus on history and journalism. What he intended to make of these when he came out on the other side, it had never been clear, but everyone around him felt they knew him enough to trust that whatever he made of his life would be… spectacular.

"Eat your food," Sam countered, smiling to his sister and brother-in-law before leaving the kitchen for them to enjoy alone.

"So, is 'your thing' happening this morning or…" Lucas inquired, bringing his wife's smile back toward him.

"Why, is yours?" she asked, giving the exchange an air of spy versus spy.

"No, I'm good until… later," he told her. She could see he had backpedaled on just what amount of information he planned to share, and it made her laugh.

"Well, so am I, so what are we doing until… later?" she imitated him.

"See, now you say that and all I can think is how we're leaving in a few days and maybe we should get a move on with packing, but that's not really what we should be doing on our anniversary, is it?" Lucas wondered.

"We'd be spending time together, wouldn't we? That's what matters," Maya replied, and on that he could not fault her logic.

"It would be productive," Lucas pitched in, and she gave him a 'there you go' nod.

So, after breakfast was through, they had spent the rest of the morning packing for their trip. They were flying off in three days, all of them, and it wasn't as though they hadn't started pulling some things together, but… yeah, it was probably a good thing they did their packing now instead of putting off any further.

Maya began to suspect that whatever Lucas' 'anniversary thing' was, it was up in the attic. She'd noticed that the trap had been shut sometime since the night before, and whenever she so much as gave a sign that she might have been heading to pull the steps down, he would come around like he wanted to stop her without letting her understand that this was what he was doing. On the other side, Lucas didn't take long to see that she was on to him. She could never resist teasing him when there was a surprise on hand, especially one like this. At least he knew that no amount of teasing and playing like she would get past him one of these times would actually end with her doing it. She _did_ like experiencing the surprise as it was intended.

In time, patience was to be rewarded. After their morning of packing, they had gone and enjoyed lunch by the lake, followed by a walk around the area. Inevitably, this had gotten them spotted by several of their neighbors as they went, which then led to their stopping to talk a while. They were both very committed to knowing the people of the lane, to have a connection with all of them, and that was definitely what they had, after living here for the past three years. Lucas had a bit of a head start on Maya, of course, as many of those who had been here for two decades and some would have known his grandparents, and his parents, and even him, when he'd been little.

At one point, Lucas had been forced to look at the time and cut their walkabout short. They needed to get back to the house for the 'official start' of their anniversary. Lucas had figured that whatever Maya's part was going to be, whether she said it or not, would only happen after dinner, and after their 'together part,' so that left him, and his moment, right here, before they left to go to the restaurant.

He was soon dressed and ready to go, ahead of her, and so he walked into the hall, pulling the steps down to land with the usual soft thump before climbing to sit halfway up and wait.

"What are you doing up there?" Maya asked, chuckling, and he turned his head to find hers poking out of their room's doorway, hair swaying over her shoulder.

"Waiting for you," Lucas smiled, climbing down as she stepped out into the hall proper. He couldn't see what his own face looked like, but he had to guess it was the personification of his thought just then, which was that she had been as ever well worth that wait.

"We going up there?" she asked, pointing to the opening which led into the attic.

"What gave you that impression?" he asked, even as he held out his hand to lead her up.

"My eyes?" Maya replied, which in turn made him remember to tell her to close those. "Okay, but it's on you if I trip," she indulged him. There was not an ounce of worry in her; she knew he had her.

So, up they went, with Lucas leading the sightless Maya along. He was pretty sure she could have done this without his holding her hands anyway, with how often she climbed up here. The bigger risk had been to ensure she wouldn't come up once he'd started and then finished doing what he'd done for her. This had left him with no choice but to wait until she'd gone to bed the night before, rising again once she'd fallen asleep and hoping that she would not get up at any time in the night. There had been enough occasions where she'd followed some idea up to her desk, regardless of the hour…

But they'd made it up here now, and when he told her to open her eyes, he saw right away that he had achieved his surprise.

"Wha…" her voice faltered as she took in her surroundings before looking back at him.

"Well, going to the museum is kind of our biggest go-to, and it's always great, but we _have_ been there… a lot, lately," Lucas explained, making her laugh. "And I just kind of remembered, one day, not sure when, talking about having our house someday, and having a sort of exhibit room, and I thought… maybe instead of going to the museum, I could bring the museum to you. Yours were the pieces I had on hand, and I think they look pretty good, yeah?"

It had been tricky to put it all together, to say the least. Their attic space was the biggest they had in the whole house, and while they also had the basement for this, sooner or later, they'd started storing a number of items up here, which he'd had to clear away, all before beginning his 'installation.' Drawings, paintings, photographs… He'd had to search out the pieces he'd include in his exhibit and then get hold of frames, compose and print placards… The trickiest part had been the 'walls' he had added, to really make it feel more like a museum. The end result though… Maya wasn't the only one to be impressed.

"Wait, hold on, one more thing," he moved to grab something from behind her, and by the time she turned and saw, he had already slipped the blazer on and was now buttoning it up. Maya laughed, loudly so, and Lucas cleared his throat.

"Sorry, sorry," she pulled it back in. This was a museum after all. They needed to keep their voices down.

She had to hand it to him, he had done a really good job, not just with the setup but with… well, curating his 'exhibit.' It would have been easy to just grab any of what she'd done – and she was overly prolific, some might say – and put it up, but that wasn't what he'd done. They both had enough experience, in one way or another, to grasp some notion of what made for a successful collection. By the end of their tour, she was so impressed, and possibly inspired. This would have to wait. Next stop was dinner, and then the 'couple's choice' part of their night.

"What do you want to do?" Lucas had asked, the night they'd decided on this whole 'yours, mine, and ours' approach to the anniversary. Maya had considered the question with a very concentrated sort of look about her, before finally just smiling and looking up at him.

"Let's go dancing."

That had been more than agreeable to him, and so it had been settled. Now, tonight, after dinner, and a bit of digestive walking, they had gone and danced… most of the night away. It was everything they could have wanted it to be, and they might have stayed at it until closing time, but then their night was not over. Lucas could see in Maya's face how anxious she was to get to her part, how eager she was to spring it on him. He had been curious all day, too, so he did not keep her waiting.

Off they went, back to the house, where they arrived to find Sam had cleared out for the night. In what felt just the tiniest bit like payback for earlier, Maya demanded that Lucas shut his eyes before she could lead him along. Actually, the further they went, it really felt like this sightlessness was completely unnecessary, but he could tell she was smiling the whole way, so he saw no reason to complain. He knew before they made it to the back door that she was taking him to the Hex. What they were going to be doing there, he had to admit, he didn't put together until she told him.

"Remember this?" Maya asked, as she stood at the console. At the press of a few keys, the studio was filled with the sound of her voice… and his voice…

"There's no way I could forget," Lucas smiled. It was the song she had written, almost a year ago, in Paris. When he had asked her if she would show him how to play it, she'd had conditions, more than acceptable ones.

_Only if you sing it with me. We record it, just for us. The Friars, year one._

"Here," Maya handed him an envelope, which had been waiting on top of the small bookcase. He took it, and right away, before he'd gotten to open it, he saw what she'd written on the front. _The Friars, year two._ Today was not just about celebrating the year which had just come to a close. It was also about looking forward to the year that was about to start, the second year of their marriage. Maya chose to do so by keeping up the new tradition they had decided to start.

She had written a new song. Where the last one had been like an ode to the stars, in French no less, this one… This one felt equally personal. They were the only people to have heard the first song, and they would be the only people to hear this one, which was simply beautiful. Reading the words, actually picking up some of the melody in the notes he was able to translate in his head, he was genuinely brought to tears. This next year would be so life changing. She knew it, and he knew it. If all went well, and they trusted in this being so, by the time there was a third song to be written, they would be close to becoming parents. They would also be on tour, with Ree Forster.

"Do you think you're ready to give it a shot?" Maya asked, nodding to the booth door.

"If I'm not, I know you'll get me there," Lucas replied. "Will you sing it for me? So I can hear it?" he asked. Maybe he just really wanted to hear her sing. She would know, and she would be more than happy to oblige.

Stepping into the booth, the two of them, Maya picked up her guitar, and she sang the song for Lucas. By the end of the night, they would have it recorded, his voice and hers, his guitar and hers, to join last year's song as they looked to this new year of wedded life together.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	275. Their Vacation With Takeoff

October 1st 2020

_Chapter 275  
Their Vacation With Takeoff_

_July 14th 2028 – The Friar House on the Lane_

Maya always looked forward to her sessions with Ree up in the Hex, and this one – which was to be their fourth out of five – would be one of those she looked forward to the most. Already on their previous session the singer had known about how Maya and Lucas and their families were looking to take a trip together, and she had made a suggestion. It was entirely up to Maya to decide whether she would take it or not, as it might not be something she'd be able to pull off, but Ree thought it might be interesting to have her write these next songs they would record while she was out there. She firmly believed in the inspiration of one's surroundings, and her songwriter was about to find herself in a place she had never been before. Maya had told her she would think about it, and in the end she'd decided to go for it. It had been a bit of a gamble, but she felt confident enough to follow Ree's lead.

Today, she awaited Ree's arrival, with two songs burning a hole in her pocket. She'd let her know she had them when they'd landed, three days ago, meant to send her the demos she'd put together, but Ree had told her she would rather wait to hear them for the first time in person. A part of Maya was feeling very nervous at the thought, worried that for some reason Ree would hate the songs, but she didn't let it hold so much ground. If for some reason the songs didn't work, well… they'd figure something out. She knew Ree enough by now to trust that she wouldn't go and blow up on her or anything. They would either rework them or start from scratch, but they would get through the day.

"The tan looks good on you," Ree was all smiles when she arrived and the two of them embraced.

"It's kind of a miracle that I didn't burn," Maya laughed, looking at her arms.

"Yes, I'm afraid I, too, would require divine intervention on that one," Ree declared as they walked through the house and into the kitchen, there to find Lucas putting the finishing touches on breakfast.

By now, it had become part of these recording days that Ree would go ahead and join them for the meal, instead of popping up in the studio with any offerings from Ma Maggie's, just as Maya made damn sure she didn't forget about the session dates until the last second… again. Today, it was just the three of them. Sam was in Tucson with the rest of the Hart-Lanes, where he would remain for a few weeks.

"Not so lucky, was he?" Ree leaned to whisper at Maya's ear, and Maya had to cover her mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. Indeed, Lucas still wore the signs of a few sunburns.

They had a quick meal together, as Lucas was due at the ranch that day. After he'd gone away, wishing them both good day and good luck, Maya had gone to hurry and clear the table, only to find Ree stepping in to help, rinsing dishes for her. She resisted the urge to tell her it wasn't necessary, already knowing what she'd hear in response.

"So, go on, how was it?" Ree asked, giving the immediate impression that she'd been dying to hear about Maya's vacation.

X

_July 5th 2028_

It would remain a point of contention all through the day, just which one of them had woken up first. Maya claimed it was her, and Lucas was sure it had been him. Possibly, they had woken up at the same time, and neither of them would ever know for sure. What they _would_ know for sure would be that Sam had beaten them both at this game. As ever, he went and put Maya's title of early bird to shame. For today at least, they could only say that the really important part was that they had all gotten up ahead of schedule, and they would not be missing their flight.

There were three parties due to meet at the airport that day, and theirs was the only one that needed to make a stop on the way. They had to go and pick up Cecilia. It would have been easier to have her stay at the house with them the previous night, but then she and her father had been visiting with family members for the fourth of July, and so it had ended up that she'd sleep at home and be picked up in the morning.

She was waiting for them, outside her house, and when they pulled up to the curb she hurried inside a moment, to say goodbye to her father, just as Sam went out to help with her bags. Once they were buckled in to the back seat, it was off to the airport. They were making excellent time, and still they were fielding messages from their respective parents, confirming that they were on their way.

With all the rush to get to the airport, to get to the point where all they had to do was wait for the call to board their plane, the first moment where it really felt like they were leaving, like they were going to be on vacation, was when the younger Friars were met with the Hunter kids, who came hurtling in to hug them, all of them showing some feeling over their getting on a plane soon. Nellie was possibly excited enough for all of them combined. Gracie gave a good show, but she was clearly concerned about the idea of flying. MJ was giving no pretense, and he absolutely did not look forward to the flight. And Haley… Well, she was about to turn four, and she showed curiosity to the point where she might have been under the impression that she would actually be flying of her own volition for all they'd actually explained to her.

"Where do I sit?" Nellie asked Katy as they went through the gate and started on their way aboard. Even without her saying it, this was as good as code for 'can I sit next to the window?'

"You and Gracie are with Maya and Lucas, and MJ and Haley are with your dad and me," Katy replied.

"Yeah, but…"

"You two are between the two of them," Katy went on, looking back to her daughter and son-in-law, right behind. She also gave a discreet look to Gracie, who kept close to Shawn's side as they went, and the message was clear. It said 'your sister needs you, and she won't want to look outside. At nearly nine years old, Nellie was still very much her twin's protector, much as Gracie was hers, and all the window seats in the world would never take precedence over her.

"Okay…" she finally told her mother, and walking behind, her big sister smiled.

They were not on a direct flight. They had to take another one, connecting them to their destination, and the fact that they would be taking not one but two planes had been received accordingly among the Hunter kids. The first flight, taking them from Texas to California, had been on the whole incident free. Nellie had spent most of the time playing a game with Gracie, which kept them both occupied and not thinking so much about being in the air. MJ had watched a movie, the better to distract him, too, while Haley, upon discovering she would not in fact sprout wings and fly of her own accord, spent much of the flight on her father's lap, looking out at the clouds through the window. The closer they got to landing, Maya and Lucas would look to one another, sharing a bit of eagerness for what would happen once they got off and their surprise passengers were found.

"What are you looking for?" Gracie asked Maya as they walked through the airport. They had sufficient time to make their connection without running or even hurrying, and still there was an obvious sense of hurry about her.

"You'll see," Maya turned a look of conspiracy to her little sister, who became at once intrigued.

"Maya," Lucas spoke up then, and when she looked at him, he nodded ahead. Both she and Gracie looked at once, and Gracie was the one to make the revelation… sort of.

"Cara!" she gasped. At this, Sam looked over from where he'd been talking with Cecilia, catching his sister's name and quickly turning his eyes from Gracie Hunter to the point where she was looking. Indeed, there was Cara, and along with her Eliza, Emma, Wyatt, Teddy, Abigail, and James with little Maisie in his arms. They were all converging to join the group of Hunters and Friars elder and younger.

Sam turned to Cecilia, who nodded before he could jog over to greet his family, all equally eager to rejoin him. Wyatt shot up ahead of the pack and almost launched himself into his big brother's arms. Sam caught him and hugged him tight. There had really been no part of him that even remotely suspected this, and if they needed proof, the tears in his eyes said plenty. Family was and always had been so very important to him, something which big sister Maya had always felt was one of the things which bonded them the most when they'd still been strangers to one another, that and art, of course.

"Why… Wait…" Sam stammered as he put Wyatt back down and was soon wrapped up in several pairs of arms, all of them belonging to three of four younger sisters. He was putting it all together now. It wasn't as though they had all come over from Tucson to say hello in passing, no. They were coming with them, on this vacation. To say that he was ecstatic did not begin to cover how he felt, and _that _was a boost to the rest of them in and of itself. They couldn't wait to get on that next plane, couldn't wait to reach their destination and kick off their vacation for good.

"Can I sit with you this time?" MJ came up to Lucas and Maya as they were all headed to the gate.

"Uh, well…" Lucas turned back to look at Katy and Shawn. They both gave a discreet nod. "You might have to ask your sisters," he indicated the twins. At once, MJ turned around and moved to request this switch with his sisters, nearly causing a pile up as he went but finally returning to announce that they had agreed. They would go and sit with their parents, while MJ and Haley would go with their sister and brother-in-law.

As it turned out, the reason for this swap was because the movie he had watched on the first flight had featured a lot of horses, and since MJ knew that Lucas worked at Sullivan Stables, he wanted to ask him some questions. He was very much of the type to want as much detail as possible, and so Lucas spent much of those six hours either listening or responding to MJ's various questions. It kept the six-year-old occupied and not so concerned about being in the air, so Lucas was happy to oblige.

Meanwhile, Maya was now the one whose lap Haley climbed into, and she held on to her little sister as she looked through the window with wide, curious eyes, or eventually as she dozed off and curled up in her arms. The opportunities were so rare, to go off anywhere out of the state with all of her siblings, and her parents, and Maya simply could not wait to spend this week in Hawaii with them.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	276. Their Vacation With Landing

October 2nd 2020

_Chapter 276  
Their Vacation With Landing_

_July 14th 2028 – The Hex_

"Do you want the demo, or…"

"No, no, go ahead, please," Ree laughed, almost nudging Maya into the booth so she might pick up her guitar.

"Okay," she smiled. "Both of them or just the first?"

"Let's begin with the first, that's generally the way to go. Be honest now, when you say both, did you actually write only the two?"

"I'm not even going to ask how you figured that one out," Maya smiled just a bit sheepish.

"How many did you write out there?" Ree asked, and Maya bowed her head a moment before holding up all of the fingers of her right hand and two of the left. Now Ree laughed that much more. "What did you do, one a day?"

"Pretty much, yeah. I wasn't trying to, they just happened," Maya admitted.

"And what about these other songs, do I get to hear them, too?"

"If you want to, I'd be happy to. I figured I might hold on to them for my band, or for any future contracted… match-ups."

"I won't be greedy, I trust you if you say these two are the ones for me. You've never led me wrong, but it doesn't change that I have been a fan of any song you've created," Ree pointed out, pressing a hand to her heart.

Maya needed a moment to collect herself at this, at hearing one of her idols declare herself a fan of hers, of her work. Finally, she sat up on her stool, preparing to since the first of her songs and feeling herself immediately plunged back into this week of inspiration and family thrills.

X

_July 5th 2028 – Honolulu, Hawaii_

It never got any less amazing to experience this one moment right here, no matter how many places they had gone to in their lives. They would walk into an airport, in their hometown, and for a while they would be in what felt like an insular little world, preparing to depart, and then boarding a plane, taking them to another airport. And as similar or different as it could be to the one they'd left from, it was still an airport, still part of that transitional world. But then… then they would step outside, in a brand new city, or state, or sometimes country, continent, and… that would be the point where it all really felt like they had gone away from the place they called home.

Each place had its own vibe, yes, but this one, oh… Lucas couldn't explain it, and as he'd turned his head to look to his wife, he could just see it in her eyes, how much she felt it, too. Quite possibly, she had to be picturing something she'd want to put to paper later, or maybe even a melody to immortalize in some way. She'd brought one of her guitars along, and even as the case hung at her back, she looked so ready to pull it down and take out her instrument.

As great of a feeling as it was for them, it was that much more amusing to witness the kids' reactions. They had never seen anything like this, none of them. It truly was a whole other world for them to discover. Maya had been carrying a still sleeping Haley on and off since they'd come off the plane, when they exited the airport, and for seeing how the others had reacted as much as to not deprive her of that same moment, she'd carefully awakened her young sister. It would be something Maya would forever remember, the awed look on her face as she looked around, and turned back to her big sister, and looked around again, and turned to Maya once more, over and over, like she couldn't quite believe what she was seeing and wanted to make sure that she was really seeing it.

The ride of wonders continued, as they made their way to the hotel. With the sheer size of their group, eight adults, six teens, and six kids, so twenty in total, they'd ended up renting one car and two minivans, and as they had the car and Lucas' parents as their co-passengers, they couldn't say just how it had all gone for the kids, but going off their non-stop chatter as they rejoined, the fascination had not ceased in the slightest. It only became more so once they actually walked into the hotel lobby.

"Would it be too big of a dream to maybe want one of these trips at least once a year?" Maya asked Lucas once they were on their own for the first time since they'd woken up that day, back in Austin.

Alright, they weren't completely on their own. In order to lighten some of the load for Katy and Shawn, they had offered to take the twins with them in their room, but at the moment Nellie and Gracie were exploring their area of the room, which was up a flight of stairs. Maya and Lucas could hear them chattering to one another, laughing, as though this factor alone was enough to make this the best trip ever.

"I don't see why it should be too big," Lucas smiled back at her. Although I'm not sure what it would mean for… _next summer,_" he signed. Maya resisted the urge to laugh over his tactic, instead utilising it as well.

_"I'm sure that we can find some part of the tour where we'd have days free before and after. We could make a vacation of it and they could all come to see the concert."_

"Can you show us how to do that?" They looked up at the sound of Nellie's voice calling from above and found her and Gracie peering over the railing.

"Don't stand too close to that," Maya told them, and they backed away before coming down the stairs to join them. "How do you like your little hideaway?" she asked her sisters with a smile.

"It's _amazing_," Nellie excitedly reported.

"The bed is so big, we could all fit in there, us four, and MJ, and Haley," Gracie added.

"That is a lot of people," Lucas nodded slowly.

"That is a lot stinky feet," Maya scrunched up her face, for the sole reason of making the girls laugh, which worked. "Anyway, you should enjoy that big bed to yourselves while you can. You're not going to get something like that back home." This made sense enough for them, and they dropped the subject. Once they did, Gracie did not take long to display some of her increasingly familiar observational skills.

"You didn't answer the question," she told her big sister and brother-in-law.

"Which one?" Lucas asked.

"About the hand talking," Nellie told him, giving as close of an approximation as she could of what she imagined the language to look like. "We want to know how to do it, too."

"Why, so you can spy on us?" Maya teased.

"You only do that when there's things you don't want us to know about," Gracie told her, and Maya almost lost it at the look Lucas gave her, a slightly exaggerated 'oh no, they're on to us.'

_"Cut it out,"_ she signed, which instantly got her 'busted' by the girls. "We can see about doing anything like that once we're back home, okay? We're on vacation now, we're in a really nice hotel, and you're here busting us about sign language when you could be checking out what else this room has. Did you see the view from the balcony yet?" The twins looked to one another for a moment before dashing to the double doors.

"What do you think, should we have gone in for the six and under division of the Hunters?" Lucas whispered, and Maya snorted.

"If we had them, we definitely couldn't have that," she pointed to the loft where the twins would sleep. "And we wouldn't have _our_ giant bed to ourselves," she added, pointing back to said bed, which after an early departure and two flights looked beyond cozy and just downright empowered with hypnotic skills. "Not that it'll be good for much more than sleeping with those two up there," she let her hands drop back down and gave an apologetic smile.

"Yeah, we'll see about that," he stepped up to her, putting his arms around her as she carried a smile and an intrigued noise up into a kiss, which lasted all of three seconds before their names were called by the twins and they had to stop.

"See?" Maya whispered. Lucas replied with an ever more confident look, and she just smiled, leading him across the room, to where they found Nellie and Gracie, standing out on the balcony and taking in the view.

"It's beautiful, right?" Nellie asked with a beaming smile. There was no doubt about that, it was really something.

"You're going to draw that, right?" Gracie asked, pointing all around them.

"Can't you see her fingers are already twitching?" Lucas tipped his head to his wife.

"I'd argue, but you're not wrong," Maya readily admitted.

"Can we be in the drawing?" Nellie asked.

"What, like a portrait?" Maya asked back, and the twins nodded. "Uh, well," she checked the time. Most of the day had disappeared into even getting here, and now settling into their rooms. They were supposed to meet everyone in the lobby in less than an hour. Maya pointed this out, saying that she could start, sure, but she'd have to stop and start again after dinner, by which time they might just want to relax… or go to bed early. "I can take a picture of you guys out there and go from that."

This was an instantly acceptable compromise, so they spent several minutes coming up with the best pose. They tried this way and that, sitting, standing, facing one way, facing the other… before finally landing on one the twins agreed upon.

"Sorry that I left you to unpack on your own," Maya told Lucas as they got off the elevator and watched the girls dash off to rejoin their parents and younger siblings.

"I was happy to do it," he promised her, leaning to kiss the side of her head. "Anyway, it kept them entertained."

Dinner was, as expected, a crowded affair. Having one large table felt just a bit unmanageable, so instead they had two tables of ten, one behind the other. Several times throughout the time they spent in the dining room, some of the group would scamper around to find and talk to someone who was too far from them, which led to the occasional swap of seats and plates. Their server handled these changes like it was a daily thing for her, which it could easily have been.

As expected, the long day had worn out several of them, and so dinner was followed by everyone returning to their rooms and wishing one another good night until the morning. Back in their room, Maya and Lucas had to carry the sleeping twins up to their bed, getting them changed and tucked in before returning below for a bit of quiet television and sketching.

"Thought you said you were stopping for the night," Lucas told Maya when, after they'd climbed into their own big bed, he watched her grab her sketchbook from the night stand.

"Oh, I did, this isn't the portrait, I just…" she shook her head to herself.

"Melody?" Lucas guessed, recognizing that look on her face now.

"And then some," she nodded.

"Right. Don't stay up all night? Or if you do, wake me up? I'd love to hear what you come up with." This made her smile, and she tapped her shoulder for him to lean in and rest there with her. He fell asleep this way, and once she'd set her book aside, a song just about completed, she settled down and joined him, falling fast asleep and into dreams.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	277. Their Vacation With Sun and Sand

October 3rd 2020

_Chapter 277  
Their Vacation With Sun and Sand_

_July 14th 2028 – The Hex_

Maya didn't exactly space out, whenever she performed, but it did sort of feel like flipping the world over, like flipping a mirror from a regular view to a closer, larger, more intense one. She had been performing on stages for over a decade now, and it was that feeling that kept her going. If she didn't feel it anymore, then she would know it was time to step back, but she did feel it, oh… she felt it so much that she missed it, whenever she was away for too long.

Performing here, in the Hex, for an audience of one, it didn't have that same sort of feeling as the stage, with a lively audience below, but it was her, bringing music to life, and that was enough that she'd be folded back in her own little space for a few minutes, until her song came to an end and she would re-establish contact with the person in front of her, in this case Ree Forster. She'd just finished performing the third of the songs she had composed while on vacation with her family.

This was the first one beyond the two which were earmarked as being for Ree, for the album they had been working on all this time. Those first two had already been received with such instant love, like Ree could understand immediately how Maya had felt these should be hers. They would be recording them shortly, but first there were those other songs she had wanted to hear, and so Maya had settled on the stool again, and she'd performed one. As minded as Ree had been as she listened to the first songs, concentrating on these melodies and lyrics she would soon be singing herself, here she just seemed… well, like she'd said, like a fan. She had such a smile to her, and a look which showed her for the fellow musician she was, taking in the piece in the way only one so finetuned to the art of music could do.

"Maya, that was beautiful," was the first thing she said, and Maya tipped her head in thanks, not trusting the words that would follow her smile. "I think you should keep that one, for the band. Mind you, I say that, and I might say the same thing for all of them. If I wasn't already so in love with my two, which I am, by the way, I would fight you for it."

"Thanks," Maya breathed.

"Alright, tell me about the next one. When did you write that one?"

"Third day, after we went to the beach."

X

_July 7th 2028 – Honolulu, Hawaii_

"Stop! There's enough, enough!" Wyatt squirmed as Maya put the sunscreen on his face.

"Trust me, you'll thank me later. You don't want to look like a lobster, do you? We are a pale people, it is our curse," she intoned, sneaking in the last of spot she'd missed. "Done!" she pulled her hands back, like a contestant in a cooking show when time out was called. "Next!" she called, and Haley came up to her, stealing a look to Wyatt and turning a confused look back to her sister.

"He's all white," she declared.

"Yeah, no kidding," Maya smiled. "Let's get your hair up, okay?"

James had gone off with Cara and Teddy for a surfing lesson, while Abigail had elected herself as keeper of camp, once they'd found a spot to call their own while they were at the beach that day. She was not much of a swimmer, but she could enjoy her surroundings, all while looking after one-year-old Maisie. She had a book, she had shade, she was good. From there, the rest of the group splintered off, some going swimming one way, some going another way… Melinda Friar spent some time with Abigail and little Maisie, while her husband joined their son and daughter-in-law in taking some of the little kids into the water.

To see him going out there in his trunks, the immediate impression was that here was a man who would continue to be in impressive shape as the years went on. Maya in particular loved messing with Lucas about this _way_ too much. The other thing they would see, of course, were the old burn scars. They mostly saw the ones on his hands, which had faded enough as to just become something they were used to and didn't notice so much. They hardly troubled him anymore, though from time to time they did hurt some. But then the scar on his leg, that one they didn't see nearly as much, enough that they could sort of forget what it actually looked like. It wasn't pretty, and it sort of made them uncomfortable to look at it. Even if Thomas promised them that it didn't hurt much if at all, to look at it, the first thought would usually be that it _had_ to hurt, for looking like that.

"You're a good swimmer, aren't you?" he asked MJ, as they walked to the water's edge, where it could wash over their feet. Mr. Friar held his hand, and as they went, the boy looked like he was trying not to stare at his leg but struggled to keep his eyes away.

"MJ," Maya tried to get his attention when he wouldn't reply. "MJ… Matthew," she pressed, and he looked at her. She nodded to Lucas' father and her brother looked over at him.

"Does your leg hurt?"

"Not at all. Want to poke my scar?" Thomas joked.

"Dad," both Lucas and Maya chimed in. They shared a look; they definitely didn't like how it sounded when they said it together.

"The easiest way to banish the unknown is to confront it," Thomas told them and MJ, too. After considering this a moment, MJ reached out and touched the area under the man's knee. He tipped his head, but he looked more curious than afraid. "See?" Thomas looked back up and nodded.

"Look, there's Sam!" Wyatt pointed, and they looked to find him and Cecilia wading along, a short distance away.

As much as Thomas Friar didn't seem in any troubled by showing his own scars, Maya knew very well the journey Cecilia had been on in dealing with her own leg, her own scars. Hers were not due to a fire, of course, but all those surgeries to fix her leg after the accident which had killed her mother and left her with her crutch had left their marks. Maya remembered those early days, when she'd taken the girl shopping and she had worked so hard not to show what it all looked like. It had taken until last summer before any of them – except Sam, no doubt – had been allowed to see. Cecilia was getting better about showing confidence, but it didn't come without hesitation. When she'd ditched her sundress, sandals, and crutch, heading to the water while holding to Sam's arm, she would have what felt like the opposite reaction to the others when they saw Mr. Friar's leg. While they would try not to look at him, _she_ would try not to look and see whether anyone was staring at her.

Looking at her out there, with Sam, all those worries looked to have disappeared. She loved swimming, loved being in the water, where it would feel as though the odds were tipped back in her favor, where she could feel more like her old self again. For the most part, she was at ease with who she'd had to be since the accident when she'd been twelve. But she was seventeen now, and a year away from graduating high school and going to college. As much as Maya and Lucas had been wondering about what would happen with Sam, with Sam and her, and whether they would stay in Texas or not, there was also a lot of what this would mean for the both of them separately. Lucas could see just a bit of that struggle in Sam. And with Cecilia… She had grown more and more confident about confiding in Maya when it came to those things where she could not turn to her father or to Sam, and Maya took that role with a lot of care, always. Right now, she knew that the thought of 'what now?' was really getting to weigh on Cecilia. She had to make some choices, and she wasn't ready.

"You hold on to me, okay?" Maya told Haley, as she watched Lucas and his father go into the water with Wyatt and MJ.

"Okay," Haley nodded firmly, locking her arms around her sister's neck.

"Not that tight, okay," Maya squeaked, loosening the birthday girl's grip. "Coming into that four-year-old strength, huh?" she laughed at the sort of shy look on her little sister's face. "Don't worry, you didn't hurt me," Maya kissed her cheek. Sometimes, she was literally too cute to handle. All day, since they'd met up that morning, she'd been telling every single person she came in contact with that she was 'this many' now, holding up four slim fingers. And because she was clearly a grown girl because of this, she made sure to clarify that 'this many' was four, which was what she was.

The 'big girl' yelped nonetheless when the water splashed against her feet, and she kept a close grip on her sister.

"It's alright, you'll be fine in a minute," Maya promised her, just as any of them would have to do, whenever they took her swimming anywhere. This was different than the pool, of course, but the promise was kept, as by the time floated there, a little less than neck deep, Haley looked very happy to be where she was. "You want to go under?" Maya asked her, amused at the way she scanned her surroundings before looking back at her. "Yeah? Like at the pool, remember?" Haley looked uncertain. "I won't let go, I promise. Three seconds and we come back up, yeah?"

"One, two, three," Haley counted.

"That's it. Ready?"

"Ready." With a countdown, the sisters disappeared under the surface, emerging again three seconds later. Haley coughed and blinked, but eventually she laughed, and she demanded to do it again. "Figured you might say that," Maya reached to pluck some strands of hair out of her face. "Ready?"

When they'd had their fill of the water, for a while at least, they headed back to where Abigail and Maisie would be waiting. Thomas convinced his wife to take a dip with him, and off they went, while Maya and Lucas looked after the two boys and the birthday girl. MJ and Wyatt set about building a sandcastle, the better to host a party for Haley's birthday. She would have to discover the completed result when she woke again, as she soon fell asleep, now in Lucas' arm once Maya's expertise as an artist had been called upon by the boys.

Looking at the small blonde in his arms, at his wife helping her young brothers with their project, Lucas found he looked forward to more trips like this, just as Maya had done, already on the day they had arrived. By the time they would return to the hotel, they would be so spent, calling an early night as they had done, all three nights so far. But then wasn't that what you wanted on a vacation like this? They were clocking out after having spent all day having fun together, making memories.

"Another one?" Lucas asked, as he came down from checking on the twins in their loft to find Maya on the balcony, with her sketchbook and her guitar. All three nights so far, just when it seemed like they were bound for bed and some much-earned sleep, she would be scribbling at a page, not drawing but jotting down a new song. He could see, this was a third one.

"I don't know what it is, but it came to me," she shrugged, giving a light strum of the strings. It was all he needed to just go ahead and sit with her, where they could finish their night with her quietly letting him hear what she'd come up with this time.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	278. Their Vacation With Community

October 4th 2020

_Chapter 278  
Their Vacation With Community_

_July 14th 2028 – The Hex_

Maya had written a lot of songs over the years. Like her art that came on paper, and canvas, she never lacked in ideas when it came to music once she started making her own. Over time, it was very possible, in both cases again, that she would forget about some piece or another that she'd made until she saw or heard it again, but this only because she could only keep so many of them in her conscious mind at once, which would have been true of most anyone. And once they were brought back to the forefront of her mind, they would feel as close as her most recent creations. She could look at them and remember exactly where she was when she'd made them, exactly what she'd been feeling. She could listen to the songs and remember just what had inspired them and what that first nugget had been, that first bit of melody, those first words.

As she sat with Ree in the booth of the Hex, playing her the songs she'd written out in Hawaii over her vacation with her family, she could practically feel the breeze, sitting on that balcony, could catch the occasional scent on the air, recall the sounds of the city. She could remember the feelings…

She hesitated when she got to the fifth song. Obviously, she had meant to share it, or else she wouldn't have included it, but she hadn't accounted for how bringing it back up would also bring back the feelings she'd been feeling at the time she wrote it, or the memories that came with it.

"Maya, is everything alright?" Ree asked, and Maya looked up at her.

"Oh, yeah," she nodded at once. "It's just, you know how songs can be sort of… emotional bombs? Not in the sense that they're bad, more like…"

"No, yes, I understand," Ree promised. "And this one is one of those for you?"

"Kind of," Maya admitted.

"Please don't feel obligated to…"

"No, it's fine, really. My mind just sort of went back there for a minute, that's all. I'm good."

X

_July 9th 2028 – Honolulu, Hawaii_

Just about every time they had returned to their room since they'd been here, one of the twins had insisted on being the one to open the door with the key card, and so they would take their turns. The door would barely have swung open that they would dash in, leaving the card on the nearest surface before climbing off to their loft above, like it was their secret fort and no one else was allowed in.

Today was no exception, as they returned from a day of sight seeing to drop off any souvenirs they might have picked up and to freshen up before dinner. Nellie and Gracie disappeared up the stairs, each with the bags they'd gotten slung over their shoulders and carrying items they'd now be inspecting closer, sat on the island of their big bed. They had told Maya and Lucas about how much they loved that place… a lot.

"Don't settle in too long, we have to go in twenty minutes!" Maya called after them.

"Okay!" the twins replied in unison.

They kept up their end of the bargain, and before either their sister or Lucas had time to call them down, they returned, changed and ready to go. So, off they went to find their family in the lobby. They ran into the elder Friars on their way to the elevator, and Maya had to bow her head to turn her smirk away in time, aiming it solely to Lucas, who would know what had brought it on. Thomas and Melinda weren't exactly tightly-wound and straight-laced when they were back in Austin, but it had to be said, they had adopted a very relaxed state of being while out here in Hawaii, and it was as startling as it was… well, kind of amazing, really.

Nellie and Gracie were telling the two of them about the books that they got that day when they all stepped off the elevator to find the rest of their group waiting. They were headed out to a restaurant that night which required them all to get in their rented vehicles. When they got to the car, Thomas Friar offered to drive, and so Lucas and Maya got in the back. This was just as well, as it afforded them some amount of privacy, once again turning to their tool of sign language, keeping it as localized in their laps as they could, so on the outside they would be talking with the elder Friars, but then they'd also be talking to one another.

_"Was it just me or did Sam and Cecilia seem a bit off back at the hotel?"_ Lucas asked, after tapping Maya's knee to get her attention. She looked at him, and her eyes kind of said it all.

_"I was hoping that I was just making things up in my head. But you saw it, too?"_

_"I'm not sure what I saw. They just looked sort of quiet and in their own heads. Maybe they were just tired. We did do a lot today. We did a lot every day."_

_"I hope they're just tired," _Maya breathed, letting her hands drop in her lap. Lucas reached over to take hold of one and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

When they arrived at the restaurant, much as they tried not to, they found it difficult not to steal looks over to Sam and his girlfriend as they took their seats, across from them and at the other end of the table. Maybe it had all been in their heads, and they really had just been tired, distracted for a moment. They looked better here, happier. Then again, what was consciously shown and what was telegraphed when you thought no one was looking… those were different things, weren't they?

Before long, the meal and the company around them was enough to pull Maya and Lucas away from these concerns over the young couple. Anytime they were all of them sat together, eating, talking, it was hard not to feel caught up in the spirit of it all. So many voices, so many stories… Throw in the fact that they were somewhere so far from home and their day to day lives, and they never lacked for conversation, especially once the kids got into it.

Of course then, sooner or later, the meal had to end, and when it did, the bubble would pop, breaking this instant of peace and community, of family. Somewhere around dessert, as everyone seemed on the whole not as tired as they had been on their evenings so far, they had started discussing the possibility of convening in one of their rooms, all together, to make a movie night. They could get snacks, treats they had discovered out here especially… This had led to everyone throwing movie titles around as options, voicing their agreement or disagreement. It was around that time when Maya and then Lucas, too, picked up on the voices they were not hearing.

At their end of the table, Sam and Cecilia both looked distracted again, the way they'd done in the lobby. Now more than ever, it really felt like something was going on, something between the two of them, it had to. If it was happening to one or them, or both of them, they would turn to one another for support, for reassurance, something. If they didn't, if they couldn't, then it meant that whatever was going on was _because_ of the other.

It wasn't as though it went completely unnoticed by others around the tables. Abigail and James had both shared in those furtive glances, directed at their son. But then they were all headed up to the elder Friars' room – because Melinda Friar wasn't about to let the fact that they were not at home in any way prevent her from being the born hostess she was – for the movie. Maybe it was better to leave it alone for now.

_"What do you think is going on?"_ Maya asked Lucas later that night, after they'd gone back to their room with the twins, who were presently meant to be brushing their teeth.

_"I don't know. If I had to guess, maybe it has to do with what happens after next year,"_ Lucas replied, before looking past her to the bathroom door, where Nellie and Gracie were spying once more, toothbrushes brushing away as they stared. Lucas cleared his throat and Maya turned.

"Hey, hey, over the sink, come on," she motioned, and the girls scurried back. Maya turned back to her husband, expressing without having said a word the sentiment he shared with her. They both hated to see any kind of trouble between any of the couples around them, whether it was their friends, or a younger brother…

A knock at the door made them both turn at once, and after Lucas went up to the door and looked through the peep hole, he pulled it open.

"Sammy?" Maya stepped up.

"Can I sleep out here tonight?" he asked, barely meeting their eyes. Maya came and ushered him into the room, as though he even needed to ask. She brought him to sit on the couch with her. Once he'd shut the door, Lucas went to look in on the girls, leaving the siblings to talk.

"Are we talking about this, or do you just want to lie down and go to sleep?" Maya asked. He may have been taller than her now, but he was still her little brother, and looking at him right now, she just really wanted to hold him.

"I don't know, I…" Sam shook his head slowly. "I think… I think we just broke up." Maya let out a breath, running her hand over his back.

"You think?" she asked. He didn't respond. "Okay, look… You stay out here tonight, and tomorrow we'll see what happens. Tomorrow morning, things might look different." Sam made a noise like he didn't believe her. "I'm serious, Sam. Do you think Lucas and I never argue?"

"No, I know," he turned his head away, like as true as this was, the last thing he needed to think about now was the two of _them_ ever having issues.

"It sucks, and it can't be over fast enough, but it happens. You just can't go all in and decide you're better off giving up, because then you're definitely going to lose her. I don't think that's what you want, is it?"

"No," Sam responded at once, firmly, definitive, but at the same time Maya could see another thought play against the back of his mind, and she had a feeling she knew what it boiled down to. He was thinking of their father, of how he'd left her and her mother when she was a kid. All the way back when she'd first met him, Sam was already expressing concerns that he would ever do just as their father had done someday, like it was in their blood and they were subject to it no matter what they did. Those thoughts were so far away now, practically disappeared, and yet all it had taken to bring them back was moment, this fear.

"Take a night, take a breath. Talk to her in the morning."

"Okay… Yeah… Maya, I…" Sam looked to his sister, and she put her arm around his shoulders, tipping her head against his.

"I know," she promised him.

She wasn't aware when exactly Lucas had gone by with them, but after getting Sam settled on the couch, she'd gone up to find Nellie and Gracie already in their bed, perusing one of their books together as they waited for her to say goodnight. They didn't ask about Sam, only hugged their big sister when she leaned to them. Headed back down the stairs, Maya could only look off to where Sam lay curled up on the couch, her mind humming in a melody she didn't yet know. She settled on her own bed, Lucas at her side, and there was that familiar pull for the sketchbook, to pull the thoughts from her mind into a song.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	279. Their Vacation With Breezes

October 5th 2020

_Chapter 279  
Their Vacation With Breezes_

_July 14th 2028 – The Hex_

"I have to say, hearing all of these new songs of yours, just like this, just you and that guitar… I cannot wait for next summer," Ree declared, after hearing the last of them. Maya laughed, entirely grateful and also just humbled.

"Neither can I," she admitted. "Sometimes I wish I could tell other people, it's all just… so much," she tried to gesture in some way that might have expressed even a fraction of what she felt.

"It usually is," Ree nodded. "You'll only have to keep it that way for a few months more."

"I know, and I will," Maya told her. "I can already imagine how some of my friends will react, and my family, which helps to keep me patient but also makes me impatient? Is that weird?"

"No, not at all," Ree chuckled. "It comes with the territory, I'm afraid. But also, I couldn't imagine I would be half as invested, half as happy, if the thought of it all didn't get my mind all twisted about like that. Wouldn't be that good of a show either."

Maya breathed out as she stood from her stool to go and set her guitar in its place before turning back exit the booth and head to the console, where Ree followed so that they might get on with their recording day. Thinking of those songs she had just performed for her, she knew that wherever each of those seven ended up, with Ree, with TXNY, with other artists… to her, they would always feel like a unit, the fruit of this trip with her family, with all the ups and downs it had seen.

X

_July 10th 2028 – Honolulu, Hawaii_

Every morning they had woken up here, in their big hotel room bed, it had been impossible not to feel how they were not at home, back in their own, familiar bed. This wasn't by any means a bad thing, of course not, far from it. Like when they had been off on their honeymoon, they couldn't help but be aware of how fortunate they were to be in this place, if only for a little while. Each city had its own spirit, readily available in the ambiance of the room, and this one… Oh, it really felt like paradise, like they could have stayed here for weeks, months, years… so, really, they were going to enjoy those few days they had.

The quiet of the room wasn't absolute, no. There was the light breeze of open windows, which felt like a call to remain just as they were, cozy in their bed, in each other's arms… Up above, there was occasionally the low sound of Nellie and Gracie, whispering to one another so no one would know they were awake… When Maya and Lucas would awaken to this faint soundtrack, even as they'd know they were both awake, it would be so easy to give no other sign that this was the case than to have him pull her closer or to have her twine her fingers with his, on the hand around her middle. If it wasn't for the girls upstairs…

Today, there was an additional factor, wasn't there? Not so far off, if they lifted their heads, they would see Sam, off on the couch. Maya turned herself over after doing so, resting now with her face toward her husband's.

"Hi," he mouthed the word, smiling, and she did the same, leaning in to share a brief but weighted kiss. One of the most wonderful things she had found, and him as well, was just how much seeing the other's love for them could make their own love feel as though it had the power to expand in their chests. It could make the whole of the world beyond the two of them disappear. They couldn't do that, not now, not when they had this… situation unfolding beyond their island within an island.

Maya had told Lucas about what little Sam had gone ahead and shared with her the night before, about how he believed Cecilia may have broken up with him. He'd been just as saddened at the idea that this might be true, just as he'd remained steadfast in the belief that all hope was not lost. They knew how devastating it could be, especially on a first major relationship. They each remembered so well the fight which had caused a momentary split between them, over several days. They remembered how it had affected them, the confusion, the heartache, the fear… It had all been flipped around after Pappy Joe had taken that fall down the stairs, after Maya had misunderstood something she'd overheard and assumed that Lucas was the one who lay in the hospital.

Sam and Cecilia would not have anything like that to come and shock them to their senses, at least they had to hope so, but clearly something was going to have to happen, if they had any hopes of fixing whatever had pulled them apart. Neither Maya nor Lucas knew exactly what that was just yet, though they could have their suspicions. All they had to go on was hope, trust that it would be sorted out. Of course, they couldn't pretend as though there wasn't also this other possibility…

_"What if they don't get back together? What if they really break up?"_ Maya whispered so quietly. Lucas let out a breath, grazing her cheek. He didn't know. He'd asked himself the same question, but there was no easy answer, was there? Their relationship was their own, and naturally so different from Sam and Cecilia's, but still the very idea that anything should ever pull _them_ apart left them sufficiently sympathetic to the two teenagers.

Mornings at the hotel usually kicked off with the twins standing up at the loft rail and looking down, confirming that their sister and brother-in-law were awake before demanding when they'd go down to breakfast, because they were hungry. Today was no different, although both Nellie and Gracie, especially the latter, looked just a bit hesitant at announcing themselves, and the reason was easy to understand. They knew Sam was down there, and even though they had no idea what had brought him out here last night, they knew it probably wasn't good. Maya could see them up there, curious little things, and she waved for them to come down, as Lucas got out of bed to go and check on their guest.

As the twins had hurried down and hopped into the bed with their big sister, Lucas had come to find Sam was awake, though his mind still appeared very far away. He didn't notice Lucas coming until he was right in front of him. He looked like he hadn't slept much, if at all.

"Are you going to be good to come down to eat?" Lucas quietly asked. Sam took a couple of seconds to process the question, and once he did, it seemed as though the first place his mind went to was 'breakfast means morning, morning means Cecilia.' He sat up on the couch.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll…" He looked down at himself, still in his clothes from the day before, while the rest of his things were back in the room he and Cecilia shared with the elder Friars. He couldn't go out there without seeing Cecilia, and he looked unsure as to whether or not it would be a good thing for him to go out there like this.

"Hey, I'll get dressed and go grab you something to change into, alright?" Lucas suggested, and after a beat Sam agreed with a nod.

Lucas' parents' room was far down the hall from his and Maya's. They'd tried to all end up in neighboring rooms, but this was the best they could do, with two groups on this floor, the Hunters on the next one up, and the Hart-Lanes another two floors up from them. Coming up to his parents' door, Lucas gave it a knock and waited.

"Who is it?"

"It's me, Mom," Lucas spoke, and the door opened to present him with 'vacation Mel' in all her glory. Thomas would say she was stunning in every way, no matter where she was, and his son couldn't help but agree. She might have looked best right here.

"Good morning," she smiled, as she would, although there was still a bit of hesitation on her face, and Lucas knew where it would come from. He signalled for her to step out into the hall, and she did, shutting the door first. "How's Sam doing?"

"Miserable," Lucas sighed. "Cecilia?"

"Poor girl sat outside half the night. I think she didn't want us to hear her crying," Melinda explained. "She's asleep now. I'm not sure we should wake her. I'll stay with her, the rest of you go on ahead and I'll just have room service send up breakfast."

"We can wait a bit longer maybe? We don't have to go just yet, it's still early…" Lucas pointed out, thinking of the sleeping girl as the boy sitting sleepless back on that couch.

"I think it might be best if you all went on ahead," Melinda shook her head apologetically. It was one of those moments where his mother was so far from the exuberant persona they all knew and expected. When this more subdued Melinda would emerge, it would always feel like they couldn't ignore the importance of the moment. Right here, she was acting in Cecilia's best interest, as she had no parents here with her to do it for her, and it was just who Melinda was, in her quiet moments as much as the loud ones.

Having been provided with clothes for Sam, Lucas was forced to return to his brother now, knowing he wouldn't be bringing back the best of news. All he could allow himself to say was that Cecilia would not be joining them to breakfast, and neither would his mother. He didn't mention the crying, as already the news that his girlfriend wouldn't be at breakfast had been enough to crush Sam. Now what was he supposed to do?

"I think I might stay up here, too, if that's okay," he told Lucas. "I'm not that hungry."

"Sure," Lucas replied. He wasn't going to fight him on it. "If you do get hungry though, just order something, put it on our room."

Breakfast in the dining room that morning was still jolly enough, as it would be, with all the kids there especially, but there was definitely something missing, there had to be, with three of their group absent. Not only were they absent, but then most of them knew _why_ they weren't around, and that was just difficult to ignore.

When they went back upstairs, to check on Sam and see if he wanted to go out with the rest of them, Maya and Lucas found he wasn't in the room, but Melinda Friar was.

"Mom? Where's Sam?" Lucas asked, surprising her from where she'd been reading her beach book on the balcony. There was a tray at her side, suggesting she'd had her breakfast here.

"Down the hall," she revealed, gesturing down that way. Neither Maya nor Lucas needed to be told what this meant, but she went on anyway. "He showed up at my door about a half an hour ago. I was going to turn him away, but it turned out that Cecilia had texted him so he'd come over. I left them to talk, not sure how it's going," she sighed, clearly concerned for the both of them.

By the time they got to see the two of them come from the other room, there was really no telling how the conversation had gone or what the result turned out to be. Had they broken up? Had they made up? They weren't pronouncing themselves either way, but it was clear that they had no intent to share one way or the other, not now. All they showed was a desire to get back to this vacation, with everyone. As hard as it was not to know, there was nothing else for them to do than to respect the choice.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	280. Their Vacation With Peace

October 6th 2020

_Chapter 280  
Their Vacation With Peace_

_July 14th 2028 – The Hex_

With only two songs set to be recorded that day, they might have finished earlier than those times when they had three, but then with Maya being recently back from her trip, they had veered off topic more often than they cared to admit. They got it all done as they'd intended though, so there was nothing wrong with friends catching up, right? That was the day Maya really came to realize it. She would never have even considered it before, would have told herself that she was getting too comfortable, that this was and would always be about the music, that she was writing songs for Ree Forster and that was all. But now, if she took a moment to consider their relationship, she could see that it was more than business. It was impossible not to look at her like a mentor, like an inspiration, to look up to her as though she was a giant, but little by little they had come to meet halfway.

When they had called it a night, two songs good and done, they'd ended up on the porch with iced tea and vacation photos, laughing at a whole stretch of pictures taken by Haley after she'd commandeered her big sister's phone. A good portion of them were selfies, intentional or not, others were blurry as though the photographer had been on the run, or crooked… Maya loved every single one and could not dream of deleting any of them.

"Our father is convinced that he passed on some of his photographer genes to her. He's been calling her Shutterbug since we got back," Maya chuckled.

"Start them young, I say," Ree laughed. "Here, look, look," she pulled out her own phone, searching very briefly before pulling up a picture to show her. There she stood, in a studio, with her daughter in her arms. Christina couldn't have been more than two or three, and she had a headset over her little ears which was so big that her mother had to hold it in place for her. The girl didn't give it much mind, as she was intent on the microphone in front of her, the expression on her face suggesting she was trying to sing, just as she would have seen her mother do. "Short of the pictures from the day she was born, this is easily my favorite."

"I can see why," Maya beamed. The now eleven-year-old had carried on following in her mother's musical footsteps, as Maya had gotten to see and hear. "What would you think of doing a second version of… By the Lights, with her, a bonus track," she suggested, finding the right song even as the idea came together. The way Ree's face lit up, she liked that idea, too. It would be in the fall, right around the festival, what better time to bring Christina Sutcliffe into the Hex.

X

_July 10th 2028 – Honolulu, Hawaii_

It was their last night in Hawaii. Tomorrow, after breakfast, they were checking out and flying off home. Sam was Tucson bound, as had been the plan from day one, when he had discovered his parents and siblings were coming on the trip, too.

At lunch time, with everyone reunited after their breakfast missing three of the group, a proposition had been made by Sam, Cecilia, Teddy, and Cara. They would have a movie night with the rest of the kids, watching over them, the better to give the parents and Maya and Lucas a chance to head out for a date night. Either their prospective sitters gave an excellent pitch or they were all just looking to spend a bit of one-on-one time with their significant other while they were still here, still had the chance, but the couples were soon on board. The Friars, elder and younger, the Hunters, and the Hart-Lanes were heading off on their own.

"Didn't keep you waiting too long, did I?" Maya asked as she came to find Lucas waiting in the lobby. It reminded her at once of those nights when they'd leave the hotel in Paris, and she was sure it was on _his_ mind, too.

"No, not at all," he smiled, leading her out of the hotel.

"The twins wouldn't go and join the others until they got to play Fairy Godmothers to our mother _and_ me," Maya explained with a laugh.

"So that explains that extra makeup on your mother," Lucas nodded. Maya's laughter increased at once.

"Yeah, I kept them off _my_ face," she gestured to herself. "I might have to pay for that later, but I don't mind. Right now it's just you and me, no spies, no sad teenagers…" she sighed. She didn't want to go back to the whole Sam and Cecilia situation, but it was still sort of right there, wasn't it? They'd started the day off in their own corners, and somewhere in the middle they seemed to have gone and mended the gap, but it still felt like they weren't out of the woods.

"I'm going to miss it here," Lucas breathed as he and Maya walked hand in hand.

"Me, too," she nodded, looking back to him.

It had all been such a whirlwind, such a different pace than when they were in Paris the summer before, but they wouldn't have had it any other way. Their great big group was hard to miss, whenever they travelled together, and still if it had been possible there would have been even more of them here, enjoying the sights, the people, the sun… Alright, looking at him now, the redness peeking out of his collar, Lucas might have enjoyed a little less sun, but they could fill pages and pages with all the moments big and small of their days in Hawaii. Maya had certainly created something of a songbook, already six of them ready and waiting for the chance to be sung.

"I can't wait to come back… We're starting to have a travel list, huh?" she reflected.

"Good," Lucas nodded. "Keep them coming. I want to see it all, and I couldn't see it without you." She smiled at him, and it was a smile full of magic, for the power it had over him.

"That's good, because it's both of us or nothing," she joked.

"We're going to see a lot of places next summer," he pointed out, after taking a slightly exaggerated look around them as though to ensure no one was close enough to hear, especially anyone who might know them. Maya had looked so confused as to what he was doing, until he'd spoken, and then she'd laughed.

"A lot of places," she nodded. They didn't know yet exactly how many stops, how many shows there would be, or where they'd take place, but that was right at the top of their list along with getting to tell their people about the tour. "Should we break out our 'five pictures per day' rule again?"

"On the tour? I think that might be too little, no?"

"Yeah, might be…" Maya agreed. "We have time to figure all that out next summer," she raised her hand now, coming to the conclusion that they had to focus on _this_ trip while it was still going on, before they could go and start planning things for the many stops of the Ree & Maya tour.

Having put the future aside, the night unfolded for them, the last night in Hawaii before they flew home to Texas. It was almost as though the city had turned on the very best it had to offer, either to entice them to stay or to send them off with wonderful memories, who was to say. It had been a gift, from Sam and the others, for them to get this one instance where they weren't surrounded by one or more of any number of Maya's siblings. Oh, of course, they loved them all in immeasurable amounts, and they had loved everything they were able to do together out here… but this was so nice… it was really just so nice…

They would wake for a good long while before stopping anywhere for dinner. Without really talking it out too much, they simply came to this thought of waiting for the right place to manifest itself, to call to them and pull them in. They finally found it, and they had a great last dinner out on the island, discussing any number of things they had seen on the walk from the hotel to here, dipping back into talks of the family, the kids and their many adventures since they'd landed here five days prior. As they were finishing up, Maya discovered several pictures on her phone and recalled the moment when she'd retrieved it from her little 4H sister's hands.

She was barely able to contain her laughter, showing these to Lucas, who grinned that great big Huckleberry grin of his. This one in particular came up more and more whenever there were kids involved. It was unavoidable. They were all of months away from entering 'the baby window,' and the wait was one of those biggest weighing on them both, right up there with Maya's tour with Ree and Lucas' starting the next step in his veterinary journey.

The walk back to the hotel was longer, as they walked slower, though neither of them was in any way disturbed by the length of the journey. This was it, this was their last chance to really take in the city. Once they woke up the next morning, it would all be about finishing up packing and getting off to airport to fly home. The city would still be there but it wouldn't feel the same anymore, same as Austin had felt different, on the morning they had left it to come here.

_All the kids are staying with us in Lucas' parents room tonight. We're having a sleepaway-sleepover. Don't wait up. Sam._

The note was waiting on the stand under the television when Maya and Lucas walked into their room. Lucas was the one to find it, and he turned to show it to his wife, only to find her digging out her sketchbook. He had a feeling that was where she'd end up.

"New song?" he asked.

"New song," she nodded, holding the open book on one forearm even as she stood there, scribbling away. The pen scratched and scratched along, giving the impression of great hurry, which he took to come from the urgency of inspiration, of wanting to ensure that nothing would get lost along the way, which was always a possibility when ideas came faster than the hand went. And maybe there was a bit of that, too, but then when she finished writing she closed the book on the pen, deposited the lot on the table by the couch, and turned to look at him. Oh, he knew that look, too, and it made his heart go thumping in a whole other way than what her smile did.

"Hold that thought," he raised a finger, as though to say 'hold on real tight, don't let go for a second,' before moving to flip the latch on the door so that it couldn't just be opened by a key card. Almost any of their group could have barged in, and that was so not how they wanted to end their vacation.

"Smart," Maya nodded, almost squeaking when she watched him hurry over and braced herself for him to lift her off her feet. She laughed all the way to the bed, where he set her down and joined her in a kiss, the least guarded one he had given her all week out here. Pulling him closer, she doubted he felt any of his sunburns in that moment. Her touch gave no space for pain, only and always the opposite of it.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	281. Their Vacation With Home

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

October 7th 2020

_Chapter 281  
Their Vacation With Home_

_July 11th 2028 – Honolulu, Hawaii_

Their last morning in Hawaii was the first they spent with this kind of quiet. There was still the ambient sound from beyond their open windows, but without the addition of the whispering little spies up above, it felt closer to total peace than anything they had so far encountered.

"I don't want to get up yet… or maybe ever," Maya breathed, so at ease in her husband's arms. By the way he trailed kisses along the flowered branch along her shoulder, she imagined he felt the same. As completely relaxed as they were right here and now, they knew that the next several hours, preparing to leave and then heading on to two flights before heading home… all of that would make this feeling right here feel like a distant enough memory as to have been in another lifetime.

"You know, our bed back home may not be this big, but it's still pretty good," Lucas told her, dipping his head over her shoulder so he might kiss her cheek and make her laugh. "I have a feeling that as soon as you lie on it again, you'll forget all about this one."

"Maybe… probably… But can we still stay here?" Maya asked, with a borderline pitiful voice.

"I think I might have something to do about that," Lucas told her.

Soon after, the two of them sat up on their bed with the breakfast trays he'd had sent up. He'd let Sam know to tell the others that they weren't going to come down to the dining room, promising that nothing was wrong, far from it. If any of them could actually see the contented little smile on Maya's face as she sat there and munched on her food, they'd have to understand why this had been the way to go.

"Where are you going?" Maya asked when Lucas got up. He'd just finished his breakfast.

"Figured I'd start going around the room, picking up our things, and the twins' things."

"I can help you with that," she moved to rise, but he stalled her.

"No, hey, take your time," he insisted. "Enjoy… all this," he gestured around the bed.

"Okay, but you know that half the fun is when you're here with me, too," she pointed out with a smile as she settled back down.

"I won't be far," he smiled back.

As much as she could have truly spent all day in this bed, Maya eventually had no choice but to get up again, to get dressed for the day and pitch in with the last of the packing. The twins made an appearance, when Katy and Shawn came to get the girls' bags, and they dashed up to say goodbye to their loft. Soon, the group was gathered in the lobby, the bags were packed in the rentals, and they were leaving the hotel for good. The drive to the airport was a bittersweet one. They were happy to be going home, they were. But they could also have done with another week here, maybe two other weeks, maybe more.

The first flight, even though it was the longer of the two, seemed to go by in the blink of an eye. Suddenly they were in Los Angeles, and they were parting ways with nearly half of their group, including Sam, off for a few weeks at his parents' house with his siblings.

"Let me know if you need us to send you anything while you're out there, okay?" Maya tried not to squeeze her little brother so hard as she hugged him, even though she would miss having him around so much. He looked like he was feeling some of that, too.

"I will," he nodded. "I'll be back soon, you know?"

"I know," she smiled, the better not to tip over the edge into crying. Could she help it if she had gotten used to having him live with them these past three years? With a sigh, she stepped back, giving Lucas the chance to say goodbye, too.

"Don't worry, I'll sort that out," he tipped his head back to Maya, who gave an 'affronted' look while Sam smirked. "Get back soon, little brother," Lucas told Sam, who responded by hugging him.

After the rest of them, there was just one person left to exchange goodbyes with, and it was Cecilia. Everyone did their best to step away and give them some privacy. There was still something hard to explain about those two, since yesterday morning's apparent reconciliation. No one dared to say a word of any kind which might allude to the argument and the aftermath, not to Sam and Cecilia, not to one another. For what little was seen of their exchange in the airport however, the impression it left was one that suggested a split might have occurred, all under the agreement that they would hold a civilized front for the sake of everyone enjoying the rest of their holiday.

"What are you two doing now?" Lucas asked Nellie and Gracie, as they settled in their seats between him and Maya, hunched over a small book. The girls looked up as one, a matching set of innocent blue eyes. Gracie held up the book for him to see, and Lucas chuckled, turning to Maya, who had been holding Haley while her parents dug through their carry on for one of her toys to keep her busy during the flight.

"What?" she asked, looking down now to realize the book was a sort of beginners' guide to ASL. She sighed. "Okay, okay, we'll show you," she told them, and her sisters grinned. "But you have to practice a lot, yeah?"

"We will," Nellie told her as both she and Gracie nodded.

And for the whole of the flight back to Austin, Maya and Lucas gave the twins their first sign language lesson. They started them off on the alphabet, which seemed as good of a place as any. They couldn't say whether they were the best suited to teach them this, but once they were home they would see if maybe Kayla or Dora could lend them a hand.

Stepping out of the airport back in Texas, it was as ever the strangest feeling, like they remembered coming here to fly away as though it had happened a minute ago. They went off their own ways, the Hunters, the elder Friars… As with their departure day, Maya and Lucas had one stop to make on the way, to drop off Cecilia at home before they could carry on to their own. She was quiet in the backseat, giving off the impression of either dozing off or doing all she could to keep anyone from talking to her. Maya and Lucas let her be, taking her lead as well once they reached her house and got her bags out to carry them in for her.

"Thank you for inviting me to come this week," she told them. "It really meant a lot to me, and I'm not sure I said it before."

"It was our pleasure," Maya promised her, smiling. She could just see it, under the girl's gaze. The trip had made her so happy, but at the same time… "And hey, if you want to join us for dinner sometime, even if Sam's not around…"

"I'll keep that in mind," Cecilia nodded. Now her look said that she needed them to leave, soon, so she wouldn't cry in front of them. It was stronger than her this time, Maya couldn't turn a blind eye, and she hugged what was becoming clearer and clearer was her brother's ex-girlfriend. It was right there in the way almost trembled as she was held.

It was not how any of them would have liked to see this week come to an end, and as they climbed back in their car and started for home, Lucas and Maya were left with an uncomfortable silence. After a few minutes, Maya pulled out her sketchbook, turning the pages, over sketches, and one, two, three… six songs. She found a blank page, and with a deep breath she started to write again. She couldn't let the bad outweigh all that good. That was the part she pooled into this seventh song. All the good of the past seven days. As they pulled up to their house, their wonderful home, she smiled. _By the Lights…_ That was what this one would be called.

X

_July 14th 2028 – The Friar house on the lane_

"How did it go? Did she like the songs you picked?" Lucas asked, tipping his head back over the couch when he heard the door.

"Loved them," Maya reported with a smile as she leaned to kiss him before standing back with yawn, rubbing at her eyes. Lucas motioned for her to come around and join him, which she did with just a dash of exaggerated dragging of her feet. "When did the guys leave?"

"About an hour ago," Lucas replied, looking at the time. While he usually had at least Sam to count on when Maya was off on one of her sessions, their brotherly tenant was still in Tucson, so it had become guys' night, with Dylan, and Zay, and Asher and Ray, and Will, and Bishop, and Lion. "Dylan kept wanting to make sure that we would be there tomorrow to go and check out the new venue."

"Yeah, I finally checked my phone after seeing Ree off to her car, and I had like thirty-seven messages from Riley, freaking out about not getting it all handled in time. If it doesn't pan out there, any chance the ranch is free that day?"

By some chance – if they could call it that – the crisis had not happened until after everyone was back from vacation, and so Maya and Lucas were able to hurry over at their friends' call when their wedding venue all of a sudden fell through, almost literally, after some major water damage forced them to shut down for repairs. Maya had practically needed to spend the night over at her best friend's house, to keep her from spiraling over her wedding being ruined, too.

"I asked Juliet about it, she said she'd have to check some things and to keep her informed if Dylan and Riley couldn't find another place, but we can't say for sure yet," Lucas reported. Maya naturally looked discouraged at this, which was always the ideal recipe to make ideas come from her good Huckleberry husband.

He considered things for a moment, resting his chin to the top of her head, resting against his chest. This aimed his line of sight at the window looking out to the lane, and though it was pitch black dark outside by now, it eventually dawned on him that out that window, out past the lane, was the Oswalds' land, the site of their Halloween maze. That was the thing that kept spinning through his mind, over and over, even as he was trying to come up with a solution, for their friends, and their wedding…

"We can have it here," he heard himself say out loud. Maya made a questioning noise before slowly sitting up again to look at him.

"Have what h… Wait, the wedding?" she asked. He sat up, too.

"Yeah," he nodded, the idea piecing itself together almost faster than he could relay it. "We can ask the Oswalds if we can use their land again. That'd be big enough, wouldn't it?" There was no point in going up to the window to have a look, as they'd barely be able to see as far as their own mailbox, but if they closed their eyes and conjured up the image in their heads, thought about the size of the maze for instance… That might actually be perfect.

"You have to go and see them first thing in the morning," Maya declared.

"Done," Lucas nodded at once.

"What about the wait staff, and everything else that would have come from the venue?"

"We'll figure it out," he cranked up on his confidence. It was sort of contagious.

"Okay, but we can't tell them until we know for sure, right?"

"Definitely, yeah." After a beat, letting it all sink in, Maya reclaimed her resting position, and Lucas submitted to it gladly, holding her in his arms.

"Do you ever close your eyes and imagine we're back at the hotel, in that bed, or on the balcony?" Maya hummed.

"Sometimes, yeah. You?"

"I'm there right now," she reported, reaching up blindly. "Close your eyes, come with me."

"Don't poke me," he smiled, dodging those fingers before they could find an unpleasant target.

"Sorry, sorry," she laughed lightly. "Are they closed?"

"Both of them, safe and sound, yes." The way she trailed her fingers along his arm, it almost felt like a wave, like the wind… It felt like they were back in Hawaii. "We're just going to fall asleep, you know that, right?" he breathed.

"Wouldn't be a bad thing, would it?" she mumbled, sounding very much like she already had one foot out the door and would be asleep in a matter of seconds. Then again, she had a point. It might not be so bad. It was not a giant bed, but it was him and her, and they were very comfortable on this couch. About as soon as he admitted that to himself, it felt as though he'd been much closer to sleep than he'd realized, too. Maya's question was never answered, nor was she aware of it. They slept along, all through the night, with no one there to notice but the dogs, who would only ever take it in stride and fall asleep on the ground at their feet.

In their dreams, they were back there, all of them. In their dreams, it wasn't just those who had really been there. Their friends were here, so many of them. Even more of their families were with them, all of them happy, all of them at peace. There was no sadness here, no problems, just a sunny beach, an island so different from what they had here at home. In the morning, when they would wake, they would leave that other place, but then they would be returning here, and that was kind of a paradise in its own way, wasn't it? It was real, and even though not all of it was perfect, it came very close to it.

And it had something no vacation spot could have. It was home, and home was more than a house, it was a city, and people that felt very much your own, whether you knew them or not. That was the treat they could never see, whenever they lamented having to see a vacation end. Leaving meant returning, and returning meant all of this, all of home.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	282. Their Celebration of Anticipation

October 8th 2020

_Chapter 282  
Their Celebration of Anticipation_

"Are you okay?" Lucas came bounding down the steps. He'd been upstairs, looking through the various suits hanging from a rack in the attic, when he heard a short crashing noise followed by a yelp and barking. It was near to impossible to see what was going on, what with the tall stacks of chairs, and the folded tables, all of them having invaded the living room. "Maya?"

"Down here!" she raised her hand, and he could barely see her fingertips. Unsure what he'd find, Lucas hurried down the rest of the way and eventually found her. She was fine, by the looks of it. She was crouched next to a toppled box of centerpieces, working to check each one before putting them back with the others. "I think we're good, only a couple of them broke and we have spares." With the last of the centerpieces dealt with, she moved to look under the couch, with what little space she had. "Hey, come here… Come here," she encouraged, reaching under and finally pulling Archer into view. The dog had the look of one who had been spooked. "Everything's fine," she promised, sitting down and setting him in her lap before looking up to Lucas. "This place is a danger zone for the canine population," Maya declared, and he tried not to laugh as he went and sat with her.

"Did he try and grab one of those?" Lucas guessed, pointing to the centerpieces.

"I saw him, I just didn't get to him in time, and as soon as the box fell, he went hiding like he had superspeed. Poor, scaredy pup," she scratched at his head and leaned down to kiss him. Archer looked up at her, looking much more at ease again. "I will be… _so_ glad when this is all out of here," she gestured around their overloaded living room.

"It _had_ to rain today, huh?" Lucas tried to sound cheerful, but Maya just squinted at him.

Tomorrow morning, Riley Matthews and Dylan Orlando would be wed, right across the lane, on the Oswalds' land. It was starting to get dark outside, and though the rain had stopped just around dinner time, looking through the living room windows – if they could actually get there – they would see nothing. That was to say, they would see the land, but nothing more. No tents, no flowers, no tables or chairs… They were supposed to have put it all out there today, and what pieces they had to keep for the reception would be stored outside the house. And then the rain had happened.

Maya had spent most of the day reassuring her best friend that this was not 'yet another sign' that she and Dylan were not going to get to be married for some reason. After their original venue had fallen through, and Juliet had regrettably informed them that they had no opening at the ranch that might have accommodated them, and none of the other venues they'd looked into had panned out, holding the wedding here, at their friends' house, appeared like a godsend, a much needed fix. So to have this issue come up just twenty-four hours before the wedding…

"We checked… every last weather forecast we could find for tomorrow, and they all say it's going to be a beautiful, sunny day," Lucas reminded his wife, as she went on playing with the dog, adding to his calm. "Tomorrow morning, we'll get out there early, make sure the ground is dry, and then we'll start setting up for the ceremony, we'll clear… all of this," he looked around. Right now, he was coming to think that it wouldn't be a bad idea for them to go and sit somewhere else. The stacks were making him feel as close to claustrophobic as he could ever claim to have felt. He was sure something would happen and they'd get buried under all those chairs. Maybe thinking the same thing, Maya moved to rise and Lucas joined her. "Let's go upstairs, it's less of a chaos labyrinth there," he suggested.

"Chaos labyrinth," Maya chuckled as they went. "That's giving me ideas for Halloween this year."

"I should have kept my mouth shut, huh?" Lucas asked.

"It might have been a thought."

Riley and Dylan hadn't been the only ones to be concerned when the rain had come along. All their friends and family members were looking forward to this day, were crossing their fingers for them to have the best day, something for them to remember fondly for all the years of their lives. Right here, Maya and Lucas had been double checking, triple, quadruple checking that they had everything ready for the next day. They counted everything, they looked over the floor plans and the seating charts, they had earlier confirmed the caterers and wait staff would be there. They had confirmed also that their out of town guests had arrived and were comfortable in whatever hotel or home they were staying. Nothing would fall through the cracks. The wedding, the party, all of it would go off as it was supposed to.

"You know, we could still go out there," Lucas told Maya. "We _should_."

"We need to be here in the morning, like we said, to set things up," Maya replied, trying to sound more upbeat at the thought than she actually felt. Right now, Riley was at her parents' house, along with some of the girls, while Dylan was back at their house, with some of the guys. Maya and Lucas were supposed to be out there, too, much as their friends had been with them the night before _their_ wedding. If not the rain forcing this curveball on them, they would have gone, but now they had taken on this responsibility by electing to hold the ceremony and reception out here, hadn't they?

"There's nothing that says we wouldn't be able to drive out here and get it done like we said," Lucas told her, shaking his head.

"Isn't there though? We already hit so many bumps in the road, tomorrow is not the time to hit another one. Anyway, she's got Nadine, and Kayla, and Rosa… I had Sophie and Chiara. The important part is they're out there, keeping her from climbing the walls.

"A huge task," Lucas nodded, and Maya laughed.

"The biggest. She's a lot of work," she smirked fondly.

The last few weeks had gone by so fast. Between the trip and the end run to this wedding, they'd barely seen the days go by. Before they'd know it, Lucas would be starting his last year of school, while Maya would be kicking off her second one as a teacher. Of the two, they both had plenty to be excited about, but it was hard to top Maya's. New students… and returning students… There was no wrong way to go, was there?

Between all the wedding woes, they'd had plenty other ups and downs… ups and sideways… On the one hand, Sam had returned from Tucson, as promised, the day before the twins' birthday party. They had cornered him, right at the start of their time in Hawaii, once they'd discovered that he was headed to see his family in Arizona. They wanted to make sure he would be at their birthday. He vowed to be there, and also that he would give them something to make up for it if he wasn't. That had really put Nellie and Gracie in a place of indecision. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he missed it, right? Family was important and all that.

It had done Sam some good to be with his parents and younger siblings for a few days out at their house. When he'd come back to Austin, back to Maya and Lucas' house, he'd looked so cheerful, maybe too much so. Neither one of them could be fooled by this, but then they weren't sure how to confront him about it. Not once, on the first days after his return did Cecilia's name come up. Not once. For a guy who had been going around for nearly three years somehow bringing her up at least once a day, it was about as transparent as if he'd gone and walked around with a sign on his forehead that said they were no longer together. He hadn't confirmed it, and neither had she, though she had accepted the offer to come by to dinner a couple of times while Sam had been away.

She hadn't come around since he'd returned, naturally, but nothing had stopped Maya or Lucas from understanding that the break had happened. Until one or both of them said something, they didn't know that they could intervene in any way. Maya especially didn't want Cecilia to be under the impression that, if she and Sam were no longer together, she was no longer welcome or that she could no longer call on her for any one thing or another that she'd need her for.

The one time they'd heard her mentioned since Sam's return, of all places, was at the Hunter house, the day of the twins' birthday party. When Maya and Lucas had arrived to greet the newly 'upgraded' nine-year-olds, they had been shown the presents Cecilia had dropped off the day before, with apologies for not being able to make the party as she'd been meant to. Neither Nellie nor Gracie seemed particularly aware of the underlying situation, and it left their big sister to think that whatever Sam and Cecilia had discussed that one morning in the elder Friars' hotel room, this had been part of it. They would keep this secret for a while, so not to ruin the vacation, but also the girls' party, and maybe even the wedding. As far as they'd heard, Cecilia was supposed to be there tomorrow. Was this the last hurdle? Would they share the news after that?

Relationship troubles aside, the birthday party had been a colorfully messy and wonderful day. Zay had practically been holding court, much to the kids' amusement. The twins and their classmates would all be in the fourth grade this fall, which meant many of them would find themselves in Mr. Babineaux' class. It was the perfect occasion for him to get to know his future students, even though Nadine and Maya both would point out that he wasn't 'on the clock.' Even if he'd played it cool, it probably would have ended up the same way. He had such a way with these kids, and once the twins had told their friends all about how they'd known the fourth grade teacher their whole lives, they had been inevitably curious.

"Let's maybe bring the dogs up here with us and shut the door tonight?" Maya turned to Lucas, after she'd caught Archer and kept him from skittering off. "Last thing we need is any of them putting their noses and their little paws where they could get hurt… or break something," she spoke directly at the dog in a cajoling tone. Archer played innocent, like he'd completely forgotten about the earlier incident.

"Probably a good idea," Lucas had to agree.

They would be turning in early, some might say ridiculously so. But then they couldn't think of a worthier reason. The earlier they slept, the earlier they'd rise, and then they'd be getting the ball rolling for Riley and Dylan.

When they were finally lying down, Maya found that she really had butterflies in her stomach. It wasn't even her wedding, but then she guessed she'd feel the same whenever any of her siblings would get married. Riley… She had been her very first sister, before any of the others, and she would not forget it, not now of all times. And then Lucas… He had some other thoughts swirling through his head. Of all things, he thought about Dylan's mother, his birth mother. He wondered if his friend would feel her absence tomorrow, as he stood before his family and friends. Whatever came, he'd have to know that his friends would all be there around him, all of them filled with so much love for him, maybe enough to fill the void.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	283. Their Celebration of Morning

October 9th 2020

_Chapter 283  
Their Celebration of Morning_

"Looks good, right?" Maya breathed out. Sitting at the back of the rows of chairs now laid out on the Oswalds' land, with her husband to one side and her brother to the other, she was unsure of how she felt. In many ways, she felt exhausted, which was not encouraging when it was barely seven in the morning, but then she was also very energized, and that made total sense. Her best friend, her first friend, was getting married today.

"It looks great," Lucas promised with great confidence as he looked to what nearly an hour and a half had created. They had transformed the bare space into the perfect spot, welcoming and magical, for Riley and Dylan to exchange their vows before family and friends. They had also gotten everything for the reception out of the house, ready to be deployed in the swap that would follow the ceremony, returning their home to a more ordered and breathable state. Now, they could face the day. "They're going to love it."

"Aren't you guys supposed to go and get them now?" Sam asked, after a beat of silence. Maya and Lucas turned to one another for a moment and soon scurried back to the house.

"Wait, hey, hold on," Lucas called to his wife as she moved to get into the minivan. Maya spun back around, like all she wanted to do was to drive off and get to the Matthews house. But then she looked at him and it was clear what he'd called her back for. She smiled, moving up to kiss him. "Keep me posted?" Lucas smiled back.

"Aye, aye, Captain."

"I'm a Captain now?" he called after her as she climbed into the driver's seat, laughing.

She had already packed her bags into the minivan before they started moving things out across the lane. She'd had a feeling that she'd possibly end up hurrying out to meet Riley and the others, and it really would not have done for her to forget anything. Riley was getting ready at her parents' house, as was Maya, as were the other bridesmaids, while Dylan would be getting ready back at the house with Lucas. As ever, it was hard to stick to one side when two of her friends were getting married. As much as she wanted to be with Riley in the next little while, wanted to see her get ready, all of it, she did wish she could also see how Dylan was doing. It would be the one compromise then that Lucas could recount the whole thing to her later on.

"Hey, good morning," Maya grinned when the door to the Matthews home was opened by a tuxedo-wearing four-year-old Hunter Matthews. He was so cute, it was impossible to do anything but smile from ear to ear. "Looking good, bud," she complimented him, and he gave his best smile. It reminded Maya very much of Riley when they were both little, and she had a feeling that today would just keep doing that to her, keep prodding at her mind, her memories. She imagined Riley went through the same thing the previous summer.

"Oh, good, you're here," Nadine appeared, coming down the stairs like she had thought 'please let that be her.'

"That bad?" Maya asked, as Hunter dashed off to go and tell his mother that she was there.

"Not to speak ill, but the whole family is a bit nuts right now," Nadine sighed. Maya had no trouble believing this. For having known them as long as she had, their eldest child, their one girl, getting married, would be enough to send Cory and Topanga to reach heights unparalleled of… frenzy.

"Okay, okay," Maya considered this for a moment. "Who else is here? Is my dad here?"

"On his way, last I heard," Nadine shook her head.

"What about Eric, is he here? Or Morgan? Josh?"

"Yes, yes, and out on an errand," Nadine counted off, and Maya guessed that she'd had the same thought as she did, dispatching them to help get the parents to calm down so they could focus on Riley.

"Okay, let's go," she pointed up the stairs, and off they went. "No one in the bathroom right now? I think I need to shower first. All that moving around…" she fanned herself.

"You should probably go right now then. Cristela will be here soon," Nadine reported. When it had been decided that Riley wanted to do her whole preparation right at her parents' house, they had recruited Asher and Joey's cousin, Nando's daughter, to come and do their hair. The hairdresser, who had known most of them since they were teens and would have been in attendance either way, had been happy to do it. "Just, you know, go say hi first, do your thing with the bride."

Maya hadn't been sure what to expect in going to find Riley this morning. Oh, she had plenty of ideas of how much her best friend would be freaking out right now, but who was to say which one would actually come true?

Though she had not lived here in seven years, she still had a bedroom at her parents' house. There had been some talk of giving the space over to Hunter when he'd been born, but August had asked his parents if they might put him in _his_ room, to share with him. He would share the space with his little brother, and once he left home for college, well, he could change the place and have it all to himself. August just wanted this chance to be close with his brother, for how long he'd hoped for one. From what Maya had heard in conversations with her fellow teacher, she had a feeling that Cory and Topanga had been as touched for their son's choice as they had seen the benefit in that he'd never go and bring a girl back there with a toddler hanging around.

"Hey, Mrs. Friar!" a cheerful voice greeted Maya when she got to the top of the stairs, and it startled her to find Milena Janacek, all dressed and ready for this wedding, clearly.

"What are you doing here this early?" Maya couldn't help but ask, smiling along. She'd known already that August had invited her as his date, their first 'official outing' as boyfriend and girlfriend, but it _was_ barely seven thirty.

"Oh, well, August and I were talking last night, and he wanted to know how early I could come. I told him seven," Milena reported. "He went with his uncle to get breakfast. I took care of getting Hunter ready. Isn't he cute?"

"Yes, very," Maya agreed. The girl looked so happy to be here, to be involved on this day of all days, and it reminded Maya of those early days when she'd started dating Lucas, how much being around his family as his girlfriend felt so evolved from being around them as his friend. "I need to go see about a bride," she pointed down the hall, and Milena stepped aside with an understanding nod.

As she couldn't put on her dress until after her hair was done, the first step in Riley's transformation had everything to do with nails. Kayla was doing her fingernails while Rosa was seeing to her toenails. Possibly, the plan had been to get her in a position where she'd have no choice but to sit, and relax a bit, rather than to move around so much. Even then, she looked like she'd been trying to make a break for it every few seconds since they'd gotten her to sit, only to remember she couldn't and sinking back in her chair again. At the sight of her best friend coming into the room…

"Help me," Riley moved, saw the looks Kayla and Rosa gave her, and sat back with a sigh. Maya set her bags down before moving to stand behind Riley's chair, hugging her as best she could without getting in the way of their friends' work.

"How's this?" she asked. Riley smiled.

"Good," she declared. "I'm so glad you're here…"

"I have to go shower now, but I'll be back quick, I promise. Look, look," she pulled out her phone, holding it in front of Riley for her to see the photos of the Oswalds' land. The bride gasped, shedding immediate tears, good, happy ones. "Good?" Maya asked.

"It's perfect… yes," Riley promised, while Maya found a tissue to dab at her face, seeing as her hands were indisposed. "Thanks," Riley laughed.

By the time she got out of the shower, Cristela Garcia had arrived and was working on the mother of the bride, and the manicure/pedicure portion of Riley's preparation was over. She was still sitting in her room, waiting for it all to dry properly. Possibly, she'd been waiting on her best friend's return.

"You weren't nervous like this when _you_ were going to get married," Riley pointed out. "Is it bad that I am?"

"Riley Matthews being chill on her wedding day? _That_ would be weird," Maya assured her with a shake of the head, sitting on the edge of the bed. Riley couldn't have kept from smiling at this. "No, you're right on track. Just, you know, keep breathing," she mimed, and Riley indulged her. "Did you sleep okay?"

"Woke up a bunch of times. Didn't feel the same without Dylan there," Riley shrugged.

"Yeah, sounds about right," Maya nodded, recalling the night before _her_ wedding. All it really got her was this thought of how in a few hours' time they would both of them be married women. They'd been little girls just a minute ago, hadn't they? This notion seemed to have been on Riley's mind, too, as she stared back at her with a thoughtful little smile.

"We wouldn't be here today if you hadn't climbed in my window that day." Maya chuckled.

"Best decision I ever made," she told her, making Riley start to go misty-eyed all over again. "We are really going to have to be careful once we get your makeup on," Maya stood and moved over to dry her face again, renewing her best friend's laughter. "I might have gotten you here, but the rest is all you and Dylan, yeah?"

"Yeah," Riley nodded in promise. When Maya's phone chirped, she went to grab it from her bag. "Is that Lucas? Is it about Dylan?" Riley asked at once. Maya pointed a finger at her. "He can't see me, it's not jinxed," Riley defended.

"Nothing to fret about," Maya shook her head, typing out a reply, sending, and slipping the phone in her robe's pocket. "Just checking in like we promised." Riley kept giving her best pout, and Maya squinted at her. "They're at the house now. And that's all you're getting on that subject. Let them do their guy thing, right now we need to get you ready."

Almost on cue, there was a knock at the door and Cristela came in, asking if Riley was ready to get her hair done.

"Couldn't be more ready, please," Maya practically pulled her across the room.

Hair gave way to makeup, and then there was the dress. For having seen it on her, the first to do so back at the store in Tucson, and then again at the theater when she'd had her fittings, today… Oh, today, with the hair, the makeup, the nails, all the other accents… Now Maya was the one crying happily. She had come so far from the wacky kid singing to herself, the one Maya had discovered on one of her excursions, and as her best friend and matron of honor… She could not have been prouder.

"Your mom is going to lose it when she sees you…" Maya sniffled, then chuckled, as she moved to embrace her. "So will your dad. Oh and Dylan… He won't stand a chance."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	284. Their Celebration of Growth

October 10th 2020

_Chapter 284  
Their Celebration of Growth_

As he'd watched Maya drive off in her minivan, Lucas headed toward his car, pulling out his phone to text Zay and let him know that he was on his way. He would meet the rest of the guys and they would head out for what was getting to feel like the cursory wedding day haircut stop. As he put his phone away again though, he turned to see Sam headed back toward the house from across the lane.

"Going to get ready?" Lucas called after him, and Sam nodded. "Hey, come here a second," Lucas motioned to him. The look on his face had just felt a bit distant from the rest of him, and Lucas could not have felt right to drive off and leave him like this without inquiring. Sam walked up to him, looking very much like he would have rather _not_ deal with this right now but also just didn't know how to convincingly refuse. "You alright?"

"Yeah, I am," Sam nodded. "It's just, you know, it's so early and we did all that," he pointed out to the chairs and the flowers and everything. "Maybe I have time to take a nap or something?"

"Sam…" Lucas held his gaze, and Sam sighed, a dejected sort of head shake showing he hadn't believed this would work anyway, and he should have known better. "You're nervous about seeing her?" Lucas asked, figuring they might as well cut to the chase and he could help his brother get there. Sam gaped now. "Please, of course I know. And Maya, too."

"Right," Sam bowed his head, rubbing at his face for a moment before looking up again.

"What are you afraid of, Sammy?" Lucas slowly asked. Sam received the question, considered it for a moment, and another, and a third.

"I just… I don't know… I don't want to make things worse today, for anyone."

"How would you do that exactly?"

"Well, we could get into a fight, make a scene, and it could be awkward and ruin Riley and Dylan's day. Or… Or I might get carried away by all… all that," he gestured to the altar again. "I could try and make some weird spectacle of myself to win her back. In the moment I might not realize it, but right now I know I'd just do something stupid and she'd never speak to me again. You have to watch me, okay? Promise you won't let me make a fool of myself."

"What are brothers for?" Lucas nodded. "Do you think you _will_ get back together?" He didn't know why he asked, why he felt he needed to know, but once the question was out, the answer felt clear. The look on Sam's face was one of a definitive no. "What happened with you two?"

"I… I told her that I wanted to stay here after next year, when I graduate," Sam confessed, and Lucas blinked in surprise. All this time, he and Maya had been waiting to hear what Sam would do, where he would end up. They'd hoped, selfishly if from a good place in their hearts, that he would stay here in Austin with them, and if not then as close to here as possible. They had kept that hope to themselves, wanting him to make his own choice, without their influence, and now… Oh, Maya would be so happy. And then again…

"I'm guessing she had other ideas?" Lucas asked.

"Literally anywhere but here. And I get that, the same way she gets why I want to stay here. But then once we knew that, we got stuck in this place of 'would I go for her, would she stay for me, could long distance work?' We talked it out, and we came to the decision that it was better to salvage what we could of our relationship. Any other options would have probably made us fight, and we might not have had a chance to be friends at least."

"Right," Lucas could only nod slowly. To look at Sam, it felt like there was so much more to it, but he wasn't ready to share, now if ever. So, he didn't push. "I have your back today, okay?"

"Thanks," Sam gave him a smile.

Lucas left Sam to go and get ready, the better for him to be on hand to receive anything or anyone that might come along before he returned with the groom and some of the groomsmen. He wished he could have stayed with his brother right then, but he also knew he had duties today, ones he had committed to, it felt, even before the engagement had occurred, months ago.

None of them in their group would apply any different kind of feeling, of friendship, to one another depending on how long they had known one another and been friends. But sometimes, it was just hard not to remind themselves of where they had come from, how far they'd gone. And the thing he could not forget was that for about as long as he could remember it had been him, and Zay, and Asher, and… Dylan. They had seen so much together, they were… his first brothers. And now the last of them was about to tie the knot, so, yeah… He was feeling a lot for him.

Arriving at Dylan and Riley's house, he pulled out his keys and let himself in. By the sound of things, he probably did the right thing, as the bell might not have been heard. The only one who looked aware of his arrival was Door the dog, who came yapping up to him. Lucas smiled as he picked her up. All their dogs, Coraline's litter, had their own sort of looks, but it still felt clear that they were brothers and sisters. Once in a while they'd manage to get several of them together again, and nothing beat seeing them find each other again.

In the kitchen, the guys, which presently counted Dylan, Asher, Ray, Zay, and big brother Kyle Orlando, were all talking over one another. They were arguing… over basketball. Specifically, they were recounting their days back on the high school team, and who had the better run, Kyle's team or theirs. It was definitely an uneven match, with the older Orlando son having no one in his camp against the other four, but none of them seemed to mind this. They were all dressed to go, though not for the wedding yet, as their suits were back at the house on the lane.

When they noticed him standing there, the guys quickly insisted for him to pull up a chair and put in his vote: who had the best team? Lucas smiled, not even needing to think about it.

"The girls from our year." The guys stared back at him for a moment, like he'd betrayed them, but then almost just as quick were left to have to agree with him. It was the honest truth.

Once the conversation had been cut short with Lucas' sorting them out in five words, everyone had started to pick up after their breakfast dishes before getting everything they needed to bring for that day, leaving Dylan to sit out as long as he could, what with this being his and Riley's day. Now that he was just sitting there though, it left Lucas with the impression that the basketball conversation had been started with the sole purpose of keeping his mind occupied in some way that would not involve them going out to shoot the ball around for a while. Knowing him, Dylan would have found a way to get hurt, and then they would have been in big trouble with their bride.

"Is everything set back there?" Dylan looked up to Lucas with big, curious eyes.

"Yeah, it's just like we said it would be," Lucas promised him. "You'll see."

"Okay… good…" Dylan quietly told himself. "Maya, she's…"

"On her way to the Matthews' house, last I heard," Lucas replied. It was hard not to respond to his face's urge to smile, to laugh, as he took in his friend's whole demeanor in that moment. It almost felt like a part of him had taken on Riley's persona, the better to have her near when she couldn't be there for real. Lucas understood that feeling very much, how could he not? He'd gone through the same thing the year before.

"Okay… okay…" Dylan replied, sounding as he'd done the last time he spoke.

"Do you know how much you'll get cut?" Lucas asked him, trying to find something to keep him from spiraling in pre-wedding jitters. Dylan's hair had been short a while, though in the last year his longer hair had made something of a comeback. As they'd found, it really didn't take much for it to grow back, and though it had not gone as long as it had once been, it was really getting on that way.

"Oh, well, Riley and I talked about it, but she said she'd be happy with it either way. And me, well, I kind of feel the same. So I haven't decided. What do you think I should do?" Dylan asked, as he stood and the two of them made their way out to the car, so they and the others could head out.

"Well… I guess you can ask yourself if you were planning to cut it off anytime soon?" By the look on his face, Dylan only had to think of it for a moment before he had his answer. After this, he let out a breath.

"I don't know why I'm nervous like this. Is it bad?"

"No," Lucas chuckled. "Comes with the territory. It's the biggest thing we've done in our lives at this point, and we put so much pressure on ourselves to get it right, and then when we need each other the most, we're not actually with each other. But hey, ask any of us here, and we'll tell you the same thing. It's going to flip around so fast, the second you see her out there," Lucas smiled, especially at the way this notion got his friend's own happiness to rise up.

Once they were driving off, with Zay at the wheel, while Asher and Ray were checking up on Sophie and the imminently due Chiara as they drove in from Houston, Lucas did some texting of his own.

_Lucas: How's it going out there? My guy is feeling it right now.  
__Maya: It's a mad house out here. Reinforcements on their way. 366!_

Lucas smiled when her reply came in. As much as today was all about Dylan and Riley, about getting them to the altar in the way they wanted to be, about witnessing their union and then celebrating it, Lucas couldn't pretend as though being here today wouldn't be reminding him of the day he had married Maya, just a little over a year ago. He even found himself thinking of the day Zay and Nadine had been married, three years prior, which was also the day he and Maya had been engaged. All those memories swirling through his head were keeping him as energized in looking to this day as the thought of their friends getting married did. As much as it had come hand in hand with Riley and Dylan's freaking out and then with his and Maya's house being overrun with tables and chairs and decorations, Lucas was actually really glad that the wedding would be happening where it would. Each of them had chosen one place or another, and it had felt right to each of them. For Riley and Dylan to be married in this place with so much connecting to who they were and how they'd been brought together, a place out in the open, with the August sun shining on them… They couldn't have hoped for more.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	285. Their Celebration of Love

October 11th 2020

_Chapter 285  
Their Celebration of Love_

_Maya: Where is he now?  
__Lucas: I have him up in the attic.  
__Maya: Good. Keep him away from the windows until I give you the signal._

"She's here?" Dylan asked, and Lucas responded by taking him by the shoulders and physically moving him to the center of the attic floor, well away from being able to see outside. It was sort of amazing how he could look so grown up and childishly innocent at the same time. The suit and the newly shortened hair did for the first part, which his buoyant sort of anticipation to see his soon-to-be-wife did for the other.

"Why don't I go ahead and keep an eye?" Ray spoke with a smile, tapping his husband's shoulder while leaving him along with the other three. Now it was them… Dylan surrounded by his oldest friends, by Asher, and Lucas, and Zay. The four men looked to one another, and they saw themselves as they were and as they had once been. All these years and they were still inseparable.

Down below, the rented car had made quite an impression as it rolled up the lane. It had been a gift of the father of the bride, allowing her to make that entrance and ensuring that all the guests already gathered would know: she was arriving. They all looked on, no doubt eager to see the bride in her dress. They didn't get to see nearly as much as they might have liked, not yet, just a glimpse as she exited out the other side and was kept obscured on her way into the house.

"I'll lead the way, make sure there's no one…" Maya turned to Riley as she was helped with her dress going up the porch steps by her mother. They stalled when they heard feet on the steps, only to relax again when they saw it was only Ray.

"Wow…" he blinked and smiled. Maya pointed a finger at him like 'you scared me, don't do that.' "Sorry, sorry, I just figured I'd give the ninja turtles a moment up there," Ray explained, gaining himself a snort and a retraction of the pointed finger. "And I wanted to go and check on Chiara, see if she needed anything. Grabbing some water and I'm out of your hair, I promise."

"Go for it. Is the trap shut?" Maya asked. Ray shook his head. "Okay, that's fine, I got it. Come on," she turned to Riley and Topanga, and off they were.

Maya went quickly ahead of the other two, which was really not too hard when Riley's skirts slowed her ascent as they did. Reaching the open trap, Maya looked back the way she'd come before turning her eyes up to the hole leading into the attic. She was afforded an unexpected stare with her husband, as Lucas at that moment had been coming to peer down into the hall for the moment when the way would be cleared.

_"No peeking,"_ Maya signed with a teasing smile. Lucas chuckled, signing back that he wouldn't before taking a few emphatic steps back. Once he'd gone, Maya turned back and waved for Riley and her mother to head into hers and Lucas' room. They did as told, careful not to get caught up in the space between the lowered steps and the wall. It wasn't usually a tight squeeze, but with that dress… After they'd all made it into the room, Maya shut the door.

"They're going down, right?" Riley asked her.

"Uh…" Maya started, then paused, listening. They could hear the steps, a few pairs of feet coming down from above. "That'll be them," she raised her finger to the ceiling. "We'll just give them a minute."

"Okay," Riley nodded, taking a deep breath and another. She looked to her mother, and as nervous as she was before, as much as they both were, it really felt as though they had calmed down now that they had come to this point. Now it was all about going out there, the big moment, and Riley had never been readier for it, so Topanga was, too.

The turn had started to happen once she'd slipped on the dress, once all the little things had come together and she was finally set to make her walk down the aisle. She was exactly as she'd hoped to be, probably more in fact. She'd already set several of her family and her friends crying and reaching to contain any possible damage to their makeup, not the least of which was her best friend. The dress had looked marvelous on her back in the shop in Tucson, but now… Oh, it was definitely made for her.

Once the guys were good and gone, Maya had stepped out into the hall, leaving mother and daughter to have a moment to talk, the last chat before Riley would be married. Maya had patiently kept guard and was so caught up in watching for anyone coming up that she was startled when the door opened behind her and there stood Topanga. She had definitely cried in there, but she was pulling herself together.

"Your turn," she said, nodding back to the room. "I'll go get Cory to walk her down when it's time."

"I'll get her down the stairs to you guys," Maya vowed before going into the room and shutting the door again. Riley sat there on the edge of the bed, with her eyes closed, hands carefully laid in her lap and… "What are you playing now?" Maya asked with a smirk, realizing she was tapping away at invisible keys as though on stage, or back in the Hex, rehearsing.

"I don't know, actually," Riley told her, eyes still closed. "I think it sounds good though," she smiled. Her hands stalling in her lap, she opened her eyes, sensing Maya standing just in front of her. "I'm getting married today," she spoke quietly.

"You're getting married in five minutes now," Maya pointed out, stealing a look at her alarm clock behind her friend. "Seven minutes," she amended. Riley took a deep breath, and Maya came to sit next to her. "The last minutes are just the worst," she sympathized. Riley nodded. "Believe me, as soon as you get out there though, you won't remember any of this."

"No, but I will," Riley told her. "I'll remember this. You and me." Maya smiled. Alright, she almost cried again, taken with emotions over her friend, her best friend, her first sister, sitting with her like this.

"Who would have thought? Right?"

"I did. I hoped," Riley smiled back, and Maya pulled her into a careful hug, minding her hair and makeup, her dress…

"Okay," Maya breathed deep now as she pulled back. "We need to get you down there. Can't keep your groom waiting."

Managing the back of the bride's dress, Maya followed Riley down the stairs, finding Cory Matthews ready and waiting for his daughter so he might walk her down the aisle. She could have tried to catch his eye, to give him a bit of 'pull yourself together, Matthews,' but then he only had eyes for his girl. He wasn't frantic anymore, no, but oh how proud he looked, and he was fighting a teetering battle against happy tears. When he'd seen her all done up like this, back at his house, it had taken so much willpower for him not to just… pass out, or burst out, like he'd known all along that she was getting married, but now it finally hit him properly and squarely that his little girl was not so little anymore.

"Handoff completed," Maya nodded as she and Riley reached Cory. "I'll leave you to it, I need to get out there and… yeah, okay…" she headed out to find Asher, her partner heading up the aisle, as best man and matron of honor.

"Everything alright in there?" Lucas asked when she passed in front of him where Asher waited. Next to her husband stood Riley's aunt, Morgan Matthews, who passed Maya her flowers.

"Thanks," Maya tipped her head to her before looking to Lucas. "Yeah, all good, they're just waiting for their cue. How about here?" she asked, looking around. She hadn't been able to get much of a look at the guests from the moment she had arrived with Riley at the house, and without a list to check off it was hard to say for sure, but it did look like everyone was present and accounted for.

"All good, too, waiting also," Lucas replied, just as the first notes were heard and everyone came to attention. This was it. "Breathe," Lucas whispered to Maya, who squinted at him before looking to Asher. He smiled, offering his arm.

"So does that mean they're off our hands now?" he joked quietly when they could finally start to walk. Maya swallowed back a laugh.

"No, pretty sure we're stuck with them forever, too," she whispered back of her best friend and his.

"Good to hear."

Walking up the aisle, all the bridesmaids dipped their bouquets to the side, that they might bump theirs with the one held by Chiara where she sat. There had been no way around the wedding landing at a point where she would have been very near to delivery and better off keeping to a chair, but that did not rob her of her earned status as bridesmaid. She was dressed in the same 'shades of purple' theme as the rest of them, and she had her flowers. The bouquet bumps had not been planned, but once Maya did it, sharing a smile with her, Morgan did it behind her, and then Nadine, and Sophie, and so on, all the way, eventually, to Riley herself.

There was no need for anyone to wonder what was the exact moment when Dylan saw her. It was right there on his face, just as it had to be on hers, just as it had to have been on countless brides and grooms before them and would be with countless more after them. As far as Dylan was concerned, now, it wasn't actually so many tears, though there were a few of those. No, when Dylan saw Riley coming, he just… smiled… He smiled so bright as to light the city, and anyone looking at him would know, he had never been quite so happy as he was in this exact moment.

Lucas could tell, even as he could only see the back of his wife's head when they walked, that she was having to resist turning her head to see Riley as they all advanced. Sure, the whole ceremony was being sufficiently documented that she'd get to see it in pictures and videos from several angles in due time, but it didn't stop her curiosity. When they got to the point where they _could_ turn around, she looked so happy for her best friend that he couldn't even tease her by the time their eyes met

It seemed only fair, as one had officiated the other's daughter's wedding, that the favor be returned, and so it was Shawn Hunter who waited at the altar to receive Riley Matthews and Dylan Orlando. He looked just as thrilled to be here as Cory had done the summer before, in uniting Maya and Lucas.

The vows were spoken, a representation of the bride and groom in who they had been together, from strangers, to friends, to lovers. It had been an easy match to find, for as long as they had been an item, and to hear them now, it was impossible to imagine them ever ending up anywhere than right here and now, promising their eternal love to one another. As heartbroken as they had been to lose their initial venue, both Riley and Dylan would later profess how glad they were that it all worked out the way it did. Standing there in the sunlight, they had become husband and wife on such a beautiful summer's day

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	286. Their Celebration of Family

October 12th 2020

_Chapter 286  
Their Celebration of Family_

After Riley and Dylan had been pronounced as married, and after they'd disappeared off into the house, most everyone outside was allowed to wander off a while, mingling and chatting amongst themselves. Maya and Lucas, on the other hand, had work to do, and that was what they had to focus on before any amount of mingling could occur on their part. They had to transform the Oswalds' land from an altar with rows upon rows of chairs to a tent, and a floor, and tables, and chairs, and table settings, a stage, instruments… They had help.

"This is the worst part right here. Taking all the chairs away when we'll just be bringing them back again in a bit," Zay huffed as he carried a stack of chairs aside, even as Lucas carried one of his own.

"Please, this is the easy part," Lucas chuckled.

"Don't think I haven't noticed you're carrying almost twice as many in one go as I am. I'd call that showing off if it didn't mean less for me to carry," Zay went on, and Lucas just grinned. Alright, maybe, _maybe_ he was showing off a little… but it was definitely not for his best friend's benefit, at least not the one from Texas. His best friend from New York on the other hand…

"Maya," Sam called to his sister, and she blinked, turning back to look at him with a face which felt much too intent on appearing innocent.

"What? What?" she asked. Sam looked to where she'd been looking for a moment before turning back to his sister with a roll of the eyes. "Don't judge me, I'm allowed," Maya lifted her chin. Remembering the task at hand, she continued stacking the chairs.

As was to be expected, clearing out of 'ceremony mode' took significantly less time and effort than setting up 'reception mode.' The floor came together first, the better for the tables to start being moved in and placed where they belonged according to the seating chart while the tent was being raised. By the time they had gotten everything ready to welcome guests and receive the day's most honored couple, ninety minutes had gone by. Finally, after everyone had been called to take their seats, Riley and Dylan had made their return, to rousing cheers from their people. Having taken Maya's advice, after the dress had been selected back in Arizona, Riley had changed into a second, more party manageable dress. This one had been bought for her from her future mother-in-law, Dylan's stepmother.

Even after all these years, Lucas and Maya would look upon the woman in different ways. To Lucas, it was difficult not to look at her and remember how she had shown discomfort over having him at the Orlando house after his suspension from school. Over time, she had changed her tune, of course, and she had expressed this regret to him personally. Still, he couldn't shake those memories of her standing at the window, looking out at him and the others whenever they'd be playing basketball, like she was making sure he wouldn't act out.

Meanwhile, Maya remembered something else entirely. For her, the thing she'd recall every time she looked at the woman was the night, New Year's Eve, when Dylan had injured himself and they'd all had to take him to the hospital. She remembered coming across her in a hall and seeing how concerned she was for her stepson. She'd tried to reassure her, and it had worked. From then on, Maya had always been held in good standings with her. Sometimes she had to wonder if her presence had helped sway the woman's opinions of Lucas.

There was no division in any feelings toward Mr. Orlando. Dylan's father was basically an older, taller, _barely_ more serious version of his younger son. One could suspect he had been even more like Dylan back in the day, but then being left to look after two boys on his own when his first wife had gone away had forced him to surrender some of his natural joy. Dylan would say that he hadn't noticed it so much himself back then, but looking back on it with the mind of an adult, everything had been forced into sharp detail. He could not have admired his father more than he did now.

No one appeared to have taken a shine to him more than Hunter Matthews. Once he'd been told that Dylan marrying his big sister meant that the two of them were basically going to be brothers, the four-year-old had taken the next logical step and decided that this meant Kyle Orlando was also his brother, and Mr. and Mrs. Orlando were like another set of parents for him. When he'd asked them, all four mothers and fathers, if this was true, at a dinner one night when they'd all been at the Matthews house, none of them had had the heart to question his logic, so that was that. Hunter particularly loved his other dad, who in turn seemed to regain some of that lost jolliness whenever he was around the boy. Riley and Dylan would look at the two of them together, and anyone looking at _them_ would see dreams of grandchildren for the man to cherish as he did the Matthews boy.

"Alright, where are you sitting?" Mr. Orlando was asking as he went by, with the small tuxedoed boy sitting confidently on his shoulders. Hunter scanned the room before proclaiming he had no idea. "Right, we'll have to see about those name cards," Mr. Orlando lifted his hands to secure the boy on his shoulders while he tipped forward and back again to read some of them. This made Hunter giggle every time. It also made Lucas and Maya laugh, though maybe for their unseen tail. The other four-year-old, three months Hunter's junior, Haley, was seeing this whole maneuver like some sort of game, and she looked keen on getting to play it, too.

"Maybe we should get her," Lucas suggested. Off Maya's look, he went on. "If that was Dylan up there, what would he do the moment he saw Haley?"

"He'd pick her up, too," Maya replied at once, which was as good as answering her previous question. As well as he faired with one small child balanced up there, Mr. Orlando – or specifically Mr. Orlando's back – would not respond so well. He had been a basketball player, like both of his sons, had been on his way to a professional career up until a major injury had sidelined him and killed any future prospects. But then he'd met the woman he would marry, who would give him his sons, his pride and joy, so on the whole he'd come out on top. It wouldn't feel like that if he found himself holding up but Hunter and Haley at once, neither child understanding the concept of old injuries flaring up. "Okay, go, go, go," Maya practically pushed Lucas off, and he went at once, snatching Haley into the air. The girl squealed from surprise, only to smile at the sight of her brother-in-law.

"Do you remember when me and her got married?" Lucas asked as he carried her back to Maya, nodding to his wife. Haley looked from one to the other, and she beamed all at once, like she'd just remembered how she would crawl under their table, present Maya with a bread roll, and be lifted over the table into Hank Hillard's ready arms, a maneuver she then repeated several times over the night. "I think maybe this year we'll need a different game, yeah?"

"What game?" Haley asked at once. Lucas turned to Maya for assistance.

"Well, later, when people start to dance out there, I'm going to be on the stage, with the band, so I won't be able to dance. I would love it if you could take my spot," Maya nodded back to Lucas, who beamed at once. "If that's okay with you, of course," she asked him, for Haley's benefit.

"It would be my honor, Miss Hunter," he told the girl, with his most hat-tipping voice. Haley was sold, and as they'd come to hear from them, she'd spend the better part of the dinner asking Shawn and Katy if it was time to go dance yet.

Meanwhile, the two of them were sitting at the large table, with the bride and groom, and their families, and Asher and Ray. It was weird – a good weird – to consider how many of them had gotten married over the last three years. It made it all feel as though the events were one big night, loosely connected across time, from Zay and Nadine on one end down to Riley and Dylan on this one. They had to venture Kayla and Will would be next.

"Hey," Maya nudged at Cory's arm. He was sitting next to her, two seats away from Riley. Ever since they'd taken their seats here, he'd been stealing looks over to his daughter and his new son-in-law so often as to make it feel like he might as well have just kept on staring uninterrupted. Now, he turned to look back at his colleague/daughter's childhood best friend. "Doing alright there?" she asked him, nodding over to Riley and Dylan.

"Oh, yeah, of course," he nodded at once, one might say confidently.

In the last year, with them seeing each other practically every day up at the high school, seeing each other not as teacher and student but teacher and fellow teacher, it really felt as though she had gotten to know him better than she'd ever known him before. For years he had just been her friend's father, and then he'd become her teacher, and her former teacher. Each of those titles had continued to keep them on two different levels, one above and one below. To now find herself sharing that higher level with him, she was not surprised for his silliness – she'd known about that long ago – or any of the qualities she'd known in him from sitting in his class. But she'd found that he had earned every single accolade she'd given him, back when she used to look up to him. He had taught her so much, had even set her on the path to becoming a teacher herself, and underneath it all his humanity shone through like nothing else. Now, after being Riley's father, and her teacher, and her former teacher, and her colleague, she was finding he might also have been her friend. And he might have seen it, too.

"One day, you'll have children of your own," Cory told her with a humble smile. "And if you find yourself at a table like this, watching them in this moment in their lives…"

"I know," Maya nodded, chuckled. "I honestly don't know which one of us will have it harder," she looked back to Lucas, who was busy helping August with his speech.

"I don't see it being an either/or sort of thing," Cory pointed out, discreetly tipping his head to Topanga, who was busy with Hunter after he'd come inquiring after a vegetable in his plate which he did not know and wouldn't dare taste until she told him what it was.

"Alright, that's fair," Maya laughed.

Topanga Matthews could be the most level-headed in her household like she could be queen of the frenzy, depending on the occasion. That morning, when Maya had first seen her back at the house, she had definitely been locked firmly on the latter side. She'd become convinced for a moment that she'd found a fault in Riley's dress and had been ready to rain litigation on whoever had been in charge of alterations and had either missed it or caused it. It had taken Morgan Matthews stepping in and pointing out that there was in fact no fault before Topanga allowed the storm clouds to part again.

For a moment, Maya tried to think what it would be like, some twenty-something years in the future, when she would find herself as a mother of a bride or groom. She knew herself well enough to guess how this might end, so it was just as well that it would be a long, long time before she had to find out for certain.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	287. Their Celebration of Friends

October 13th 2020

_Chapter 287  
Their Celebration of Friends_

Once dinner had ended, the party could finally and properly begin. It kicked off, naturally, with Cory Matthews taking his newly wedded daughter on to the dance floor. Many in attendance lost their battle with maintaining a dry eye as they looked on. Slowly but surely, the dance floor opened to more pairings, until they could all get their turn. The band was on stage from the top, playing and singing for their bandmate as she was led along by her father, and her new husband, and so many others.

Maya had taken out her father's guitar for this. It just felt right for the occasion. And as often as she had been on stages over the years, she had to say occasions like this one held a special place for her. Oh, nothing could compare performing to a crowd of hundreds of people, but then more often than not they would just be countless unknown faces, and it would be more about the energy they shared than anything else. But at a wedding, at her friends' wedding especially, it was just something else. She could look on to those people on the dance floor and beyond and know exactly who they were, and she could enjoy watching them as they moved along.

She looked to her best friend, her oldest friend, and she saw so much happiness radiating off of her, happiness now and not a drop of concern anymore. The anticipation was so heavy, in those last hours before the wedding, and Maya understood exactly how that felt, just as she understood now the flood of joy, and love… Right now, Riley probably felt like she had superpowers.

Maya also had to work not to let her smirk press into her performance, as she spotted Lucas being more or less dragged on to the dance floor by his young sister-in-law. He _had_ promised her this, hadn't he? He would be a man of his word. When they found an empty spot to stand, Lucas crouched forward to tell Haley something, and the four-year-old nodded before holding out her hands to him. He lifted her very carefully until her small feet came to rest on top of his larger, adult-size feet. This was not the first time Haley had exercised this maneuver, and she was agile enough to hold on as Lucas started to move and lead her in this careful dance. To watch the two of them, it made Maya want to play nothing but songs for them to dance to.

Lucas would carry on dancing with his sister-in-law until she'd be called upon by Hunter Matthews. The two of them had been easy friends from the start, having grown together over the four short years of their lives so far, which could only make their respective parents very happy to see. Here, Lucas had barely set the girl down that she and the Matthews boy were dashing off on some unknown adventure together.

From there, as he found himself still minus his wife and favorite dance partner, Lucas went seeking another. Much as he had promised Haley Hunter that the two of them would dance, he had also made promises to other people. He'd promised Sam that he'd keep an eye on him as he dealt with being around Cecilia tonight while trying not to make any sort of scene. So far, he'd been doing well enough on his own. Lucas had heard how Cecilia had come along, dropped off by her father, and from there had been left to realize that even _he_ was not yet aware of his daughter's breakup with her boyfriend. Why she chose not to tell him, Lucas couldn't say, but he trusted the reason had been a valid one. Now as to the matter of Sam…

They were still playing up as though they were together, for most people, and though they managed to fool most people, for those who knew what was really going on… It bordered on painful to watch. They were going through the motions, as though they were still so happy together, so in love, when in reality they didn't know how to be with each other except to hide behind fake smiles. Lucas could see them, and up on the stage Maya did, too, and all they saw was a deep sadness in them, mourning this relationship which had meant so much to them. It really was over.

"Lucas!" a voice pulled him from his thoughts, and he turned to find its source. He eventually found Chiara waving her arm at him from where she sat, with Sophie, Bishop, and Leona. He smiled, moving toward their table.

"Hey, you alright? Do you need anything?" he asked, earning a look from Sophie as though to remind him that she was right there and could look to the needs of her very pregnant wife. Chiara responded to _that_ with a raised finger to her. _Just wait._

"I need you to dance with her," she told Lucas, continuing before Sophie could protest. "She will not leave my side, not one second, and her feet are doing all the dancing under the table where she thinks I can't notice. Please, please take her. I will be here, not alone," she indicated Bishop and Leona, who were both trying not to laugh at how 'affronted' Sophie looked for being called out. Lucas was also reining in a smirk of his own, before holding out his hand to the redhead.

"How about it, Zvolensky?"

"One. _One_ dance," Sophie told him and Chiara in turn. Chiara held up three fingers, reconsidered, added a fourth. "What if he wants to dance with other people?"

"Then he will find you another partner," Chiara told her, turning to Lucas, who gave a nod.

"_Fine_," Sophie sighed dramatically, taking Lucas' hand and letting him lead her away.

"You know, if this keeps up, we could make a tradition of it," he told her, trying to get her to concentrate on having a bit of fun instead of how long it would be before she could go back to the table. Lucas had to stop her from signalling Asher and Ray so _they_ might go back.

"What, you and me dancing at weddings?" Sophie asked. To look at her now, one would likely never know how big of a deal it was that she could do that, just one year prior. "We're running out of single friends," she pointed out.

"We probably won't be around anyway," he nodded, and he realized what he had said – almost said – even as Sophie looked at him, curious.

"What do you mean?" she asked. He had to think of something quick, to redirect them and not blow the secret of the tour with Ree. He went with the first thing that came to mind.

"Just that, if all goes well, I'll be in the same position you are now, and I won't want to leave Maya's side," he smiled, inwardly crossing his fingers. When Sophie smiled back, he relaxed.

"I'll just have to return the favor then."

Lucas and Sophie were still in the middle of their Chiara-appointed dances when the band announced they were leaving the stage and the music became the responsibility of Riley and Dylan's playlist. The group dispersed, most of them going off in search of their significant others. Knowing that Lucas was dancing with Sophie and not wishing to get in the middle of that, Maya followed Isadora. Seeing Sophie out there, she'd known what she wanted to do next. They approached the table where Farkle waited with the kids, and before they could even get there, a small dark-haired girl came dashing toward them, almost bolting to lock her arms around Isadora's legs.

"Oh, I missed you, too," she scooped up the two and a half-year-old Ada, who happily hugged her mother now that she was closer. She would just burrow her face at the crook of her neck, and for how much Isadora used to have to will herself into participating in embraces like this, she never looked so at ease as she did when she had her daughter close like this. "Did you like the music?"

"Uh-huh," Ada nodded emphatically, prodding at her mother's necklace. "I like the singing."

"You hear that?" Isadora turned to her former/forever bandmate, who received this with a bright smile turned to the girl staring back with her father's smile.

"Yes, I do. Thank you very much, Miss Minkus," Maya held out her hand, receiving a determined high five. Moving to the table, she caught Farkle's eye, her old friend so grown, so contented in his growing family. He held six-month-old Bertie in his arms, the boy fussing like he had just been awakened by the music. "Why don't I take these guys for a walk away from the noise while you guys go and dance for a while?" To their credit, Farkle and Isadora knew better than to suggest anything of the 'you don't have to' variety.

So, Bertie was passed into her arms, soon balanced expertly in one, so she might take Ada's hand with the other and lead her away from the party. For such a little kid, with the night sky in full starry darkness, she didn't look the tiniest bit sleepy, something her friends would appreciate being remedied, if she had any hope of sleeping through the night. Once they'd had their turn on the dance floor, Farkle and Isadora were planning to call it a night anyway.

"Bertie's crying?" Ada looked up as they walked.

"He didn't like all the noise, he'll be alright," Maya promised. The girl was still looking up, to the point where she would probably trip and fall if she wasn't careful, so Maya stopped and, minding her dress, she crouched until Ada could get a look of her baby brother. The boy saw her and looked just a bit calmer all at once. "Look at you with the big sister powers," Maya chuckled. To this, Ada gave her most capable rendition of the lullaby she heard her mother sing to Bertie every day. It might not have been the most on pitch or contain all the right words, but the sentiment was there, and the baby certainly responded to it. "You know, I'm always so happy when I get to see you?" Maya whispered, smiling at her friends' daughter.

The girl nodded easily, and the way she stood almost resting her head on her shoulder, she showed how much the feeling was mutual. She so often spoke to 'Aunt Maya' over Skype, and she was overjoyed every time, but when they got to see each other 'in real,' oh… She hadn't let her go for a solid half hour, when they'd come over to the house the first time after arriving from New York.

By the time Farkle and Isadora came seeking their children to head on out to the hotel, Maya was sitting on the porch with them, Bertie asleep in one arm, while her free hand lightly ran through Ada's hair, the girl's sleeping head rested in her lap. They all said their goodnights very quietly, and after the kids had been buckled into their seats in the car, the Minkus family took off. Maya watched them go, and like a wish granted, the car passed by and revealed Lucas, waiting to cross the lane and join her. Maya smiled, meeting him halfway.

"I think I owe you a few dances," she stated.

"More than a few," Lucas agreed, smiling back as he caught the hand she held out and they turned back for the party.

"Okay then, all the dances," Maya nodded. "It's not far to go home, we can stick around long after everyone's left."

"I'm liking this plan a lot."

"I thought you might." They waited a moment before entering the dance floor, watching the newlyweds slow dancing together under the lights. After all the twists and turns, they had made it to this moment, and everything was perfect

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	288. Their Celebration of Life

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

October 14th 2020

_Chapter 288  
Their Celebration of Life_

Though they had not in fact danced the night away once the newlyweds and their guests had cleared out after the reception, Lucas and Maya _had_ seen to it that they enjoyed a brief time swaying under the lights in the tent. The only music they had to accompany them came in the form of crickets, and the wind, and the occasional humming out of one or the other of them. In the end, when the length and activity of the day finally became more of a factor than any desire to keep going, they had retreated to the house. Packing in their pop-up reception hall could wait until morning.

They couldn't say for sure how long they slept. Even if they had fallen asleep the moment they had laid their heads to theirs pillows – which was highly likely – they had not seen the time when they'd gone. Maybe for that, they had forgotten to make sure whether or not they had turned off the alarm they'd set themselves for the morning of the wedding. And in the morning _after_ the wedding, they discovered that they had not turned off the alarm at all.

"No, no way, not doing it," Maya grumbled, while Lucas stretched to grab his phone and turn off the offending sound. Once he did so, he settled back down, only to find a head of blond curls come to thump at his chest, and one arm drape itself around his waist before deciding instead to bend at the elbow, so its hand may grasp to his shoulder. "No sunlight, no deal," Maya yawned, then gave a satisfied hum as Lucas closed his arms around her and bent his head to kiss those curls.

"Go back to sleep," he whispered, she made a noise like 'uh huh' which sounded as though she was already halfway there. A few more seconds and she would reach the other half, while he dragged trails along her back, the better to keep her there until she was properly asleep again.

He had silenced his phone, but in the dim light of those early hours, a phone screen lighting up was hard to miss. It was like a beacon activated, its sole purpose being to be noticed, and though his eyes protested the burst of light, Lucas reached out his hand and did his best to see what it was without disturbing his sleeping wife.

Barely awake as he was, it was reflex more than realization which made him answer the call from Asher.

"Hello?" he whispered. In his sleepy head, his voice sounded so, so loud.

Rare were those calls that came in the night, or the early morning hours in this case, which did not work like a boost of wakefulness, for good or bad. Being told that a close friend and former roommate had gone into labor and was about to have a baby absolutely fell on the side of good.

"Yeah, no, don't even think about it. We'll be there as soon as we can," Lucas told Asher. On the phone, his friend's voice sounded so alert, wired, and it reminded him of when they were kids.

By some chance, rather than to have to drive two hours back home to Houston the night before, the quartet had decided to spend the night in Austin, the guys at the Garcias' and the girls at Diana Zvolensky's house. As it turned out, Chiara had felt the first of what would eventually be confirmed as genuine contractions while they'd still been at the reception. She hadn't mentioned a word of it to Sophie or the guys, figuring it would not be The Big One and would eventually stop. She and Sophie had gone to Mrs. Zvolensky's, and they had gone to bed. Sophie had soon fallen asleep, while Chiara just could not get there. Instead, she would count in her mind, and she would breathe… The moment she became certain of what was going on, she'd awakened Sophie, who had jumped into action, always prepared. Now they were on their way to the hospital, and the call was going out. No one would be expected to get out of bed so early, especially after a long night like they'd had. They could just wait until later that morning and come in on their own time.

They could, but who would they be kidding? No, they would be there as soon as they could.

"Maya," Lucas shook her, about as forcefully as he would allow himself, knowing he had to wake her up but also wishing he didn't. She grumbled. "Maya, wake up," he shook again.

"Why?"

"We have to go. Chiara is having the baby." A pause, then a quiet voice.

"Jujube?"

"Yeah, she's coming," Lucas chuckled.

And that was all the prompt she needed. Without a word, she rolled and set her feet on the ground, rising, yawning, and stretching all in one go. There was a brief debate on whether to wake Sam as they quickly got dressed to head out. In the end, they decided that as much as they wanted to let him sleep on, he would have wished for them to bring him once he found out about Chiara and the baby. So, Maya went ahead and woke him, while Lucas hurried down to make sure the dogs had all they needed, at the same time getting coffee and some food together for the ride to the hospital. Twenty minutes after they got the call, they were on the road.

They pulled up into the parking lot at the same time as another car they recognized, and as they all got out of their respective vehicles and merged on their way toward the building, Maya embraced her newly wedded friend.

"You're going to miss your flight," she pointed out.

"We'll take another one. I already reached out to the hotel, and the airline, it's not a big deal," Riley insisted. "This is more important. We would have hated to miss it," she smiled, looking back to Dylan, who walked with a bounce in his step at the prospect of meeting his best friend's little girl.

Reaching the waiting room, they came upon Zay and Nadine already waiting, along with some nervous but eager future grandparents sitting and standing in wait. Mr. and Mrs. Garcia and Mrs. Zvolensky were talking amongst themselves, feeling like larger than life representations of their roles. If they broke it down in such terms, not one of them would be biologically related to the child about to be born, while the grandparents who were, Chiara and Ray's parents, were either about to board a flight out of Italy or were sound asleep, unaware of any such child. It would never be said that the presence or absence of blood would make any of them any less of a real family though, and so the Garcias and Diana Zvolensky would count themselves as doubly the parents they were, for Ray, and more than ever for Chiara off bringing one Giulia Lucia Choi into the world.

"You know, I had a feeling this would happen," Zay declared as they all sat around, drinking coffee like they were feeding logs on to a weak fire on a frigid winter's night. As it turned out, all the excitement in the world could only go so far.

"You did not," Lucas challenged.

"Did, too," Zay insisted. Nadine cleared her throat. "Alright, maybe _she _suspected it first, but either way, we're here, aren't we?"

"Yes, we are," Nadine tapped his knee with a smile, and Zay pressed a kiss to the side of her face.

"You hungry?" he asked her, and she shook her head with a grateful look.

"I took what I could once the gift shop opened," Sam reported as he rejoined the group, carrying what felt like sufficient stuffed animals and flowers to celebrate quintuplets rather than just the one baby. His bounty was quickly distributed among the group, who had given him the money to fulfill this task when he'd requested it. This then led to a very comical, if fueled by an imbalance of sleep and caffeine, conversation on which animal was the cutest in its stuffed form. Either way, it kept them all entertained until the moment when a very tired but happy looking Asher was spotted striding down the hall in their direction. His jolt had not been generated by coffee, not one drop.

"Is it over? Is she here?" Dylan asked, even as Asher realized that both he and Riley were here, instead of on a plane taking them off to their honeymoon.

"She is…" he confirmed, his hand flying to his heart, like the thing would not stop beating so fiercely for the joy it felt. "We have a daughter," he nodded, new tears meeting his smile, as his best friend got to be the first to catch him in a massive, congratulatory hug.

For a few minutes, it was hard to say where one hug ended and another began, voices piling over one another as questions were asked. Asher was still too overwhelmed to answer any one of them, and besides he couldn't stay long. He wanted to get back to his husband, to their friends and fellow new parents, to their precious girl. They let him go, feeling a weight lifted even as they prepared for the anticipation bubbling in their chests, waiting to meet the newborn.

By the time this became possible, more had arrived in the waiting room, including Farkle and Isadora, who had left the kids with Shawn and Katy, and Rosa – who had left her phone silenced and slept hard through the night before getting the message – along with Jenna. Then, there were the elder Friars, both of them eager to meet Giulia. They were all still catching up with the others when Ray came to get a few of them for the first visit. He was greeted with a giant hug from his mother-in-law, holding his face in her hands as she congratulated him and asked him about the baby.

"She's doing great, both her and Chiara," he nodded, looking like he'd been so sure he'd be able to keep his emotions together and now had to admit defeat, as he was swept along by the arrival of this small human. "She's smaller than we thought she'd be, but all within where she should be," he went on to explain. "And she's got so much hair already," he laughed, remembering.

The grandparents had been the first to go, understandably, but in due time everyone would get their chance to go in and say hello.

When Maya, Lucas, and Sam got their turn, they walked into the room Chiara awake and sitting up in her bed, looking on with a smile as Sophie slowly walked the length of room while holding the bundled babe and humming under her breath. Like the guys, she had that glow about her of exhaustion challenged by joy. She was already clearly so in love with her little daughter, and it was hard to disturb this moment between the two of them by announcing their presence. But then she reached one end of the room and turned about, only to lift her head and see.

"Good morning," she greeted them quietly. Chiara turned her head now and smiled along at seeing the three of them standing there.

"See, I was just about to say the same thing," Maya told Sophie, even as she stopped over at the bed to greet the one of all the new parents that morning who had actually had some birthing to do. Sophie and the guys had already readily declared her queen of the day. "Didn't exactly go according to plan, huh?" Maya asked.

"We had the bag packed, back at our house. We packed and repacked it so many times, so we could take it when the time came. We _did_ consider bringing it with us to the wedding, but we thought it might be…" she let the sentence trailed off, as there really was no point anymore, now that the baby _had_ been born, bag or no bag, birth plan or none. "She is only hours old, but she already has a mind of her own," Chiara stated, already sounding every bit the proud mother.

"With all of you as parents, are we really surprised?" Lucas pointed out, making them laugh.

"Like we could want anything or anyone else," Sophie replied, approaching and placing the baby back in Chiara's arms, where they all might see her.

As promised, the newborn's head was covered in fine, raven hair, in amounts rivalling all other newborns they had ever seen. Oh, but those eyes, blinking and staring… No wonder they couldn't tear their own gazes off of her.

"Hey, Jujube…" Maya could find no limit to her smile. "You have no idea how happy I am to meet you on this side of your mamma's belly. You probably don't remember me, but that's okay. We have plenty of time to make up for that.

They would go home soon after this, the better to get some proper sleep and return again to see the new family later on, before they made the trip back home to Houston. Already, the guys were going to have to drive back there and to Austin again, to go and get the seat, which had naturally not been installed in either of their respective cars, just to bring Giulia out with them.

"Good… afternoon," Sam sleepily waved to his sister and brother-in-law when they arrived home and he started up the stairs.

"You, too," Lucas watched him go before turning in search of his wife, only to find her mid-plop down to the couch. "What are you doing?" he asked, amused.

"Upstairs' too far," she protested, pulling a cushion and hugging it as she planted her head to it. "This is good."

"What about me?" he asked, with only halfway mock-pity. Maya forced one of her eyes open even as she tapped the couch cushions in invitation. "I _will_ crush you," he warned with a smile as he went to join her.

"I can take it," she insisted. Even so, it didn't take long before they wriggled their way along until they were both on their sides, once again adopting their favored spooned position. "That's perfect, stay just like that," Maya tapped his hands, joined around her waist.

"Yeah, okay," he yawned. He'd been fine to drive, and really he'd made sure, but now that they were here, lying together, it was as though all the energy had been sapped out of him. That wasn't so bad. Now to fall asleep, holding his wife in his arms, he couldn't imagine a better conclusion to this unexpected half of a day. Right before he fell asleep, he could swear he heard Maya mumbled a wish of happy birthday to her sweet Jujube.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	289. Their Work With Freshmen

October 15th 2020

_Chapter 289  
Their Work With Freshmen_

Maya could easily have led the charge as far as the teasing went, that morning back at the house. Lucas and Sam both were well at ease with pointing out her exuberance over the start of the new school year, but frankly they were right on the money, so what was there to say? She was so excited to be going back, to find her former ninth to eleventh graders, now tenth to twelfth graders, along with this batch of shiny new freshmen. Her first year had been its own thing, with everyone being new to her, whether this was their first year, too, or their last one. But now… Now she had returning students, and though most of her experience at the school still fell in the realm of being a student there herself, years earlier, she wasn't the brand new teacher anymore, and she could welcome these new ninth graders as a standing part of the faculty.

"Mrs. Friar!"

She had barely made it out of the parking lot and toward the building, and then there was that call, in a voice which made her smile. Turning about, she found the two girls making a dash in her direction. The first to reach her was Stella Buckley, and her shy little bird practically bolted into her arms. Maya laughed, hugging her briefly before she sprang back, a look of uncertainty in her eyes.

"Wait, is it okay for me to do that?" she asked.

"Why don't we just agree to let that one slide?" Maya told her, and Stella nodded at once. "I like your hair," she pointed. The once full-back length of hair had been significantly shortened, now reaching just above her shoulders. The old look tended to make her come off like she might have been twelve or thirteen when she'd been fifteen. Now she looked much closer to her sixteen years.

"Thanks," Stella's smile came timidly, showing that no haircut could change who she was on the inside.

"Are you doing the fall festival again this year?" Phoebe asked.

"Yeah, preparations are starting soon," Maya confirmed. "Can I count on you two to help?" she inquired, already guessing the answer. Of course, they were on board.

It was going to be something for her to get used to, she soon realized, to see her returning kids at different points in the day. Her periods remained the same, with the seniors in first period, and sophomores in third, her freshmen just after lunch and her juniors at the end of the day, except the groups had leapt from one spot to another, all through the day. The kids she used to see at the end of the day were now going to be starting them out.

After a quick check of supplies, and plans for the day, Maya had all of a few minutes to stop, and breathe, and look around her classroom. Oh, she was just so… _so_ happy to be back here. The sound of voices in the hallway allowed her to rein in that bit of excessive smiling before the first of her new seniors started to come in. The thing which set her even further on the path of trusting that this day really would be as good as she had hoped it might be was that, as happy as she was to see them all again, they all looked as though they felt the same way toward her. Even those of them who could not help but fall in the category of 'occasional troublemaker' came along without incident.

"Hey, Mrs. Friar," Derek Boggs greeted her with one great, winning smile, and it warmed her heart to see it, especially for knowing it had a whole lot to do with the girl now standing at his side.

"Hey, Mrs. Friar," Helena Zimmerman echoed her best friend. Her slowly regrowing hair had gained just a bit of length over the summer, but it was still enough that she looked that much more confident in not wearing her wig over it.

"Welcome back, guys," Maya smiled back at them, the words feeling that much more important when aimed at Helena, who had been out of school since midway through tenth grade, when she'd fallen ill, and was now reintegrating the graduating class of 2029 to spend her senior year among her classmates.

When the bell rang and she turned to her students, Maya looked to all those faces around her, her new seniors. Last year, she'd had them all introduce themselves to her, since she was new, but now, what she really wanted to know was what they foresaw for this last year of high school, and for life beyond this school. Before she could do this though, there was one order of business to attend to, and it fell once again to the returned student. She asked Helena if she would introduce herself. While it was partway for her own benefit, to get to know her, it was in another big way for the benefit of her classmates, who had last known her before her life had gone and changed the way it did. Who was she now?

"Alright," she tipped her head, considering this for a moment before looking to her teacher, to her classmates. "I'm Helena Zimmerman," she started, a smile on her face as though to say 'but you knew that.' She'd barely said this much that several in the classroom pounded their hands on their desks and called out a rousing _sixty-five!_, which made her laugh and made Maya smirk curiously for a moment before she remembered that Helena had been on the basketball team before her absence. "Eighteen years old, as of this summer, and I have never been so happy to be back in high school." This made the others laugh. "I used to get by on average grades," Helena went on, feeling just a bit more introspective now, and the others listened. "But after everything that happened in the last year and a half, I realized I didn't want to just get by anymore. I got to live, to come back, and not all the people I met along the way got to say the same thing. So, I'm going to make it count," she nodded, determined.

Her words had resonated with her classmates, and with her teacher, who had a feeling this group of seniors might have been on their way to something big together. After the bell had dismissed them off to their next class, Maya had spent her free period reflecting on everything the group had said, when their turn had come, to speak of their outlook on this senior year. She only realized now how she'd forgotten to share what her departed seniors had written for them. She would have to pass it on the next day.

The day had carried on, with her sophomores, and eventually with lunch, and then finally, finally, her freshmen would be on their way. Like the year before, they were mostly names on a piece of paper at this point in time, but that was all about to change. And at least one of those names, she suspected, would go along with a face that wasn't entirely unfamiliar.

They all started to come along, a mixture of the usual first day of high school responses Maya had come to know, both as student and teacher. It mostly fell somewhere in either one of two camps, either 'this is so exciting!' or 'this is kind of terrifying…' And then, once they came in here and they saw _her_, there was once again a parade of occasional recognition from TXNY, and possibly her performance with Ree a couple years back…

So, she'd kicked off her class much in the way she'd done the year before, which she suspected now would have to be the norm with her ninth graders every fall. Right now though, after her own introduction, she asked the same of her new group. It took a few seconds, but finally she had a volunteer, and they were off. As soon as she saw him, she had to smile. Maybe he spoke because he'd heard of her from his older brother.

"My name is Roman, Roman Day," he nodded, dislodging a sizable fringe of blond hair to swoop into his face, which he pushed back with the reflex of one who had to do so many times a day. It got him a few looks from some of the girls in the class, a couple of them trying to hide a flush, a smile, or a laugh, so clearly he and Dakota had that in common. Where the older Day boy was sort of off in his own world a lot of the time, Roman came off as the opposite, someone who was all about the things he saw around him, the better to take it into his world. "I'll be fifteen next month. I have a cat, found her in our garden last spring, she didn't have any owners, so I got to keep her. She's called Sunny. This summer, my family and I went on a trip to Greece, that was great. My brother kept drawing everything. He's a junior here. I collect model cars, little ones, you know? And… oh, I love to swim. I'm going to try out for the team."

Maya was sure that he would have provided several more pieces of information about himself if allowed to carry on, but seeing as they had other students to get through, she thanked him and asked for someone else to go on. The kid was a talker, for sure. The next few who went ahead and spoke all looked like they wondered if they had to say as much, but Maya steered them back on track without a word. About midway through the introductions, there was a knock at the door and a boy came in, holding a tardy slip which he handed over with an apologetic look. As they had only gone through half the group, Maya had to rely on the paper to identify him.

"Khalil Russell?"

"Yes, ma'am," he nodded as politely as he spoke. According to the paper, he was late because of a meeting with the principal. It didn't specify what the meeting was about, so Maya indicated for him to take a seat and decided to ask him after the period was over.

"Well, while I've got you, would you go ahead and introduce yourself, tell us a bit about you?"

"Uh… Okay, yeah," he replied, looking around uncertainly for a moment. "Well, I'm… Khalil," he gestured to the paper still in her hand. "I'm fifteen. Just moved here from New Mexico last week, so I don't really know my way around the city. I have a little sister, Desi. She's nine," he went on, and the mention of his sister brought on the first appearance of a smile. "I'm learning Japanese right now, and… yeah…" he shrugged and looked up to Maya like he wanted to know if he had to say more.

"Thanks," she smiled at him before looking to the class. "Who wants to go next?"

One by one, the others took their turns, and all the while, Maya would see who was left. By now, she had done this enough to know the ones who went at the end usually had a reason, just as the ones who went first did. As the leftovers dwindled, she had one girl pegged for ending up dead last, and she was proven correct. This one looked like she really didn't want to even be acknowledged, and not for any shyness, more like she didn't want to be there. As it turned out, that was not so far off.

"One name left. I have a list, so I know what it is, but how about you tell us yourself," Maya approached the station, waiting for the girl to look up.

"Rochelle McNeil," she stated, meeting her teacher's eye with the slightest defiance. She didn't know what she was facing up against, and each bit of information that followed felt like a concession. "Fifteen… Top of my class." A boy laughed. Maya gave him a look and he retreated. "I suck at drawing, didn't want to be here," Rochelle shook her head, finally airing her frustration. "The counselor made me."

"What would you rather be doing?" Maya wondered.

"Studying," Rochelle replied at once, just before the bell rang, and then she breathed a sigh of relief, scooping up her bag and rising to leave along with the others.

Maya watched her go, watched Khalil disappear in the shuffle before she could speak to him. Alone in her classroom again, she let out a breath of her own. New year, new kids… This was going to be something alright

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	290. Their Work With Horses

October 16th 2020

_Chapter 290  
Their Work With Horses_

For his final fall semester, Lucas didn't actually have a whole day without classes anywhere between Monday and Friday, which led to him now working at the bookstore all through Saturday and Sunday. He did have Monday afternoons free though, and so he would spend these at Sullivan Stables, with Juliet and Dr. Alvarez, and the rest of the team up at the ranch.

As close as he was to doing the job he'd long dreamed about, he knew he still had a few steps to cross before it was all said and done. But then seeing as these last steps would see him actually putting the things he had learned and would still be learning into practice, they hardly felt like steps at all. This past summer, with the work he'd put in to help the doctor, he'd gotten to make an actual plan for what the next few years would look like, and he was pretty excited about it all.

Every time he drove up to the ranch, every time he passed through that arched gate, he would feel like a part of him was coming home. This place had so many ties to his family. This was where he and Maya had been married, the place where his mother had learned to be a rider, the place his grandmother had built from the ground up. The sign over the main gates, the looped words carved into the arch, those were a replica of Marianne Sullivan's own handwriting. He hadn't realized it until he'd looked at the document she'd drawn up, the one where she'd stipulated he was to be hired on if he became a vet like he'd told her he would and if he still wanted it, naturally. He passed those gates, and he could see her smile, there in his mind's eye.

Being here now, more and more, it felt like the world was showing him how right he had been to choose this path. The idea that he would get to come here, to carry on his grandmother's legacy, not with her name perhaps but with her heart and her spirit… He had spent so much of his childhood here, and then after his grandmother had passed, it had just been so hard to return, to look around and not find her waiting. So, for many years, he had barely come around at all. It was the wedding that really got him to come back in earnest, to really loop himself back into the old feelings he had for the property. And then from there, oh… From there, everything had changed.

He thought of Maya every time he passed that big tree. They'd been married under the shade of those leaves, and it was like a ghost image of that day existed, whenever he saw the tree. He remembered exactly the feeling of seeing her walk out in that dress, the look on her face as she came up the aisle, as they stood facing one another… When he saw that tree, she was with him.

She was up at the school today, first day back. Right about now, she'd have to be in the middle of meeting her new freshmen, and _that_ made him smile for another reason, thinking how he and Sam had just needed to tease her for how excited she got at the thought of being with her students again. It all came from a place of love, of course. Lucas could understand the excitement of returning to that place. It was where she became the thing she'd been meant to be… one of them at least. In his own way, Lucas went through the same feeling whenever he came here, to Sullivan Stables.

"Oh, you are a sight. Can I borrow you?"

Lucas turned from the tree to find the ranch's event coordinator coming his way, balanced on her cane. Donna Devereaux had been a dancer in her youth, a ballroom champion, the pride of Austin, born and raised. These days, and after several hip and knee surgeries, she would say she was happy just to be walking. She still had so much of that fire in her though, and she had a commanding nature to rival the likes of Melinda Friar. Naturally, she fit right in at Sullivan Stables.

"Uh, yeah, I just," he looked out toward the clinic, hoping to see the doctor, or anyone… Thankfully, he locked eyes with Elias, one of the assistants, and once he did he only had to point out Donna for the message to be clear. He'd been commandeered, and there was nothing to be done for it. Elias lifted up his hand and nodded, and they were good to go. "Lead the way," Lucas turned back to the woman and offered his arm.

"You are your grandmother's boy, you are," Donna smiled as she took the arm and started toward their intended destination. Lucas smiled, too. She and his grandmother had been school friends. Marianne had hired on her friend when they'd started doing events, in what Donna referred to as a 'shrewd business maneuver.' It was around the time when her dancing career had been brought to an end, having already lasted stubbornly too long. As much as his mother could be a great source of stories about her own mother, there was really nothing like hearing one of those stories from Donna's perspective. Lucas especially loved the stories that came before his mother's birth, when Marianne Sullivan had been a girl.

After assisting Donna with some boxes of supplies, Lucas had hurried back to find Dr. Alvarez. He knew the man enough to know that he would not have batted an eye for being called Manny, and Lucas would call him so, when they were off the clock. But he was here to work now, and so it was Dr. Alvarez he went to find.

"Hey, Doc around?" he asked when he walked into the clinic. Once again, Elias was his first contact.

"They had him come down to check on Trooper, told me to tell you to get out there when you arrived," Elias informed him.

That was all he needed to hear, and he was off to find the man and the horse. Trooper… He was one of their oldest, had been born here. More importantly, he was one of the very last horses left at Sullivan Stables who had been around in his grandmother's day. Much as he tried not to play favorites, it was hard not to look at them and remember how his grandmother would have looked after them, might have been present when they'd been born. She would often show up when a birth happened. He had ridden Trooper when he'd been little, old enough to be taken up on one of the horses.

But he was getting up in years now, and he likely didn't have more than one or two left in him. The fact that Manny was with him now had Lucas wondering if he'd have even that. Was this why he wanted him to meet him? To tell him Trooper was dying?

Lucas walked through the stables, finally reaching the stall where he'd find the doctor and the horse. Dr. Alvarez looked as though he'd finished doing whatever he'd come down here to do and was now simply spending time with the old horse, brushing him with his hand.

"Sorry I'm late, I got caught by Miss Devereaux on my way in," Lucas explained, and the man had a smirk like a laugh barely stalled.

"Haven't we all?" he joked, and Lucas was the one trying not to laugh now.

"How's he doing?" he asked, stepping forward. The horse looked to him, showed his familiarity for him and his appreciation. By now, Juliet would say he tolerated most people, but he only truly responded to a select few, and Lucas was absolutely one of those few. He liked to imagine the horse saw him and knew him for being Marianne Sullivan's kin.

"Oh, he's doing just fine, aren't you, Troop?" Dr. Alvarez smiled. The horse made a sound, possibly of agreement. "The kid calls me to check on him anytime he does anything to suggest his health is failing for old age. If you ask me, he does it on purpose, looking for some more acceptable attention," he went on, looking to Trooper like he might have been a small child in need of scolding but too adored to be given much more than a shake of the head.

"If he's fine, then why did you need me? I mean, I just thought…"

"I know what you thought," Dr. Alvarez assured him. "Listen, Juliet and I were talking, and much as we both hate to even have to consider it, we agree it's time to think about the next chapter in Trooper's life." Lucas didn't know what to make of that, certainly didn't feel comforted by the words, and Dr. Alvarez looked like he read as much in his face. He raised his hand in reassurance. "Like it or not, there's little more for him out here, and we could use the space," he gestured around the stall.

"What does that mean for him?" Lucas asked, turning to Trooper, reaching to touch his head. The horse showed he appreciated the contact.

"Well, now, we went over a few ideas, but you know, we loved your grandmother very much, and she loved _him_, too. That's how I came to this thought. Got in touch with a friend, asked if he might be able to house Trooper here for whatever time he had left in him, and he agreed, provided someone was able to look after him out there. It so happened I knew just the guy, already lends a hand up there from time to time. Plus, he lives just up the road, so it'd be real easy for him to look in on old Trooper here."

It didn't take long for Lucas to figure out what he was getting at, and his nerves released all at once. Doctor Alvarez and Juliet wanted to send Trooper to the Sanderson farm.

"What do you think? Sound good?" the doctor asked.

"Sound perfect," Lucas nodded, smiling. Soon, they made their way out of the stable and started back toward the clinic.

"So, started classes this morning, did you?"

"Yes, just the one so far," Lucas told him.

"I'll be glad when you're with us the way you were over the summer again," Doctor Alvarez declared. The way he spoke, Lucas could easily fill in the sentiment behind those words. The season had been hell for him, where the ranch was concerned, spending what little time he could out here while spending most of the rest looking after his wife, Esther. And then she'd started to recover, and with that the man had done some recovery of his own, back at his post in full swing. Donna would tease him and say he'd wound back the clock twenty years.

"So will I," Lucas promised.

He went back to look in on Trooper before heading home that day. Doctor Alvarez had explained that the transfer wouldn't happen for another couple weeks, giving the Sandersons time to prepare for his arrival. But Lucas would be involved every step of the way. Maybe for being married to a woman full of enterprising ideas, he looked at the horse and wondered if this arrangement might not be one they could repeat in the future, him and the Sandersons and the ranch. Whichever of their horses would next be coming to the end of their days, the 'legacy' ones especially, they could care for, up on the lane.

"It's going to be hard leaving this place," he told the old horse, who looked at him like he knew his days at Sullivan Stables were numbered. "Don't worry. You're staying in the family."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	291. Their Work With Students

October 17th 2020

_Chapter 291  
Their Work With Students_

"You know what I was thinking?" Morgan Stewart asked as she walked into the art class with a bag full of Ma Maggie's, another gift just dropped off by her boyfriend, Paul. Maya spotted it and smirked at once.

"How much you and I have become such good friends in the past year, being new teachers, that you've decided out of the kindness of your heart that you just could not eat all that on your own so you thought of me?" she innocently suggested. The music teacher chuckled.

"Oh, you know how I feel about you," she played along.

"Woman after my own heart," Maya pressed a hand to her chest before moving to pull the extra chair to her desk. She'd just been about to head to the teachers' lounge to grab her lunch and join her colleagues, but now, well… "So, assuming that wasn't actually what you were about to say, what _were_ you thinking about?"

"Right, well, I had this thought about the festival. Now and again, there'll be a new thing, to freshen things up," Morgan started as the bag was opened and the contents divvied up. Maya did not fail to notice Paul had packed enough for two lunches, which left her to wonder if he had packed for his girlfriend's friend, too, or if Morgan had asked him to put in an extra order she paid for herself. Knowing them both, it really could have been one or the other.

"Sure, yeah," she nodded, accepting the container offered to her along with utensils. Morgan sat down, with very 'wait for it' hands. Leave it to the music teacher to have a flare for dramatics.

"We need a talent show." Maya grinned at once. "Yeah?" Morgan nodded.

"Hey, it's me you're talking to. I built a whole program to help people take the stage, you know I'm on board."

"Great," Morgan beamed, opening up her own lunch.

"Did you ask Lindsay about it?"

"Not yet. I wanted to run it by you first. But she'll say yes, right?" Miss Alcott was once again leading the charge with the fall festival this year, and for what Maya knew from experience, she saw no issue in her liking the idea. The only thing that might put bars in Morgan's wheels would be whether they were able to fit it into everything else, find a spot to hold it and a timeslot…

"See, I'm going to say this while holding on to this bowl real tight so you can't take it from me, but you really might have given _her_ the pancake treatment." Morgan laughed. "Do you want me to ask her?"

"No, no, I can do it… Wouldn't say no to a buddy though."

So, once they'd finished eating, they'd headed over to the lounge, where they tracked down Lindsay Alcott and made the pitch. As soon as she knew this was about the festival, she'd reached into her bag and pulled out a binder marked FALL FEST 2028 and opened to what had to be a note section before grabbing her pen. She wrote a few things down as they spoke and finally looked up at the young teachers across from her.

"I will let you know on Monday, I promise."

That was as far as they could take it for now, so they thanked her and headed off, back to their classrooms so that they might get ready for the start of their Friday afternoon classes.

Maya wondered where the week had gone by. One moment ago, she'd been walking in for her first day back, and now a whole week had just about gone by. She would have imagined that, by now, she would have gotten used to seeing her groups in their new order, but she wasn't there at all and would still have a moment of 'wait, what are you doing here?' when some student or another would show up in the morning instead of the afternoon and vice versa. She could only hope that none of them picked up on it.

The one time when she didn't have to think about this was after lunch, when her new freshmen came along. She'd had four days with them now, and while she was starting to get a handle on what most of them were about, there were still a few who evaded her.

Roman Day was not one of those, not in the slightest. The kid walked through life being one hundred percent himself, no space for being anything else. And aside from being a motor mouth, which was not exactly a fault, depending on who you asked, he was very much like his big brother Dakota, just a genuinely and openly nice guy. Some people may have been able to mask some faults, until they had the world fooled into thinking they were good, but that wasn't the Day boys. No, those two exuded an unmistakable lack of a mask.

Maya wished he could pass some of those good vibes on to Rochelle McNeil. The girl had been making it very clear all week, in not so many words, that she absolutely did _not_ want to be here. She did not act out, and Maya recognized this would not have been her style. But just because she was polite did not mean that she would flip a switch and act like she wanted any part of this.

After the second day, where she'd watched the girl seem to have some sort of existential crisis as she and the rest of the class were tasked with an activity and she was left with either doing as she was told or risking some kind of 'incomplete' mark in her record, Maya had gone and visited the counselor. Miss Potts fell in the category of people who'd come along in the time after her graduation and her start as a teacher, so she didn't know her all that much, but she was generally someone who seemed to know what she was doing and care about the students, so there had to be a reason why she'd gotten Rochelle to take up art, although seeing as she was only starting here, it might have gone back to Mrs. Whitley at the middle school, and _her_ she knew, mostly from when Lucas used to have to see her every week back in seventh grade.

As it turned out, she was on the right track. According to Miss Potts, Mrs. Whitley had reached out to her, in anticipation of Rochelle's arrival at the high school. When she had introduced herself on Monday, she'd claimed to be the top of her class, and from what Miss Potts told her, this wasn't wrong. She was a valedictorian in the making, and if she kept it up, she would have such a bright future ahead of her. But on that same line, if she kept it up the way she was currently going, it was Mrs. Whitley's opinion that Rochelle would burn herself out, that she'd close up and find no interest in anything but racking up those top scores wherever she could, a one-woman mission which left no space for the companionship of friends or anyone else.

The two counselors had tried to come up with a solution together, and when Miss Potts had mentioned the high school's new art teacher, Mrs. Whitley had recognized the name… the names, technically, as she'd known Maya Hart, not Maya Friar, though she could guess where the Friar had come from. From there, the rest had been easy. Miss Potts had told Rochelle she would be taking art this year, and possibly the rest of her high school days, and that was that. It was their hope that Maya would help the girl find some self expression, that they would get her to see the world beyond the pages of a textbook.

After receiving this information, which, admittedly, would have been good to know beforehand, Maya had been left to figure out how to handle Miss McNeil. Treating her any different from the rest of the class would not do, would it? She had only been a teacher for a year, but she had enough confidence in herself to say that she was a good teacher. It wasn't about treating anyone differently, but with each of her students there had inevitably been a sort of level to figure out. Some of them made no splash, just came to class, did good work, and moved on. Others struggled, in one way or another, and would require assistance, depending on the case, while others thrived in this space like no other, and would be given chances to expand even further where they sought to.

Rochelle would need help, but Maya couldn't just jump in and decide to treat her as though she did without knowing the way to do it, the best way for _her_. So, for a couple weeks at least, she could only observe her, see what she did. So far, it was 'the bare minimum.'

Maya had half a mind to pair her with Khalil Russell. Whenever he'd show up in her class, whenever they'd gotten to draw, or paint, over this first week, he'd always looked so… at peace… like finally he was somewhere that allowed him to clear his head, and it made him happy. Yet for all that, as soon as the bell would ring, he would always be one of the first ones out, and up to now she had not gotten the chance to speak with him the way she'd been trying since Monday.

Finally, she'd decided to come in from the other side. Instead of catching him on his way out of class, she'd have to get him before he got there. After visiting Lindsay and splitting off from Morgan, and getting the classroom ready, she'd hurried over to the cafeteria, hoping to spot the boy. By chance, she didn't have to go that far, as she came around one corner and spotted him standing by his open locker, tapping at his phone.

"Hey, Khalil?" she called, and he looked up at once. "Can I talk to you for a minute? You're not in trouble," she added a moment later, when the student's eyes shifted into 'uh-oh' mode. He put his phone away, grabbed his bag, and followed her after shutting the locker door. They went all the way to the art room, seeing as the period would start in a few minutes anyway. When they arrived, Maya shut the door, so no one would interrupt as they spoke.

"Mrs. Friar, I…" Khalil spoke, like maybe he really was in trouble. Maya raised her hands to stall him.

"I just wanted to check in with you and make sure everything was alright. See, I've been meaning to ask about the slip since Monday, but you're always so quick to leave when class is over…"

"I have gym after," Khalil cut in, pausing like he hadn't meant to interrupt and he wanted her to know that manners were important to him. She nodded, allowing him to go on. "I just want to make sure I get there early so I can get changed on time." Alright, that made sense. "About why I was late on Monday…"

"The principal needed to speak with you?" Maya recalled, and the boy nodded. He looked uncertain for a moment.

"My little sister and I, we just moved here," he reminded her. "We're living with our grandparents now, and it's been hard for Desi, leaving everything, everyone. The reason the principal called me is that _her_ principal called _him_. They wanted me to talk to her, to Desi, to calm her down for the rest of the day."

Maya let out a breath. If anyone could sympathize with starting over, and how hard that could be…

"How's she doing now?"

"Better, a little," Khalil nodded, with a grateful tone. "Her teacher's been really good." Even as he said this, Maya had to wonder. Desi Russell would be in the fourth grade, and if she went to the same school… What would be the odds of this teacher being one Isaiah Babineaux? If he was, then that would also mean she would count Nellie and Gracie Hunter as her classmates…

"What school does your sister go to?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	292. Their Work With Lectures

October 18th 2020

_Chapter 292  
Their Work With Lectures_

"You know what you remind me of right now?" Maya asked that morning, when she woke up to find Lucas was already finishing up getting dressed, the sun barely starting to bring light through the windows of their room. He turned around, happy to find her no longer asleep, the better for him to come around and kiss her good morning. She responded to this by pulling him down to meet her, so she might get a bit of morning cuddles before getting up.

"What do I remind you of?" Lucas asked, playing along.

"MJ, the morning of 'tree day' last year," she smirked, which made him laugh. They had spent the night at the Hunter house the night before, all the better for them to join in when Katy and Shawn took the kids to go and select their Christmas tree before taking it home to decorate. That morning, they had gotten up to find MJ had not only dressed himself but then proceeded to retrieve enough bowls and spoons to fill nine cereal bowls, as it was the only thing he could do all on his own, and he really just wanted to speed up the process and go get that tree.

"Alright, I think I earned that one," Lucas admitted.

"You're just happy," Maya smiled, touching at his cheek. It was nice and smooth now, but as soon as Halloween was through, it'd be back to beard growing, the better to enable his transformation into the jolly man in red and white. "I love it when you're happy." This made him grin, which in turn made her laugh. "Your head just went somewhere cheesy, didn't it?"

"Big, massive blocks of it," he confirmed, whispering at her ear what she'd suspected, that he was always happy whenever she was near him.

"Alright, off you go then," she 'shoved' him, and he went.

He had plenty to look forward to today, much as she'd done the week before, when she had started her new year with her students. This morning, he knew, his Monday morning class would welcome his uncle and former professor, Hank Hillard, as a guest lecturer. And then, this afternoon, Lucas would be aiding in the relocation of Trooper the horse from Sullivan Stables over to the Sanderson farm.

His drive to the university that morning was one of the most satisfying ones he'd had in three years and some dust of going along that road day after day. There may have been some very silly and very animated singing along to the radio, a part of him imagining the look on his wife's face if she'd been there in the car with him to witness it all.

Arriving in the school lot, it was back to business.

"Hey, are you okay? You look kind of flushed," Simon pointed out, when Lucas joined him and Bishop outside their classroom.

"Oh, yeah, had the window open. Is Professor Hillard here yet?"

"You can just call him your uncle right now," Bishop pointed out.

"It's a reflex," Lucas shrugged.

"Well, here he comes," Simon nodded past him, and Lucas turned just as his uncle spotted him. They waved to one another, and Hank approached the trio.

"Good morning," he nodded to Bishop and Simon before turning to his nephew. "Hey, you have the afternoon free, right?"

"No, well, I'm headed back to Austin, to the ranch," Lucas explained, and his uncle gave a quick nod, showing he was recalling him mentioning this when they'd last spoken.

"Yes, yes, the horse, I'm sorry, when I'm about to do one of these, a lot of unrelated things tend to slip my mind," he chuckled, indicating the class door. "Mind if I tag along?"

"No, not at all, that'd be great," Lucas promised, and so it was settled.

Hank Hillard was something of a regular as far as guest lectures went. He had long standing connections with the department here, and so he was a favorite for them to call upon. Lucas loved hearing these lectures. It reminded him of the years he spent in Houston, where Hank had been one of his professors throughout his four years there, truly his favorite and by no means because of their familial bond. The man was simply made for speaking in front of a classroom. The fact that he would pop up here every now and then had become a sort of treat, enough that Lucas realized he'd be sad not to hear any more of these in a little while.

When the class was done, Lucas said goodbye to his classmates and waited for his uncle to be done answering a girl's questions so they could head out together. They'd be getting in their own cars to drive from the university to the ranch, though as they made to split off they agreed to stop at the diner on the way, the better to grab lunch together.

"So, why did you ask if I was free?" Lucas asked as they sat across from one another in a booth.

"Well, I had the afternoon free, and I figured if you did, too, then we might spend it together." Naturally, they didn't see each other nearly as much as they did back when he and Maya and the others lived in Houston like he and his family did. Lucas regretted it very much, and he knew his uncle and aunt and cousins did, too, when they hadn't been in each other's lives for so long.

"Sounds good," he nodded, and Hank showed his agreement with a tip of the head and the raising of his glass. "So, how is everyone?"

"Oh," Hank laughed, sounding like he had a lot to share. "Well, the girls are graduating high school this year, as you'll know," he started, to which Lucas nodded once more. The second and third of his five children, Sarah and Evie were now eighteen and seventeen respectively, and by all accounts Sarah should have already graduated, already moved on, but then she'd repeated a grade, landing her in the same year as her younger sister, which was really what she preferred. "They've gotten it in their heads to go to study abroad. Tanya and I are still trying to get on board with the idea, but then we know there's really nothing we can do if they've made up their minds on anything, and they'll be in the position to make this choice for themselves, so… Who knows, maybe they'll change their minds."

"Do you think they will?" Lucas wondered.

"Not one bit," Hank replied at once, and they both laughed. "And then Joseph… Did he tell you?" Lucas shook his head, coming up with nothing his cousin might have said that would feel in any way newsworthy. "He went and proposed."

"Proposed?" Lucas repeated, blinking. "As in…"

"Yes, exactly," Hank slowly nodded.

"What did Leigh say? They didn't say no, did they?" Lucas asked, imagining how crushed his cousin would be.

"They said yes," Hank reassured him, smiling. "Looks like next summer will be the big day," he went on, with a look not unlike the ones Lucas had seen on his parents', or Maya's, or any of their friends', when they as firstborns went and got married.

"Another wedding…" Lucas thought to himself, imagining the look on Maya's face. Privately, he hoped the date would not land anywhere when they'd be away on the tour with Ree. "Wow…" his thoughts shifted at once to his cousin, all of twenty-one, twenty-two next summer, getting married. In his head, he still saw the kid who'd shown up at the house on Halloween years ago.

"Yeah," Hank agreed with the sentiment. "This left me and Tanya to think about what it would be like, with three of the kids out of the house, and two growing faster every day."

What these thoughts were, they were interrupted by the arrival of Nando with their plates, and neither Lucas nor Hank thought to bring them up again. Once they were done eating, they took off in Lucas' car, deciding they'd come back for Hank's truck later on.

Arriving at the ranch, they soon found Doctor Alvarez, Juliet, and Elias up at the stable, working to get Trooper out of his stall and into the trailer which would bring him up to Sanderson Farm. It wasn't going well. The horse refused to follow, like it sensed the coming change and was not interested. As responsive as he had always been to the trio here, just now they might as well have been strangers, because he was _not_ on board.

"Oh, good, Lucas, come here. Maybe he'll listen to you," Juliet waved him over. Lucas moved in at once, as the others stood back, introduced themselves to Hank as he did the same with them.

"Hey, Troop, hey, what's the matter?" he reached up to the horse, brushing at his head. Though he did not immediately calm down, there was a definitive shift in attitude, in responsiveness. Lucas rolled with it, hoping to incite the animal to follow him. "I know you're going to miss this place, bud. But you'll love it at the Sandersons', I promise. And I'll be there to see you so much more often. I'll be nearby."

Sometimes, he could swear the horse looked at him, saw through him, recognized the Sullivan in him. The horses here, the ones who were old enough to have been there at the time, they may have been the only living beings, other than his mother and his uncle and him, who had known and loved and now missed Marianne Sullivan the most, and for that he could only feel that much closer to them. Maybe, just maybe, they felt it, too.

Trooper finally allowed himself to be led out of the stall, and the stable, and into the trailer. Lucas stayed with him every step of the way, tossing his car keys to his uncle for him to follow. Elias drove the trailer, and they were off. The ride was thankfully uneventful as far as Trooper's temperament. When they drove through the farm gates, Missy's father and grandfather were standing by, waiting for them. According to a text he'd gotten from Maya, Missy had lobbied very hard to miss school that afternoon so she could be there when Trooper arrived. She had been most excited at the prospect of the horse moving on to their land, and had promised to be something like Lucas' assistant in tending to him. Lucas had no doubt she would be very helpful and skilled in doing just that.

Trooper was led out of the trailer, showing some brief uncertainty but trusting in Lucas' presence. Lucas took him around for a slow walkabout, the better to familiarize him with his new home. Finally, he brought him out to the stable, which had been adjusted in the past week, before they brought the horse over. Lucas felt just a bit like a parent bringing a child into a new home after a move, trying to sound encouraging so that they'd like it and wouldn't lament the place they'd been forced to leave so much.

"It'll be good here, it will," Lucas promised, brushing him with his hand. Trooper looked like he still wasn't sure, just a bit like he knew he'd been brought out here because he was on his way out.

Maya had given Missy Sanderson a ride home that day, figuring the girl had resisted the urge to skip class so she might as well speed up her return to see the horse. When they arrived, Lucas was still in the stable with Trooper. Missy came up with such a smile, careful as she presented herself, reaching up to pet the new resident of Sanderson Farm. Lucas turned a smile to his wife. It looked like Trooper had made a new friend.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	293. Their Work With Records

October 19th 2020

_Chapter 293  
Their Work With Records_

The month of September had been passing along as smoothly as anyone could hope it to go. Lucas was getting to feel something of a morale boost in his studies, whether he had actually needed it or not, with the arrival of Trooper on the Sandersons' farm. It was strange, but then maybe having the horse to look after in this way had really put him in the mindset of what his future could look like, after this last year, and working at the ranch, doing his residency… Whether he'd needed it or not, he deeply appreciated it, and he would use it for all it was worth.

Meanwhile, Maya was finding the rhythm of this new school year, and the shift of her groups from one timeslot to another was not so jarring anymore. She was getting to know her new students anymore, from the whole ninth grade group to the returned Helena with the seniors. As ever, some of those kids just caught her attention, showing her in one way or another that they might need that extra attention. And on top of getting to know them, and figuring out how she might help them, she had the preparations for the fall festival to see to. Thanks to Morgan's idea, this meant organizing a talent show on top of the scavenger hunt, and the maze, and any number of other items, along with Lindsay and the many other volunteers.

With everything in full swing like this, it was just as well that she'd gotten her final songs for Ree's album written, recorded in demo, weeks ahead of their next and final session. One afternoon, as she'd been sitting in on a talent show rehearsal, her phone rang and she answered to find the singer on the other end of the line. Quietly excusing herself from the English teacher and festival coordinator, she scurried out of the auditorium.

"Hey, sorry, I couldn't hear you back there. What's up?"

"Would I be putting you terribly out of sorts if I rescheduled our session for this weekend?" Ree asked, sounding like she had the most apologetic look on her face.

"Uh…" Maya thought for a moment, recalling what she had planned this weekend. Lucas would be out, working at the bookstore from opening to closing, Sam would be working on a project with some of his classmates on Saturday, working on Sunday, and she had a few things with her siblings, but these could be on either day, so… "No, I'm good, sure."

So, just like that, she was booked with a long day in the Hex with Ree and her daughter. From all she'd heard, Maya knew Christina was looking forward to sitting in on the session, not just for the part where she'd get to record a duet with her mother. They had two new songs, plus the mother/daughter duet, and then one more track: Ree wanted them to record a duet, too. She would joke and say that she simply didn't want to end up with thirteen tracks, but Maya knew she also wanted this for them. She'd told her to pick which one she wanted them to do.

Saturday morning, while the guys were still getting ready to head out for their own days, Maya was already in the studio, getting set up in a way that made her feel as though she was back in her classroom, awaiting the arrival of her students. Usually, if she had minutes to spare, she would end up doodling away as she waited. In the Hex, she picked up her guitar and practiced her song, her future duet. She didn't miss a note when the door opened and in walked her guests for the day. Ree led the way, with her mini-me of a daughter right behind her. The eleven-year-old had that spark in her, the kind Maya recognized for having felt it herself. The girl here had the added benefit of having grown up around places like this, and she walked into the Hex looking very much at ease, taking it all in not as though it would overwhelm her but instead like she just wanted to see everything that Maya had.

"Morning," Maya smiled, stepping out of the booth after setting her guitar down. "Welcome to the Hex," she turned to Christina, who was practically bouncing on her toes for how excited she was.

"Easy now," Ree laughed, trapping her in her arms as she stood behind the girl. "What do you think, should we do ours first or do you want to hang with her while I do my last solos?"

"Solos first, finish your supper," Christina looked up with a teasing grin and making her mother laugh that much more.

"I don't know where she gets that," she shook her head, turning to Maya. "Alright then, right to business apparently."

"Boss is in the house, got it," Maya waved her into the booth before moving to indicate the second chair before the console. Christina moved to sit at once, and Maya joined her. "Did she let you hear the songs she's doing today?"

"Yeah," Christina nodded and smiled. "I loved the second one best."

"Yeah, me, too," Maya confided quietly before turning back to find Ree was just about ready to start their first run through. She'd barely had a couple of days to do any work on them on her end, but this by no means slowed them down. Ree may have looked like she just jumped into things, but she did her work, showing the growth of her years in the business. By lunchtime, they were just about ready to jump into the duets. It probably helped that they had gotten right to it instead of sitting around a while to talk and/or have breakfast.

Christina had wanted to see the horse as soon as she'd heard about him, and while lunch was on its way, Maya had called Missy to come and grab the girl to accompany her up to the farm. To see the look on her face when she not only realized who Christina was but then in turn met her mother, oh… Maya had to resist the urge to take pictures.

"I tell you, I'm going to miss these days, you and me," Ree breathed as she assisted Maya with the meal. "Might just drop in now and again, for no other reason than to have ourselves a jam back there," she nodded to the window, through which they could see the Hex nearby.

"You are welcome anytime," Maya promised with a smile soon returned by the singer. "And you sort of picked the perfect time for this one, the fall festival is starting today, so depending what time we finish those duets, you could take Christina up there."

"I might just do that, if she can handle that much excitement in one day. A studio session, a horse, _and_ a festival? Spoiling that child…" she shook her head. Maya chuckled. "So now, how's it going with you and your school? Last I heard you were so looking forward to your new students. What are they like? Any troublemakers?"

"Not exactly, no," Maya laughed on.

"What does that mean?" Ree curiously inquired.

"Doesn't mean anything, except I'm starting back from blank slates with one group, when the other groups are just getting to the point where it really feels like I know them. This new group, some of them feel like a new puzzle I have to figure out, and I don't have the picture to look at to help me put it together."

"I do love a puzzle," Ree nodded, before giving a small 'sorry, go on' wave.

"Well, I have one boy who recently moved here from out of state, him and his sister. They're living with their grandparents now, both their parents are in the Navy, their mother was already overseas and then their father had to go as well. It's the first time both of them have been gone at the same time, and now they're here, new school, new everything, and it's been harder on the sister." Ree made a noise at this, a mother sympathizing. "But then it's been hard on him, too. He feels so responsible for her, and I don't think he knows how to express how _he_ feels about the whole thing, because he needs to put her first." All _she_ could think of was Sam, when their father had been about to die, and after they'd lost him, the way his focus would be turned on Cara, Eliza, Wyatt, _and_ their mother, rather than on to his own grief, his own loss.

"Can't even imagine…" Ree breathed, their cheerful exchange brought to a standstill. Maya silently nodded.

"Then I have this girl… She's so bright, like really clever, more than she knows what to do with. But she's also just _so_ focused on her studies that the school counselors went and made her take my class, so she'll just lift her head once in a while, you know?"

"I do, yes. My brother was sort of that way growing up. Used to drive me mad."

"From day one, she's just been sort of… resistant to the whole thing, so I've been keeping an eye on her, trying to pick up what little she put down for me, so I could figure out what to do about her. And I can almost see it, but I'm not there yet, so until then I have to watch her sitting there and being so frustrated. She shows up, she does the work as best she can," Maya had to note. "It would be so easy for her to skip class, or just phone it in, but she doesn't."

"That's a good thing, isn't it?"

"Maybe, but… not really… She hates every minute of it, I can tell. And I don't want to force it on her, like she _has_ to love art or else I won't understand her, no. Maybe she'll get to that point where it all clicks for her and she starts to love it, but maybe she won't, and if she has to drag her feet through this whole year, through however long she'll be with me, all it's really going to do is… pull her apart. I don't want that for her."

When she'd stopped speaking, and silence held, Maya turned her head to find Ree looking back at her, smiling.

"What?" she laughed, confused.

"I was just thinking, any kid should be so lucky as to have a teacher like you. Even last year, you were brand new, and you just jumped in with both feet at once," Ree told her. Maya almost felt like she might blush for the compliment. "You will find your solution, I know you will. You won't let her down, or any of them."

Maya let out a breath. She really hoped that Ree would be right about this. Khalil, Rochelle… even Desi, even if she would not be anywhere near her classroom for about six years, if she was still in Austin by then. She _was_ in Zay's class though, and one whisper to him had brought the Russell girl to be teamed up with the Hunter twins for an exercise. Whether the three of them would gel would be entirely up to them, and by the end of the week, when she'd gone to visit her family, Maya had learned that Nellie and Gracie had a new friend. It was all just a matter of chance, wasn't it? The potential was all there for them to see take root, and then it did.

Christina soon returned with Missy in tow, and the girl gave Roman Day a run for his motormouth money as she told her mother and Maya about getting to see Trooper, and getting to feed him, and touch him… Maya would later joke how they might have jam sessions_ and_ horseback riding lessons to bring Ree back around on Austin visits once their recordings were done.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	294. Their Work With Books

_A/N: Thanks to azuliara for catching a big ol' issue. Fixed it now!_

October 20th 2020

_Chapter 294  
Their Work With Books_

"Hey, I need a favor."

Lucas made a noise to say 'ask away' as he kept looking through carts of books in search of the one his client was seeking. Out of the corner of his eye he could just recognize Maeve's striped pants, a staple of fall and the run up to Halloween.

"It's quiet out there, and at the risk of jinxing us, I'm pretty sure it's going to stay that way," his co-worker and friend stated.

"Uh-huh…"

"So, Ben and Ramona are taking Erin to the park, for the festival, and they were wondering if I'd go with them. I explained how I was working today, and obviously I am, but now I keep wondering if I'm really supposed to be there with them. I know how it might sound, and it's really not about the kid, or me feeling all mother-like about her, more just… aunt-like… a little… You've seen her, you know how giddy she gets around people, she did not get that from me… Anyway…" Her voice was just going all over the place, taking twists and turns as though to narrowly escape any suggestion whatsoever that she might have been feeling anything more than affection toward a cute toddler, even if she _was_ her biological mother.

"Maeve," Lucas stood up now and faced her.

"I know, I know," she sighed, leaning on one of the carts. "See, this is exactly what I was trying to avoid by not seeing her. Whenever I'm around her, everyone just looks at me and at her like they're waiting to see if I'll start to cry or something."

"That bad, huh?"

"I made the mistake of mentioning to my parents how I'd been spending time with her, and now they want pictures, they want to see her."

This was new to Lucas. Last he'd heard of her parents was when she had finally come clean with them, revealing that she had _not_ been a surrogate like she'd led them to believe, that Erin had been hers, free and clear, how she'd relinquished her rights and left her to Carter, and how brother Ben was helping raise her, along with new wife Ramona. According to Maeve, her parents had used the fact that it had been 'her choice to make' like punctuation… a lot, letting her know without saying it in so many words that they would never have made _that_ choice, which only served to convince her she'd made the right call in keeping them in the dark. Since the revelation had been made, the relationship with her mother and father had been tense, and now this new development didn't seem to bode well either.

"What are you going to do?" Lucas asked.

"I don't know, I… It's not up to me, and I really don't want to complicate things for Carter, Ben, or Ramona. They're really good with her, you know?"

"Yeah, I know," Lucas smiled. They were over at the house easily once a week, two or three or all four of them, usually when the band got to hold practice.

"Anyway…" Maeve started, like she briefly couldn't remember what she'd wanted to say. "Right, so… I was wondering…"

"I'll cover for you, you go ahead," Lucas cut in with a sympathetic nod.

"Are you sure?" Maeve asked, looking like she was trying to buckle down a rush of joy.

"Yeah, yeah, go," he turned back to his carts, by chance landing right on the book he was after.

"Thanks, I owe you one!" Maeve was already dashing off to clock out.

After bringing the book to his waiting customer, Lucas returned to his usual circuit around his floor. He had nothing else to do tonight except to keep an eye out for anyone in need of assistance, which could be both a blessing and a curse. It allowed him to think, a lot of the time, but then it all depended on just what subjects he had floating around his mind at any given time.

Tonight at least he had plenty of good things to think about. He was looking forward to the festival, too, couldn't help it when he had a direct line to all the preparations for it living with him and sharing his bed. His schedule this semester tended to make things tricky, as far as getting to go _with_ Maya, in the daytime, but then Juliet had told him to take Monday afternoon off and go enjoy himself, so the plan was for him to pick up Maya from the school in her two-period gap between her freshmen and juniors. He was also supposed to meet her there, after the store closed and if she'd finished with Ree, for them to catch some of the late-night activities. Saying it like that sounded so far from what it would actually be, although by the nature of the hours on hand, it was definitely adults only.

His attention was pulled back to the store around him by the sound of a strange clash, followed by mutterings, and he turned to find himself almost face to face with…

"Cecilia?" The girl looked up, bordering on 'deer in headlights.' From the looks of it, she'd knocked a few books over and was now struggling to make a graceful descent, crutch and all. "Here, I got it," he moved in and collected the books.

"I almost had it…" she promised.

"I know, but this is kind of my job, so…"

"Oh, sure, yeah…"

They fell into an awkward silence for a few seconds. It had been weeks since she'd been at the house. Much as both Lucas and Maya had let her know that she was still welcome, anytime, they couldn't get around the fact that she and Sam had not been seeing each other either. They were trying to let the break breathe, they said, but really it felt more like they still weren't able to be around one another. Now, they wondered if the girl would just fade away until they never saw her at all. All signs were pointing to her leaving Texas once she finished high school, so that might have been where they were headed, shame as it was. Cecilia had become almost like family to them, for near on three years.

"How've you been?" Lucas ended up asking her, not because he felt he had to but because he genuinely wanted to know, and he hoped she knew that. The way she smiled, he guessed she did.

"Good, good, yeah, uh… My dad started seeing this woman from the university, Janet. She's nice. It's weird, seeing him with someone, it's the first time since Mom and all, but… He looks happy, and that's what matters, right?" she asked with a small, hopeful expression.

"Absolutely," Lucas nodded.

"She's been coming over for dinner a few times now, and we went to her house, too. She's a pretty good cook. I can tell she's not sure how she's supposed to act, with my leg and the crutch, like her instinct is to help me but she doesn't want to make me feel like I think she thinks I need help. It's actually kind of sweet."

"Glad to hear it," Lucas smiled. "What about school?"

"Oh, well, I've been really putting in more effort, senior year, you know?"

"Yeah," he chuckled.

"I guess… well… I have more time now…" her eyes flickered aside, and Lucas fumbled for a new topic to take them away from _that_. Thankfully, Cecilia changed the subject for them. "Would it be weird if I still went to you guys' Halloween party?"

"You are always welcome," Lucas assured her.

"I know," she smiled. "At first I thought 'well, if I wear a really good costume, I can just go and no one will know,' but then…" she lifted up her crutch. "We always found ways to make it a part of my costumes, Sam… He's really clever about that," she sighed.

"He is," Lucas had to agree. "You know, once the party starts, you just get lost in the games, the maze… We have our first pumpkins this year, can't miss that," he tried to sound encouraging.

"Do you know… Is he… Does he have a new…" Cecilia asked, looking very much like she could kick herself for asking a question like that, for even caring.

"If he does, he hasn't said anything to me or Maya," Lucas told her.

"Okay… I don't meant that he shouldn't, you know? If he met someone, it'd be…"

"I know," he cut in, keeping her from digging deeper.

"I should go, my father will be waiting for me, he's up in reference books, and if I leave him there he'll buy a bunch of books he won't even get to for five years," Cecilia explained, sounding like she really just wanted to extricate herself from this conversation before she stuck her foot further in her mouth.

"You know, he's working tomorrow, and so am I, so Maya will be at home by herself," Lucas called after her as she started to walk off. She paused and looked back at him. "If you want to brainstorm costumes." Cecilia blinked before smiling, nodding as she waved and went off to find her father.

After Cecilia had gone, Lucas found himself helping four customers back to back, which ate up much of the time left before the store closed. He'd had no one else to assist after those four, so he went around, casually doing his end-of-day circuit until the last customers headed down to the registers, clearing his floor. With the rest of his closing duties behind him, Lucas headed out of the store.

_Lucas: Leaving now. Are you home?  
__Maya: At the park with Ree and Christina, but they're leaving soon.  
__Lucas: Be there asap. 366  
__Maya: 366!  
__Maya: I have cotton candy, hurry!_

The image alone of his twenty-six-year-old wife hopped up on pink sugar was enough to send Lucas laughing off to his car and eager to join her. As he went, he also found a text from Maeve. Along with a picture of Ben, Ramona, and little Erin, making quite the photogenic family unit and Maeve herself, stretching out her arm and her phone to capture the shot, his co-worker checked in to make sure the rest of the night at the store had gone off alright. Lucas assured her that everything had been fine.

Pretty soon, he wouldn't be there to bail her out like this anymore. Much like with Coleman's in Houston, when he had finished his four years out there, he'd be resigning somewhere in early summer. It wouldn't be because he was moving out of the city this time, of course. But he would be for the first time in his life working solely toward his veterinary career, and _that_ he looked most forward to. Still, like when he'd had to leave Coleman's behind, he knew that he would miss this store, too. It wouldn't even be about the store itself. He still spoke to Pete from time to time, and of course he got to see Tracy Coleman every now and then, seeing as she was Rosa's mother and all.

Much as he loved all the people at the store here, he knew most of all he would keep Maeve in his circle. After three years of working alongside her, of seeing her go through everything with her pregnancy, and finding her place with Carter and the child who had once been hers, of just being her friend… She was and would be part of that great extended friend family he and Maya had cultivated over time. Thinking this, his mind wandered back to Cecilia again. She'd become family, too, in ways independent from her relationship with Sam. Somehow, it felt like she was the kind of family they had to fight for, to keep her from becoming a memory of the past._TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	295. Their Work With Festivals

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

October 21st 2020

_Chapter 295  
Their Work With Festivals_

"Hey," Lucas came up behind her, slipping his arms around her waist. Maya smiled.

"You know, that could have been so awkward if you got the wrong person," she teased, looking back at him.

"Then it's a good thing I could pick you out of a crowd anytime," he smiled back even as she stretched up to kiss him. "How was it today, good?"

"It was really good," she nodded, and she had to think he could just sense the nostalgia already inhabiting her, as though it had been more than a few hours since they'd left the studio. There would always be possibilities for more, Ree said so herself and she would always be true to her word, but a part of her would still feel like this little period of time, these five sessions, had been some of her favorite times out there.

After lunch, they had gone back to the Hex, the two of them and Christina, and then because she'd had lunch with them and Ree's daughter already loved having her around so much, Missy came along, too. Christina went and did her duet with her mother first, leaving teacher and student to sit at the console and listen in.

Once again, the eleven-year-old's experience around recording studios showed. She was like a pro, and when she practiced her solo, it was so easy to see how much she resembled her mother, in features as well as talent. Maya watched them, singing together, and to see them so happy together, sharing this, she looked forward to a future where she might get to do the same.

When her turn came to join Ree in the booth, Christina swapped seats with her and the girl joined Missy. Their audience of two watched and listened, while the two singers brought their voices together. It was not the first time they harmonized, but it still felt like a dream to Maya, to experience it all. Whether it was on a stage in front of hundreds of people, or in this small studio outside her home, it felt magical.

"Do you know what I kept thinking about, back in the booth when it was you and me?" Ree asked her, later on, as they'd reached the park. Missy had come along, and so she would show Christina this thing and that, far enough to be out of earshot.

"No, what?" Maya asked.

"I was thinking about the tour. The announcement will be going out soon, over the holidays. Are you ready for that?"

They had finished all their recordings. From here on out, the next few steps were essentially out of her hands, and the tour would be all of eight months away, half a year by the time people found out about it… She only had weeks left before a lot more people would start to know her name, before people she'd kept in the dark about this big project with Ree and about this tour would be finding out. Even now, the one part she thought about the most were her students.

"I wouldn't have agreed if I wasn't," Maya nodded to Ree.

"That'll be one more thing to think about. Rehearsals. I may need you to fly out for that, but we will make it work," Ree assured her. Maya did not worry on that. She had gone and shaped her entire tour to enable her to finish one school year and start the next without batting an eye. "Oh, and costumes," Ree added, grinning all at once. "We will have to look into those, too." Maya could only laugh, seeing how excited the singer got.

"Whatever I end up wearing, we might need to… you know…" she pinched the front of her shirt, over her stomach, pulling it forward to suggest a presence.

"All in due time," Ree smiled, showing she had not forgotten her songwriter's maternal goals.

After Ree and Christina left, Maya stuck around the festival with Missy for a little while before her neighbor and student was picked up by her mother and taken home. Maya waited for Lucas' eventual arrival by walking around the park, taking in the various stalls still open, the games… The stage was empty at the moment, though there was a general sort of open-mic policy at this time of night. It was one of the things she loved the most, seeing people go up there, taking a chance… If she'd brought her guitar, anything, she just might have gone up there. She'd been thinking that, and then Lucas had joined her.

"Come on, they have these burgers out that way, they're still around. I may have eaten two already."

"Two burgers and cotton candy?" Lucas counted off with a smirk.

"See, when you say it like that…" Maya shook her head at him. "You just wait until you have one of those." Soon, they ended up on a bench, with Lucas' order between them, the better for her to snatch up a fry or two. "How was it at the store today?" she asked, always curious for some tales of customer service oddities.

"Good, not too busy," Lucas reported, then off a semi disappointed look on her face, "Cecilia was there." Now she dropped the pout. "She was with her dad and I ran into her."

"How's she doing?" Maya asked.

"Good, I think," Lucas nodded, creating a pause by taking a bite of his burger. "She's still sort of… Well, like him, you know?"

"Yeah," she sighed. Much as he tried to put up a good front, Sam clearly still felt the sting of his breakup. Maya and Lucas would do their best to cheer him up again, without being to obvious about it, but it was not so easy to do.

"She asked if she could still come to Halloween," Lucas went on, to which Maya gave an immediate look which read as 'of course she can.' "I told her that," Lucas replied, reassuring her. "I also suggested she might drop by the house tomorrow, so you two could discuss costumes."

"Good, good," Maya breathed. After a few seconds, reading a new look on her face, Lucas smiled and held out the remainder of his fries. Maya took the cup with a grateful smile.

The next morning, Maya started out her Sunday morning as she generally would. She had a casual breakfast, seeing Lucas and Sam off to their respective days of work. Once they were gone, she took the dogs out for a walk, occasionally stopping to talk to any of her neighbors along the lane if they happened to be outside. Back at the house, she climbed up to the attic to go through her plans for the coming week's classes, along with any other school-related work that needed doing.

She was still up there when she happened to get a glimpse out the window and spotted the familiar figure of Cecilia, her walk further recognizable because of the crutch she leaned to. She must have taken the bus rather than catching a ride from her father. Maya gathered up her papers and her computer and brought it all back to her room on the way down, finally coming out to the front porch as the girl walked up to the porch.

"Can I just say how much I have missed having you around?" Maya smiled. Cecilia climbed up to join her, and in response reached over and hugged her. Maya hugged her back, held her as she might any sister of hers. "The answer is 'so much,'" she added at her ear, and Cecilia nodded in her shoulder.

Going into the house, it was clear that Maya wasn't the only one to have missed Cecilia. The dogs all came scampering out, barking and wagging their tails and crowding around Sam's ex-girlfriend, who laughed and bent to greet them all. Archer especially, who was Sam's dog, would not leave her side for as long as she was at the house that day. He climbed up on the couch and sat with his head in her lap, the better to get some scratches as Cecilia and Maya caught up on the weeks since they'd last seen one another. Maya was happy to hear about Cecilia's father having a girlfriend.

"So, Halloween…" she finally sat up, like she was getting ready to conjure up something out of thin air. It felt very 'fairy godmother' like, and she wasn't mad at it.

"I still feel like maybe I shouldn't come," Cecilia shyly admitted.

"Hey, you want to be here, and we want you here," Maya reminded her.

"No, I know, and it really means a lot to me," Cecilia stated. "But well…" she hesitated. "I don't want it to look like… like I'm desperate and I want to get Sam back. It's not like that," she promised, shaking her head.

"I know," Maya promised back.

"But it's going to be my last chance to be at one of these for a while, if ever, and I was looking forward to it…"

"Hey, listen to me, okay?" Maya reached for her hand and squeezed it. "You don't have to explain yourself. I know that even Sam would say you should come, and I know you know that, too." Cecilia didn't have to say it, of course she knew. Sam was easily one of the best guys out there, and no one could take that from him. It probably played a hand in why it hurt so much to be separated from him all of a sudden. The break had not healed over, was barely starting to close, so it continued to sting.

"It's just… In a weird way, it kind of reminded me of when I lost my mom," Cecilia spoke, sounding so fragile now, and Maya had a feeling she'd been holding on to that, needing to share it for so long, needing to share it with _her_, because she was the only person she'd ever felt able to say these things to, in the years since her mother's passing. Maya felt her own emotions had taken a hit, and she reached out, placing a comforting hand over the girl's shoulder. "It's not the same, I mean Sam is still alive, obviously, but… I was just going along with my life and I was happy, and it never… it never occurred to me that I could actually lose him. And then I did, and…" She lacked the words, but her hand just hovered over her heart, like it could only indicate where the hurt originated, and how it felt so physical to her, like she could actually touch it and feel its burn under her fingertips.

There was little more for Maya to do in that moment but what felt needed. Her hand at Cecilia's shoulder became the means to draw her into her arms again, and as she'd expected to follow, the girl began to cry, first a little, then a lot more, as the hurt inside her was let out, in what felt like an endless wave. Maya just went on holding her, rubbed her back, feeling an echo of those emotions in herself.

When the tears had started to die out, sensing she'd have trouble just suddenly switching gears back to Halloween parties and costumes, Maya reached for the television remote and hit power, flipping through channels until she found something inoffensive and potentially curious enough to let Cecilia ride out the last of this moment and wake again into herself. Once she could see the girl sitting more independently, Maya went into the kitchen, grabbing them both something to drink and eat along with a pad of paper and a pen.

"Thanks," Cecilia quietly told her when she was offered the water. Maya sat next to her and started to draw. After a few minutes of watching her, Cecilia spoke again. "What's that?"

"Following a hunch, I guess," Maya told her. "I think I have the perfect costume for you. If you don't like it, we can just start over. Sound good?" she asked, and Cecilia nodded.

She went on watching, and Maya kept on drawing. At some point, she could tell that Cecilia figured out what the costume was shaping up to be, and by the look on her face, she was absolutely on board, so Maya kept going. When she was done, she handed the page over to Cecilia, who took it and looked at this image of her potential guise with genuine anticipation.

"We've got a few weeks to put it all together, and I would really love to help you do it," Maya nodded. Cecilia looked like she might cry again, for happiness this time.

"That'd be nice."

"Hey, so, I'm supposed to meet my parents and my siblings at the park in a couple of hours for the talent show. You should come with me if you're not busy," Maya suggested. Cecilia turned a smile to her, until a thought flashed across her face and she became suddenly doubtful. Maya knew what that thought must have been. "Sam probably won't join us until after the show's over, he'll still be at work." Cecilia looked just a bit frustrated with herself that this was where her mind had gone, but then she accepted Maya's invitation. "Great," Maya nodded. "That gives us a little while to look at this," she indicated the drawing.

"What are you going to be this year?" Cecilia wondered.

"We haven't actually decided yet," Maya admitted, in a tone suggesting she was now thinking they needed to get a move on that. "It'll be hard to top last year's, but that's not the point either, so… who knows? What do you think, any suggestions?" Cecilia considered this, observing her.

"I saw this video about turning villains into heroes and heroes into villains the other day," she offered, and Maya smiled at once.

"That… might have some potential…" she nodded, as Cecilia picked up the pad and pen and gave them back to her. "Yes, okay," Maya laughed, clicking the pen. "Which way should we…"

"Heroes into villains," Cecilia firmly nodded. Maya pointed at her.

"Good thinking. Halloween. Spooky."

The hours before they had to leave for the festival were spent coming up with way too many options, which Maya diligently sketched out. These options were posted in a row on the wall underneath the stairs, like a gallery from which Maya and Lucas could choose their winners, once they both came home at the end of the night.

Maya left with Cecilia, and they joined the Hunter Harts at the park, along with Morgan Stewart and Lindsay Alcott. The talent show drew a very impressive crowd, and it became the crown jewel of the 2028 Fall Festival. They were definitely going to have to do it again the following year.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	296. Their Spooking of Pumpkins

October 22nd 2020

_Chapter 296  
Their Spooking of Pumpkins_

"I told you we shouldn't have named them," Lucas smiled, much as he tried not to, as he watched Maya, kneeling among their pumpkin patch. She looked like didn't want to disturb a single inch of their small harvest.

They hadn't had much in the way of expectations when they had started off this project, months ago. Maya had presented the idea at last year's Halloween, and there had been temptation to hear her say 'we're going to grow pumpkins' and think that they'd never actually go through with it. But then they had done research, and they had found an ideal spot, had prepared it and planted the seeds of their hopes for this very moment.

As diligent as they had been in tending their garden, there had been days of staring at nothing but earth, hoping for a sign of something, anything that looked like the first sprouting of their pumpkins. The day it had finally happened, Maya had spotted the small leaves from up in the attic, looking through the window, and she'd dashed back down to their room, waking Lucas by just about pouncing on him. And then when those little leaves had grown, and grown, and grown, and flowered, and at long last they found the definitive signs of very small pumpkins, starting to show… Oh, that had been ridiculously rewarding.

From there, they had watched the little things grow larger and larger. They had five of them in total, and neither of them had expected so many to grow like this, figured they might have a few duds along the way, but they had five, and they all looked to be as perfect as any pumpkins could be. Lucas only needed to get one look at Maya sitting on the ground one day, sketching the patch, to know that she would have gone and named each of their growing pumpkins. When prompted to reveal these, she'd just grinned to herself before sitting up and pointing each one out.

Carrot, Clementine, Ginger, Marigold, and Sweet Potato… Lucas had to laugh, while Maya was beaming from ear to ear.

Of course now here they were, and much as they had tended their quintet over the last few months, now the time had come for them to leave the comfort of the ground where they had grown, and Maya was looking at them all like she was about to kill them.

"But I _had _to name them… It was right there," she shrugged, looking up with eyes much too woeful.

"Because they're orange?" Lucas smiled, and Maya responded by patting Sweet Potato and giving him a nod. "You know we won't be doing them any favor by leaving them out here either," he finally pointed out, and she huffed, hardly encouraged by logic. Of course, they were going to have to do it, but she didn't have to like it.

"When we open them up, we take some of their seeds, and we put them aside, with their names, so we can plant them again in the spring, can we do that?" Maya asked him.

"Yeah, of course," Lucas confirmed, then, "So… Carrot II, Clementine II…"

"Exactly," Maya moved to stand, accepting Lucas' hand to help her up when it was offered.

"So… are we ready?" he asked, nodding to the pumpkins. She let out a breath. Yes… They might as well get on with it.

Pumpkin angst aside, they were both very happy to find themselves rounding up on the end of October, for so many reasons. After so many years where the end of one month and the start of another was marked with a celebration of their love, their relationship… It was as though the deeper they dug their way into autumn, the happier they'd get for little to no reason. And now that Halloween was just a few days away… Oh, they had just about hit the pinnacle.

"I think…" Maya trailed off, looking at their row of pumpkins, once they had been carried up through the back door and on to the kitchen table. The dogs were all standing about, curiously looking to the orange things that smelled like the ground. "I think Sweet Potato should go to your parents, and Marigold to mine, and then… Ginger to the Sandersons?" Maya turned back to Lucas for his opinion. This would leave Carrot and Clementine for them.

It had been decided, somewhere about the time when the pumpkins had been named, that they would go ahead and 'spread the wealth' to the other families. They hadn't told them of this plan, just in case it all went bad, or they just changed their minds, but now that they looked to their little harvest, with so much pride between the two of them… It kind of felt right.

"Sounds good to me," Lucas agreed with the choices. "You up for a delivery run?" he asked, checking the time. It was just after dinner on Friday, and there was no doubt that they'd all be home.

So, the three pumpkins were cleaned up and loaded into Lucas' car, as securely as could be, so as to prevent 'backseat pumpkin pie,' as Maya called it.

The first stop was an easy one, just up the road from their own house. Pulling up the Sandersons' drive, they could see Missy sitting on the house steps along with Kai Avelino, the two of them chatting along with postures and gestures that suggested they were doing what they loved to do together, which was to talk about zombies. With Halloween approaching, they could be said to be at the heart of prime walking dead season. They looked up as one when they became aware of the car, and they stood up, curious for this visit from their art teacher.

"Still zombies this year?" Lucas asked as he got out of the car.

"Yeah, but we're not telling yet what we were before," Kai told him, as Missy joined this statement with a shake of the head.

"So that's how it is, huh?" Maya smiled.

"You can't mark us down for it either," Missy noted, to which Maya raised her hands in 'surrender.'

"Fine, fine. Anyway, we're not here to take anything away," she told the girl, looking back to Lucas as he pulled Ginger the pumpkin from the backseat.

Missy was very familiar with the pumpkins, as she'd insist on checking on them whenever she was over at the house for any reason or another. Between that and the addition of Trooper to the farm's 'population,' it had only felt natural to gift the Sandersons with one of their first pumpkins. They brought it into the house, where it was received with many thanks by Missy's parents and grandparents. Much as Missy would check on the pumpkins when she was at their house, Lucas and Maya both made a stop over at the stable to look in on Trooper whenever they were by the farm, which they did now.

"Hey, Troop," Lucas smiled, seeing how the animal reacted to his and Maya's arrival. He had been doing well since they brought him out here. He hadn't exactly gone and regained years upon his life, but anyone who had been around him in the last weeks and months before his move would say that they hadn't seen the horse look so spry in a good long while.

After leaving the farm, Maya and Lucas got back on the road, making now for the Hunter Hart house, deciding it would be best to go that way first, the better to catch the kids before they went off to bed. One thing was for certain, as they arrived, and it was that the family was very much looking forward to Halloween. The decorations were all over the place, in a good way. With Marigold the pumpkin in hand, they headed up to the door, where Maya rang the bell before using her key to let herself and Lucas in.

"Hello?" she called out, a moment before a tiny werewolf sprang into view with a 'mighty' roar. It was a good thing it was cuter than it was terrifying, as it kept the pumpkin good and secure in Lucas' arms, while Maya aimed for a more playful response, pretending to be terrified, at the mercy of MJ the werewolf as he 'pounced' at her. "Gotcha!" she finally hugged him close, making her brother give up the game and just melt into giggles instead. "I like your costume a lot, very convincing," Maya told him.

"Good!" MJ pronounced, standing up now and batting his hairy hands about his face.

"A little hot in here, huh? Too much hair?" Lucas asked him, and the boy turned a nod up to him. When he did, his eyes went wide with awe over the pumpkin. It was one of their larger ones, larger than the ones presently on display outside the house.

MJ was helped out of his costume by his big sister, while the pumpkin was brought over to Katy and Shawn. They were in the midst of helping the girls with their own costumes, and they welcomed the break. From the looks of it, Haley had chosen to be a bird, going by the many feathers being sewn on by her mother while she kept a watchful eye. Meanwhile, the twins were working on their plan to go as 'a mirror image.' Their costumes had been made to be the reverse of one another, and now they moved as though a mirror sat between them. When Nellie raised her right arm, Gracie raised her left, when one jumped, so did the other. It actually looked easy to them, much to their father's smiling fascination.

The large pumpkin, along with its bearers, brought all these proceedings to a pause. Shawn and Katy were both thankful for the gift, while the kids were all very interested to find out which of the pumpkins they had received. They all knew the names, too.

"Why do I have a feeling they're going to have an even harder time about cutting it open than you will?" Lucas teased as he and Maya finally got back in the car for their last stop. She gave him a 'disapproving' look, for as long as she could keep it going without breaking into chuckles.

Arriving last at the elder Friar house, Maya elected herself to carry Sweet Potato the pumpkin, so Lucas led the way, opening the door for her. When he looked back to find her burying down a laugh, he made a few signs to ask what that was about, but she only shook her head. _Never mind_. Whatever it was about, it was set aside for the time being, as they were greeted by Thomas Friar, rising from the living room couch at the sound of the door.

"That is a good looking pumpkin," he declared with a slow nod.

"Thanks, made it ourselves," Maya grinned over to Lucas, who laughed at the bright look on her face.

When Melinda Friar found not only the visitors but also the reason for their visit, she wasted no time enumerating the many uses for the pumpkin and debating which ones she wished to explore the most. Looking at her now, it felt good to see and be reminded of how things had changed, how they had returned more or less to the way they were before the kitchen fire. She had regained the ease she'd once had in that room, where for a time she'd been made so nervous and uncertain because of what she and her husband had gone through. Lucas suspected this was in part the reason why Maya had wanted to bring her the pumpkin. It would feed her excitement for the holidays rather than her dread, recalling those darker times.

"I think we need to try for even more than five next year," Lucas breathed out as they drove on for home.

"How many more?" Maya wondered. "We only have so much land to use," she reminded him.

"As much as we can, I guess."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	297. Their Spooking of Students

October 23rd 2020

_Chapter 297  
Their Spooking of Students_

It used to be that Maya hated when Halloween landed in the middle of the week. Mostly that was because she was a student herself, and middle of the week meant shorter activities in the evening, to factor in bedtimes and next day classes. But now she was the teacher, and Halloween meant springing her ideas on her students, with decorations, and costumes, and candy. Last year's October 31st had actually been on a Sunday, but it hadn't stopped the Friday before from being one of her favorite working days, and this year, with a Tuesday Halloween, she intended to keep the tradition going, full steam ahead.

The first step had been to decide what she would dress as for the in-school part of the day. Last year had been easy, the school and the party had been on different days, so there hadn't been so much of a rush for transition. Now, she would have to go to school, come home, and hurry up and get changed before the trick or treaters started to descend upon the house on the lane. So, it really felt like a gamble when she came up with the idea of carrying on what she had sort of started the year before. She had been Serafina the vampire, a previous costume of hers, which gave her the idea of dressing as her previous year's party costume for the school part.

"Are you sure you're going to be able to pull that off?" Lucas asked as he watched her transform once again into the sun, all glitter and gold.

"As soon as I get home, I will hop in the shower, and I'll be all set before you know it," Maya assured him with a golden smile. "It won't be near as great without my moon by my side anyway," she added coyly, earning herself a chuckle out of him.

And so she was off. She didn't know that she had ever appreciated how good it felt to walk into the school all decorated for Halloween when she had been a student. Now, she walked through the halls and she couldn't stop smiling.

"Hey, I remember this," she heard Morgan's laughing voice and spun around. Her friend and fellow teacher was dressed up as what felt like a very Jane Austen era situation, especially for how she'd once told her she'd read each of her books at least twice a year since she was sixteen.

"Finally went through with it, huh?" Maya smiled, recalling how she'd wanted to dress like this at last Halloween but, it being her first teaching year, too, she'd eventually decided not to. She didn't want to 'come on too strong.'

"Yeah, well, you know, gotta live your truth," Morgan nodded, and Maya pressed her hands together in a gentle clap. "I guess yours is that you're the sun?"

"I do like to light up a room," Maya turned about.

She explained her costume turnover plan to her colleague as Morgan joined her in the art room, the better to transform it as before into a more day-appropriate look. She hadn't been sure at first whether it would work or not, seeing as she was a star instead of a vampire this time around, but by the end she was of a mind that everything was exactly as it should be. Now, she was ready to welcome her students for the day. She was very curious to see who would come in costume this year, and what those would be.

"See, I knew I could count on you," Maya beamed as among the first of her seniors that day came Derek and Helena. Last year, he had come as Black Panther, and to see how happy that made him… It had been something like a revelation. This year, with his best friend and partner in crime in tow, he had returned with a new costume, while Helena had hers. Maya had a feeling they had spent a lot of time working on these together. She'd go so far as to imagine Derek keeping his ailing friend company the year before, as he'd assembled his panther suit, and it made her happy.

"Yours is amazing, too," Helena blinked, a reaction which Maya would find many times over the day, especially from the new students, who had no concept of the art teacher 'going all out' just yet.

"Thanks," Maya bowed her sun crowned head. "If you guys are free tonight, you should come around by my place. We have games, and a maze…" She wasn't sure if they'd be up for it, maybe they would have been too old, but she had a feeling they had just the right spirit for something like this, and going by their intrigued looks, maybe she had it right. She gave them directions, which prompted Helena to grin all at once.

"Oh, that's your house? My cousins went last year, they couldn't shut up about it," she revealed, making her teacher laugh.

The seniors had given way to the sophomores, and as with the previous year, Missy and Kai came along in a very tame get up, compared to their zombie turn in the evening. Clearly, they were getting to enjoy the fact that they carried this mystery over their teacher, and Maya was happy to indulge them, appearing on the whole very intrigued. Truth be told, she had been finding herself trying to figure out the solution ahead of time. She tried to think about what she had seen and heard of them in recent months, figuring it might play into 'this year's zombies.' So far, she had many contenders, though none that stood out. And so the mystery continued.

She saw most of her juniors ahead of the end of the day as she'd walked out of her class on her way to find Morgan for lunch and spotted them coming out of Mrs. Anderson's algebra class. Ariel Su continued to honor her mermaid namesake, this time having fashioned herself into a futuristic version of the character, and she was rightly proud of her achievement. Meanwhile, Daphne Brett was all smiles, waving to her art teacher as she went along, hand in hand with Dakota Day. Daphne might have been paired up with Ariel instead, for the costume she'd chosen, coming along as an alien of her own creation. She had actually consulted with Maya, for the look of it and then for makeup tricks. Now she had accomplished it all and received a proud look from her teacher. As for Dakota, he had come dressed as what Maya was almost sure was a video game character, though she couldn't place him.

In no time however, she was given confirmation as well as information, as Roman came along with the freshmen after lunch. He was also dressed as a character, from the same game as his brother. As she was informed – in excess of details – these were their respective preferred characters, so they had dressed as them today, the better to bring the competition to real life.

"I was wondering if you would match your sister today," Maya chuckled when Khalil came along. She had heard, via her sisters, that Desi Russell was going to be dressed as the heroine of her favorite movie, a warrior sorceress. The sorceress in question never travelled far without her trusted associate, and just now Khalil arrived for art class dressed up as him.

"It was the only way I'd talk her into going, that and getting her to go with her friends," he went on, here acknowledging the fact that 'her friends' were also 'his teacher's little sisters.' As polite and humble as he always was, here he was also just so thankful. Much as they had their grandparents looking after them, Khalil had clearly felt himself pulled into a more paternal than brotherly role where Desi was concerned, ever since their father had gone away and they'd come to Texas.

"She's not claustrophobic, is she? If she's not, then she'll definitely like the maze," Maya grinned. Of course, part of the night for the little Hunters would be to visit their big sister and brother-in-law to enjoy the games, and the maze, and extra candy 'because we're family' as Nellie would say.

"I'll go with her, she'll be fine," Khalil nodded.

As with the previous year, there were a number of students in each group for which she had no idea what to expect, costume wise. In the freshman group, high above all others, was Rochelle. The immediate instinct was that she would show up in her everyday clothes, no costume. But then was that just because of her attitude toward the class? For all she knew, she loved Halloween as much as her… right? Maybe… Truly, Maya didn't think she would even think of costumes, not when all her brain power seemed centered on studying, getting good grades. It was never going to be about opening herself up, being social or…

Or…

Oh… Oh, she had a thought now… Maybe a crazy idea, maybe too much for her to undertake now, on top of everything, but… Maybe if she didn't do it alone…

"Good afternoon, Rochelle," Maya tipped her golden rayed head to the girl when she walked into the room. No costume in sight, just a fuzzy turtleneck and jeans.

"Good afternoon," she mumbled, like she only said it because she had to, if she didn't want to be reprimanded in any way.

"Candy?" Maya offered, indicating the bowl.

"My mom's a dentist," Rochelle replied, without missing a beat, as she went on toward her seat.

"She must be so proud," Maya sighed, pulling herself back on track to start the period as the bell rang.

As soon as the period was over and the kids were gone, she stopped off to discover where Rochelle would be headed next period, and then she stalked off in search of one Cory Matthews. He became aware of her presence when a good portion of his class, just started, looked to the door at the golden woman standing there.

"One minute," Cory told them before stepping out into the hall. Maya took in his costume and had to resist laughing.

"Didn't you dress like this one year when I was here?" she asked.

"I've got four costumes, I rotate, no one's supposed to be here long enough to see them again," he shrugged, tipping a look to her.

"Uh-huh, okay," she squinted before getting back on track. "I have a proposition for you."

With her answer secured, the sun went seeking Rochelle McNeil, finding her in Mr. Brett's science class. She asked to borrow her, and when she stood and walked out to the tune of the widely recognized 'someone's in trouble' hush from the rest of her group, she only appeared increasingly annoyed. By the time she came to stand with Maya in the hall, she looked like she was fighting the urge to speak her mind with every inch of her patience.

"Here's the deal. You listen to what I have to say to you, and if you still feel the need to unleash whatever that is," Maya indicated the girl's face, "Then you can go right ahead. Total honesty, choice of vocabulary, all yours. Deal?" Rochelle stared back at her, observed her like she was trying to spot the trap. When she couldn't find it, she nodded. "Good. Walk with me."

They wandered away from the history class, passing a couple of students off to their classes with tardy slips in hand.

"I came to Texas when I was thirteen, and I was not a good student, not by a long shot. But I was on my own, and I wanted so much to make a good impression that I actually started to apply myself more, and I became a better student. I went from mostly failing to qualifying for advanced placement. I never believed I could ever be someone who not only did well in school but also enjoyed being in school, so much that being here, as a teacher everyday, actually sounded like a good thing. One of the things that helped make that happen was a quiz team some friends and I put together. We called ourselves the Basket Cases."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	298. Their Spooking of Visitors

October 24th 2020

_Chapter 298  
Their Spooking of Visitors_

As excited as she had been going into this day, by the time Maya returned home, her love for this year's Halloween had reached further heights still. Sure, it had nothing to do specifically with the day's festivities, but it was happening today, and so that totally counted in her book.

She wouldn't go so far as to say that she'd cracked the Rochelle case, that she suddenly had the freshman turned on to a new path, but she had definitely done something to start and turn her head. For the first time today, she had gotten a look out of the girl that didn't feel one hundred percent composed in annoyance and frustration. She'd gotten intrigue, curiosity, and those were some of her greatest allies. Rochelle actually wanted to know more, after Maya told her some of the things they had done as a team, told her about the competitions, the travels. Maybe she mostly saw it as a thing that would look very good on her transcripts for now, but it was something. She'd told her to come and meet her in the art class over lunch tomorrow, and then she'd sent her back on her way to science class.

For the rest of her break, and maybe for a portion of her class with the juniors, she'd tried to think about who else she knew that might have been a potential candidate for the team, which she and Cory would run together, the better to divide the load. Ariel Su came to mind, maybe Helena Zimmerman… She had a thought to bring in Stella Buckley, the better to open her up to new opportunities… An all-girl team… That was starting to be very interesting…

She needed to put a pin in this for now. She was home, and within a few short hours there would be kids descending upon their house, kids and teens, families, all looking to enjoy a bit of Halloween fun, and after _that_ there would be the party inside the house, and then at midnight… Oh, what a night it would be. First things first, she needed to shed every bit of gold and glitter, returning herself to base level Maya before starting on a brand-new transformation.

Carefully pulling her crown of rays from her head as she went up the stairs, she dropped it off in her room and carried on down the hall toward the bathroom, pulling her hair over her shoulder to reach for the zipper on her dress. She had just gotten a hold of it when she came to a sudden stop, startled by her near collision with… Dora?

"Woah! Hey… Hey…" Maya's voice shifted from surprise, to confusion, to shock, even as the expression on the girl's face went from surprised, to startled, to awkward.

Lucas' young cousin stood before her, having just exited Sam's room. She stood before her, hair messily tumbled from a broken bun, covered by little more than a hastily buttoned shirt, while the rest of her clothes, boots and all, were in a mass she carried in her arms. If Maya had to guess, she'd been heading into the bathroom to get dressed.

Looking past the nineteen-year-old, almost more to follow a thought than through any personal wish to see whatever she'd find, she could just make out her brother, asleep in his bed, the covers just halfway up his naked back.

Too many thoughts… so many thoughts going through her mind… It didn't take much to understand what this all added up to, but it was still… No, no, no, too much…

She looked back to Dora now, standing there, staring back at her with growing panic on her face as she remained stuck in her compromising position, unable to breathe while she received no words.

_"I'm going to go in there," _Maya finally signed, surprised that her hands were not shaking as she then indicated the bathroom. _"I need to get this gold off of me for tonight. While I do that, go in my room, get dressed. Wait for me downstairs."_ Dora stole a look back into Sam's room before turning back to Maya and giving her a nod. She hurried off into the room, shutting the door.

Maya breathed out, feeling almost woozy. She looked back at her sleeping brother, fighting the urge to go in there and wake him up and… and what? He was eighteen, and he may have lived in her house but he wasn't her kid, and… and he was single, wasn't he? He wasn't doing anything wrong, she guessed, except it felt wrong… It felt so wrong… And today of all days, today…

Maybe all that turmoil of shock and emotion gave her great scrubbing powers, because she powered through and was glitter free in record time. She was now free to go downstairs and have the most awkward conversation with a family member since that time she'd given her brother The Talk, which now that she thought about it made her feel like this would be a case of 'I laugh because I can't believe how ridiculous this is.'

Instead, the universe decided to do her one better. When she finally opened the bathroom door, it was just the exact moment when, across the hall, a barely awake Sam was realizing that Dora wasn't there. He moved to stand, then spotted his big sister in the bathroom doorway and immediately sat back down, grasping the blankets and holding them secured over his waist and everything below. His eyes were wide and his jaw was moving pointlessly, as though it expected to be able to catch the appropriate words.

"Yeah, hey, I've got nothing either," Maya shook her head, moving toward her room. "Pants. Find some," she called back.

The door was open again, Dora had gone downstairs. Changing out of her dress, Maya twisted her hair up and tied it before making her way down as well. As she got nearer, she could just make out Sam and Dora's voices, in hushed but hurried tones. She could just see them, in the kitchen. Dora looked ready to cry, while Sam was doing his best to reassure her. The way his hands seemed unable to breach the distance between them, like he wasn't sure he could, Maya could only guess that whatever had happened upstairs had been a first between them, in all likelihood a spur of the moment, without definition or expectation, just two people who'd carried one another in their hearts for years without means to see it through until suddenly…

As startled, as shocked as she'd been earlier, Maya didn't know what to make of it anymore. There was no way of ignoring it, not with everything that had already happened. And for all that… The thing that kept coming to Maya's mind was Cecilia. No one had done anything wrong, Sam and her, they'd been broken up for a couple months now, and they should both have the ability and the right to move on, if this was what that was, but still… Maya couldn't chase the memory of holding that girl in her arms while she cried on the couch not too long ago. She would be here tonight… Lucas might have called this a fitting finale to what had been four years, four Halloween nights featuring some situation or another involving those three. Oh… Lucas… She was _not_ looking forward to filling him on this.

"I-I should go…" Dora spoke when Maya walked into the kitchen. Sam was shaking his head at her, biding her to stay.

"You don't have to do that," Maya insisted, earning relief off of her brother.

"No, but I need to, I… my costume isn't here," Dora specified.

"Alright, I'll drive you," Maya decided simply, turning to Sam, who tried to keep his eyes from bugging out. "Can you get things going with the set-up while we're gone?"

"I…" he looked to her, then to Dora, who was looking at her boots. "Okay… Y-yeah, I'll do that."

"Great. Let's go," Maya held out her arm for Dora to follow, which she did. They climbed into the minivan and took off Dora's apartment. "Did you just get in from school?" Maya asked after a few seconds of awkward silence.

"Yes," Dora confirmed quietly. "I was on my way home, a-and Sam and I had been texting while I was on the bus, so he asked if I wanted to come over early, to help with the things outside and…"

"Right, no, yeah, I get the picture," Maya cut her off. She did not need specifics of how the two of them had ended up in bed together.

"I'm really sorry… I didn't think… I wasn't there to…" Dora tried to explain, sounding again like she would cry, which just prodded at Maya's sympathies. She wished she wasn't at the wheel right now, so she could close her eyes a moment, take a breath, center herself again. All she could do was stay in the moment as it was.

"Has this been going on a while or…" she finally had to ask, to be sure.

"No," Dora responded at once. "N-no, we… it was just this once, I… we… I don't know what we're… I don't know…"

"But you still…" Maya slowly asked. She didn't need to finish the question for Dora to know what it was. _You still love him._ She hesitated to respond, but she nodded at last. "And he… he still…"

"I think… Yes…" Dora sighed. Maya drove on in silence for a few seconds more.

"Can I give you one piece of advice?" she finally asked. Dora nodded. "Whatever this is, if either of you thinks it might be something, just… take your time, really make sure that you're not just… reacting."

"I promise," Dora told her, maybe finally accepting that she wasn't in so much trouble as to be unable to breathe.

Maya stayed in the car while Dora dashed up to go and collect her costume. She found it near impossible not to just faceplant into the steering wheel a couple times, thinking of this new mess she'd stumbled upon. She could only guess what tonight would have been like if she hadn't busted the two of them, and… No, no, she wasn't even going to…

When Dora returned, bag in hand, they headed back for the house. They arrived to find Sam hard at work, possibly having taken the mess in his head like fuel, the thought of his sister and Dora out there and whatever conversation they might have been having just lighting a fire under him. As Dora went inside to get changed, Maya went to help Sam as he moved the extra hay from the maze into place. The moment his hands were empty, she pulled him into her arms and held to him.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Reminding myself that I love you so much so I won't say the first thing that comes to my mind right now and that I'll tell you the second one instead… maybe the fourth. It basically goes along the line of 'you better hope you know what you're doing, and if you hurt either of those girls, you and I are going to have some words you won't like.' Are we clear?"

"Super clear, yes," Sam nodded.

"Figured," Maya pulled back, giving him the tamest smack on the arm she could muster in that moment. "I know you did nothing wrong, but I still can't help but be mad at you right now, and I just… I have to go get changed. I love you," she tacked on, reminding him. Sam nodded, looking nonetheless like he was very aware that this was not his proudest moment by a mile. Maya felt restless down to her bones as she climbed the steps on to the porch. "Happy freakin' Halloween…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	299. Their Spooking of Games

October 25th 2020

_Chapter 299  
Their Spooking of Games_

"Hey, guys," Lucas smiled as he climbed out of his car to find his cousin working along with Sam, and Missy and Kai, putting the finishing touches on the outdoor decorations and other items for the evening's activities. "Do you need any help?"

"No, we're good, we're almost done," Sam replied, never looking up from where he sat arranging the extra, smaller pumpkins, which they had bought.

"Alright, well it all looks great," Lucas replied, frowning to himself as he wondered what was up with him. He couldn't put it into words, but something seemed off about his brother. He put this notion aside as he turned and smiled at his cousin when she came toward him. "Love the costume," he hugged Dora. When he let her go, she looked down at herself before turning her eyes back up to him. This year, she was dressed, it felt, like some kind of autumn fairy, with great, colorful wings that sort of looked like maple leaves.

"Thanks," she told him, and here again it felt as though something had gone amiss.

"Are you okay?" Lucas asked her. She stared back at him, possibly at a loss for words herself.

"Oh, yes, I just had a long day at school," she finally explained.

"Yeah, had one of those myself," Lucas chuckled, passing her a brief sign to ask if she was sure that was all. Dora nodded. "Okay. Maya inside?" he asked, pointing to the house.

"She was going to fill the candy bowls, last I heard," Missy piped in.

Lucas headed inside, where he was quickly greeted by a pack of bats and devils. The dogs had been outfitted with horns, and wings, which they all bore with impressive patience. They made him laugh, especially for how they went trotting off together.

"Maya?" Lucas called out.

"In here," she called back from the kitchen. He followed her voice and found she had indeed seen to the candy, although now the bowls had been filled, and his wicked Snow White sat at the table, adding one more empty wrapper to a growing pile before biting into a fun size chocolate bar. "Hey," she waved with the fingers that weren't holding the other half.

"Okay, so the weird vibes are in here, too, huh?" Lucas blinked, moving over to lay a kiss at his wife's forehead. She looked up at him. "What's going on?" Maya sat quietly eating the rest of her chocolate, like she was considering her response with great care. "Should I be worried?"

"I don't know, do you want the truth or do you want to have fun tonight?" Maya sighed. Seeing how she was eyeing the candy again, he gave her chair a pull so she'd be turned to face him and not the treats.

"Is this really an either/or?" he asked, to which she gave a shrug. "Try me." Maya looked at him for a few seconds more before clearing her throat, rising, and moving to ensure no one was nearby. Eventually, she went and pulled Lucas by the hand, leading him out the back door and into the Hex. Once there, with the door shut, she turned back to him. "Seriously, whatever this is, I need to…"

"Dora was here when I came home from work earlier," Maya started.

"Okay…" Lucas slowly nodded, at once unsure of where this was going and made to want to know, as it involved his cousin.

"She was just coming out of Sam's room, with the… vast majority of her clothes in her arms," Maya continued, figuring it would be best to just get on with it. There was just no point in being coy about it. Lucas certainly looked appropriately stunned by the revelation.

"She…" he blinked.

"Yeah."

"And Sam was…"

"Asleep… naked… blanket…" Maya vaguely mimed, setting the scene. In response, Lucas could only take the few steps that would bring him to sit on the small couch. Maya followed him, sitting on the armrest and looking down at him. "I should have seen this coming. Wouldn't be Halloween without our favorite drama, right?" she sighed. He didn't reply. "I can't stop feeling like I want to be mad at him, at them, but there's no point, is there? It's not like anyone's cheating on anyone, and they're… their own people… But I still…" she held out her hands, squeezing at a nothing that felt like it wanted to be something.

Whatever the discovery had been for her, she knew it would be complicated for him, too. It had been her brother, and it was his cousin. Much as she never sought to install a distinction, she had only known Sam for… not quite half his lifetime, while Lucas had known Dora since she was a baby, he'd held her as such, when he'd been eight years old, so he remembered the whole of her life. She was and always had been his favorite cousin, the one who mattered most to him. She wasn't a kid anymore, no, but he would always get this flash of that tiny girl who'd make a run for him every time they saw one another. And Sam, he had become his brother, even before he'd married his big sister, but now he'd found himself in the position of potentially causing some sorrow for his cousin, and it put him somewhere he didn't want to be.

"Here," Maya reached into her pocket and handed him a chocolate. The wrapper crinkled in his hand, but he just stared at it without opening it. "What do you think, we just stay in here all night, I may have hidden one big bag of these in here, for recording and rehearsing cravings. We can have our own Halloween, just you and me." If nothing else, that got a small smile out of him. "Just say the word, and I'm locking the door," she moved to stand but was pulled back down, landing in her husband's lap this time. "You might be on to something there, Huckleberry," she smirked, eventually letting out a breath and setting her forehead to his.

"This is so not what I envisioned tonight to be," Lucas breathed out.

"No? What _did_ you have in mind?" Maya asked, figuring all she could do now, for both their sakes and maybe Sam and Dora's, too, was to coax the merriment right out of him and let it pull out her own as well.

"Oh, you know, so many of those Halloween greatest hits…" he started, locking his arms around her waist. "And playing our parts," he looked at her now as though taking in her costume for the first time. Maya gave him her best 'I'm not so innocent, how do you like them poisoned apples' look. "And at the end of the night, when the clock strikes midnight…"

"Wrong princess," Maya teased.

"… it's November," he carried on, and the look on his face made her laugh.

"Yes, it will be," she agreed, catching him in a slow, almost healing kiss. They _had_ decided that they would start trying in November, hadn't they? With how eager they had both been, how much longer could they be expected to wait? "What about…" she started to ask, as the notion of her brother came back around. The thought had the misfortune of coming along with a flashback she could have done without, but it couldn't be helped.

"That may have already been taken care of," Lucas revealed. It wasn't as though he had gone to Sam and told him 'you need to clear out because your sister and I are going to be busy,' but he had advanced the possibility of having the house to themselves for their anniversary, and Sam had responded by arranging to spend a night or two at a friend's place.

"Man with a plan," Maya nodded appreciatively. "So, are you ready to go back out there?" Lucas looked for a moment like he had forgotten and was now remembering the thing she'd told him. He rubbed at his face and she tried not to laugh.

"Yeah, let's go," he replied as she stood up and offered her hands to pull him up.

"First things first, you need a transformation. I just don't know if anyone will believe you as a bad guy," she joked.

"I can be scary… Just see how Sam will act once he realizes I know," Lucas shrugged, and now Maya laughed.

By the time either Maya or Lucas rejoined the others downstairs, with wicked Snow joined by her equally wicked prince, the group had grown, now counting the Hunter Harts and Riley and Dylan, even as Rosa and Jenna arrived, too, all of them here to assist with the outside part once people would start to arrive. As expected, the moment their gazes crossed, Sam had grown a definitive 'oh crap, he knows' look, while Dora would look to her cousin with something like concern, for the first time in her life.

"Yeah, this is going to be weird for a while," Lucas told Maya under his breath.

"Uh huh…"

Regardless of this thing hanging over their heads, Halloween was upon them, and soon the night was a go. Kids, families, they started to arrive, some of them already on their fourth annual visit to the Friar house's night of spooks and games. Seeing those kids, recognizing them, seeing how they were growing year to year… It was an unexpected bonus to the whole thing, and Maya and Lucas both were supremely appreciative of it.

Maya saw more than a few of her students that night, mostly those who had younger siblings, or those who had been to the house before. Stella and Phoebe showed up, joining Missy and Kai for a bit of maze running. Khalil and little sister Desi also came along, and as soon as they did, mirror twins Nellie and Gracie ran off to bring their new friend to see all the games. Desi Russell looked so much like her big brother, right down to that bright smile, which was put on full display as soon as she found her friends. By the time they would head their separate ways that night, a sleepover would be set for the upcoming weekend, and all three of the nine-year-olds were barely able to contain their giddiness.

"Hey, Mrs. Friar," a cheerful voice intoned, in a very student-like rhythm, and Maya turned around to find she had thought correctly.

"I don't think you need to call me that anymore," she smiled, looking upon Milena Janacek. It wasn't as though she never saw her former student anymore, thanks to her connection to August Matthews, but still there was this temptation to just hug her for how glad she was to see her. This feeling was only increased for finding both August and her brother, Tony, not far behind.

"Yeah, but it's really hard not to," Milena admitted. The exchange was getting to be something of a routine between them.

"Are you guys sticking around for the party?"

"Can we?" Milena nodded.

"Absolutely," Maya laughed, as her former seniors went along and disappeared among the visitors. Almost like an apparition, as soon as they'd passed her by, Maya spotted Cecilia coming along, and it was a new turmoil of emotions, thinking of what had happened earlier and how she might react if/when _she_ found out, too. "I was starting to think you wouldn't make it," she smiled, approaching the girl.

"I didn't want you to think I'd chickened out. I missed my bus," Cecilia told her, looking at her costume in such a way as to suggest that walking around in it had been the thing to slow her down and cause her to miss that bus, forcing her to wait for the next.

"Next time, just call me and I'll go get you, alright?"

"I will," Cecilia nodded. She looked nervous, and Maya could understand why, just as much as she worried to think her brother's ex had no idea what she was walking into.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	300. Their Spooking of the Night

October 26th 2020

_Chapter 300  
Their Spooking of the Night_

Much as the first part of the evening had felt riddled with hiccups, by the time the activities shifted into the house for the party, it did get to feel a bit more… Halloweeny. Music, dancing, crazy cakes, friends in crazier costumes… Suddenly, both Maya and Lucas could look to one another and think of how eleven years ago that night, things had taken a turn between them, and the morning after that, sealed with a kiss…

"This is the first time we've left her with anyone that wasn't one or more of the four of us," Asher let out a breath, when asked how he and Ray and the girls were doing, two months into their shared parenthood. Specifically, baby Giulia had been left to the care of Mr. and Mrs. Garcia, who could not have been more in love with their little granddaughter if they tried. They'd come to collect her here at the house, shortly after she and her parents had arrived, so that her many aunts and uncles would get some time with her, face to face. The child was still too little to realize it, but oh how many people she had wrapped around her finger already…

"That's a good thing, right?" Rosa asked.

"Depends on who you ask," Asher tipped his head over to Chiara, carefully pulling chips from a bowl, as her long, billowing sleeves tended to get in the way.

As much as she had seemed to breeze through the pregnancy, the part afterward had been harder. Suddenly finding herself with a baby daughter in her arms, it had awakened something of an ache for her family back in the Italy and the home she had left behind upon coming here. Her family had flown in to meet Giulia, of course, and they'd been in Houston for a few weeks, but then they'd gone home, and Chiara really got to feel their absence.

It had gotten better over time, but not so much that the sadness didn't find its way back in now and again, resolving itself into so much protectiveness for the child she'd brought into the world. According to Sophie, she barely slept on the nights when Asher and Ray had Giulia at their house. And tonight, much as she knew that of course her daughter would be safe with her grandparents, there was an inevitable yearning for their reunion which made it harder for her to enjoy the party. Sophie could only do so much to hide her concerns, even as she did her very best to try and cheer her wife up. She finally got her to get up and go dance with her, and from there Chiara did manage to brighten again.

"So, what are you two up to after tonight?" Nadine asked Maya, who had not been paying attention. When Nadine tapped her on the shoulder, she turned her head, eyes full of questions. "You and Lucas, after tonight," she repeated.

"What? Did he say something to…" Maya blinked.

"What?" Nadine laughed.

"Never mind, I… Oh, the anniversary, you mean?" she realized, and Nadine confirmed with a nod. "I don't know, he's in charge of that part again, so I just follow his lead. I just know that there's a thing I'm supposed to bring with me to school tomorrow and open after last bell." The memory of this brief bit of instruction, given to her that morning when they got up, was able to get her smiling momentarily, prying her away from what she'd been focused on earlier. Nadine noticed the change though, and she gave her friend and bandmate a curious look.

"What's up?"

"Nothing," Maya promised, trying to wave it off.

"Liar," Nadine 'accused,' making her sigh. So, she turned her head again, discreetly pointing out the sort of awkwardness happening across the living room.

Here was Sam, chatting with some of his school friends, who had come to the party. There was Dora, signing away with Kayla and Will in what felt like she'd taken a break from her hearing aids. And then there was Cecilia, sitting to a piece of 'brain' cake as she watched the people dancing.

"Am I missing something?" Nadine asked, not getting exactly what Maya was getting at.

"And if I could tell you right now, I would, but I can't," Maya nodded at her.

Specifically, what she was able to notice, for knowing about what had happened earlier, was something of a conflict. Sam wanted to be nearer to Dora, maybe dance with her, and she wanted it, too. They had not meant for it all to happen that way, but now it had, and it had awakened something in them, had reminded them of all the things they had buried away for so long. Maya could more than understand how irresistible that feeling could get.

But then there was Cecilia, right there, and they were happy that she was here, they both were. She had been their friend, had been more to Sam, naturally, and despite everything that had come along, leading to their breakup, Dora still saw her as her friend, and Sam wanted them to be that again. So they wanted to go and see her, talk to her, except… Well, what if they gave themselves away? What would she think if she figured it out? More importantly, what would she feel? They were stuck, unable to get to each other and unable to get to her, while Cecilia… As resolved as she'd been to come anyway, now she was here and she looked like she had no idea what she was meant to do anymore. So she sat, and she ate her cake.

"Looks like a mess to me," Nadine declared, and Maya nodded once more. It definitely was that. "Who's that guy?"

"Which guy?" Maya turned to her, and Nadine pointed across the room. Even as Maya followed her finger, it moved, keeping up with its target's movements, approaching the couch where Cecilia sat. It took her a moment to remember whose costume that was, but then she was familiar enough with the way he walked to identify her former student.

"That's Tony Janacek," she blinked.

Playing like a silent act, they could only watch as Cecilia looked up when Tony spoke to her. He must have introduced himself, as she responded with a tip of the head and a readable declaration of her name. Tony pointed back, off to where people were dancing, and a surprised Cecilia appeared to kindly refuse, pointing to the floor and looking back to Tony. She'd likely stashed her crutch there. Whatever Tony said in response to this, it made her smile, or laugh, they couldn't say for sure. He might have asked her if she was sure she didn't want to give dancing a try, as she responded with a nod and an apologetic smile. Tony gave a courteous nod, then pointed to her plate. Cecilia pointed toward the kitchen, and with an exchange of waves, Tony walked off in search of cake. Cecilia looked back down to her plate for a moment, then back the way he'd gone, seeming to think to herself for a few seconds more before this sort of new breath in her convinced her to pick up her crutch and stand to head off to the kitchen, too.

Maya blinked. As baffled as she was about what had just happened and what it may or may not lead to, her gaze couldn't help but travel in search of the other two, where they'd been. They'd seen it, too, clearly. Dora was understandably surprised, even as she reacted as well as any friend might, when another friend had been going through a bad time and something came along to refresh their spirits. For all that though, she looked just as curious as Maya was about how Sam would react upon seeing his ex-girlfriend make a possible connection with someone new.

Oh, he was surprised, too, obviously, but if there was any concern from anyone that he might suddenly see this and feel the stirring of lingering emotions, making him want to get her back, that wasn't what happened, not by any means. He looked… relieved, almost hopeful. For some reason, it reminded Maya of what Cecilia had told her, two years back, another Halloween caught in their tale. _He's got this stupid big heart, and he loves, and he loves, and he loves, and asking him to be any other way would be asking him not to be as good as he is… And he's really good…_

When they'd broken up, Cecilia and him, it was like the floor had fallen out from under them. He'd known there was no coming back from it, that as happy as they had felt they were, they were not seeing the truth underneath. They would always love one another, but their lives were just destined for different things, and the breakup had saved them from sinking so far that they would have destroyed one another on the way out. Cecilia had needed to confront her emotions, and she'd done that, when she'd visited Maya, but Sam… He needed to know she was okay, couldn't bear to cause her any hurt. Her maybe forging something with Tony, who he knew to be a solid guy, well… that might have been the best thing to happen.

Right then, Maya couldn't think why she'd felt in any way upset at her little brother. She knew who he was in his heart, and this thing with him and Dora, well… Who of them hadn't done something without thinking it through? Sam… Sam rarely did, and maybe this would be good for him in the end.

"What are we looking at?"

Maya and Nadine both jumped, startled, and they turned to find Lucas standing there, Zay following right behind like maybe they had both been going around, seeking their wives.

"Nothing," the two of them replied at once, grabbing their respective husband's hand and leading him off in opposite ways.

"Nothing, or more 'drama?'" Lucas asked Maya as she pulled him to an empty spot where they might dance.

"Please, I need to think about other things than teenage triangles right now," she pleaded with an exaggerated huff.

"Okay, okay," he laughed, one hand finding hers, the other settling around her waist. "Better?"

"Yes," she smiled, then, "Turn this way."

"Okay?" he followed her lead. She was looking back toward the kitchen. "You know, you're giving mixed signals," he teased her.

"Yeah, well, it's been a weird night."

"And getting weirder?"

"You could say that… New player, maybe."

"New…" he looked, but there was nothing much to see from where they stood.

"Would it be weird if you lifted me up right now?" she asked, and he gave her a look. "Hey, it's not my fault, I didn't want to get involved," she insisted. Lucas bit back a laugh. "Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in," she recited, sounding very much like her mother for a moment.

"You know you can't give me all that and not tell me the rest," Lucas looked to the kitchen again, like he might know whatever this was about if he saw something, anything.

"No, I guess not," Maya tapped her hand at his chest so he'd look at her again before motioning for him to bow his head until she could whisper at his ear. With the beat of the music around them, he might not have caught half of what she said, but then he stood back up with a look of surprise, and one which read like 'this is good?' "Maybe?" Maya shrugged. They wouldn't know until a few more steps went by, right? "Now, can we please just dance?"

"We could," Lucas slowly nodded. "I just get this feeling like we haven't been bad good guys enough tonight…" Oh, this was an excellent point. Snow White and her prince had to see about some spooks while they had the chance…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	301. Their Spooking of Chances

October 27th 2020

_Chapter 301  
Their Spooking of Chances_

The added benefit of a middle of the week Halloween party was of course that they could count on their guests clearing away earlier rather than later. Oh, they could have partied well into the night if they had been able to, but it wasn't a bad thing for the noise and the press of costumed bodies to dwindle and dwindle until there were none but those of them who lived here… and even then, they were going to be minus one of those tonight.

"I can help with the clean up," Sam told Lucas and Maya.

"Don't worry about it," Lucas told him, giving a thankful nod.

"But…" Sam started again before being cut off by his sister. Maya had pulled him into a hug. "Reminding me you love me again?" Sam asked, sounding nervous, possibly recalling their earlier conversation.

"I really, really do," Maya hummed, pulling back to smile at him.

"Yeah?" He still looked nervous.

"If I didn't love you, I'd let you stay here tonight," she teased him, knowing it would immediately make him cringe at the thought she'd suggested into being. "You earned that one, dude," Maya shook her head, laughing.

"I guess I did," Sam conceded.

"So, where are you headed?" Lucas asked him as he returned from grabbing his bags.

"Going to crash at Josiah and Deanna's," he informed them. "I was going to stay at Dora's place, but we both agreed that maybe it wouldn't be the best idea, not if we want to really figure out… where we're going with… all that," he gestured toward the stairs, unable to keep from looking a bit pink in the cheeks.

"Yeah, good idea," Maya smirked. Alright, maybe she was a tiny bit relieved. "And you're coming back…"

"Uh, day after tomorrow," Sam told her, checking with Lucas and getting a nod. "Thursday, yeah."

"Text us when you get here," Maya hugged him one more time, giving one good squeeze and a kiss on the cheek before releasing him.

"I will," he promised. "Are you even going to check though?" he asked, allowing himself a joking smirk.

"He's getting way too comfortable about this," Lucas intoned curiously, slipping back into his wicked prince persona.

"You're right," Maya followed his lead. "Maybe we should add a little detail of…"

"Okay, good night!" Sam waved his hand at them at once, cutting her off. "Happy anniversary!" he told them, heading out the door to the chorus of his sister's giggles and the dogs' barking.

"What would you have told him?" Lucas wondered, wrapping his arms around her from behind. Maya grinned, leaning to him.

"Oh, nothing at all, I knew he'd go before I got to," she promised, turning around to face him. "And now look at that, it's just the two of us." That look in her eyes, now there was no margin for error in what it suggested. Lucas looked back at her, and he was so on the same page, he was on the very same line, the very same word…

"It's not midnight yet," he pointed out, smiling. "It's still October."

"It's November in a lot of places out there," she countered, pulling him deeper and deeper into her web. "And, the way I see it, with what we're trying to do, I think it's very important that we give it all we've got and get started as soon as we can, don't you?"

"Now that you mention it…"

"Also, you've got school in the morning, and I'm working, and like I said, it's just you… and me… and who's going to tell us off for breaking our own rule by thirty-seven minutes?" she asked, her voice growing fainter by the word, as he looked at her with so much heat in his eyes that she might have been melting. When he leaned in to kiss her, she was already rising on her toes to meet him halfway, the better to happily join the flame.

So intent into the kiss as she was, Maya barely took notice of Lucas lifting her into his arms except to hold on tight as he brought them both up the stairs. How they made it without a single stumble or without unlocking their lips from one another's, they could not say. All that mattered was that he got them up to the second floor, good as blind, turning left when he reached their room and managing to shut the door before any of the dogs could think to follow them in.

Maya's shoes were allowed to drop off her feet, falling with a thunk to the ground even as she reached between them to untie the cloak from around Lucas' neck and then found and undid a few buttons down his shirt. He found the zipper on her dress, pulled it down as far as it went before bringing her to the bed, setting her down and only breaking the kiss so as to look at her a moment before carrying on. As they both worked to regain some of the breath in their lungs, they only had eyes for each other, loving gazes lifted with smiles.

Neither of them was under the impression that they would miraculously conceive this child on the first try, but that wasn't what mattered right now. Anyway, the timing wasn't exactly right for it to even happen, and still… What did matter was that they were starting, that after waiting and dreaming for what felt like a really long time, they were taking that leap. Six years ago tonight, they had stared at four tests and found them all negative, and it had been the first time they really thought of that future, their future, with a family. They could not say if they would have fared as well as they had done by now if they'd had their first child way back then, and they would not lose themselves into thinking of what ifs and never weres. Right here and now, they had never been more ready.

"I love you so much…" Lucas breathed. Maya beamed, holding his face in her hands.

"I love you so very much…" she echoed, as he turned his head to kiss at her palm, trailing his way up her arm, her shoulder, until he landed at her throat and climbed his way up her chin and back to her lips. "We really need to get rid of these wigs," she added, when they pulled back again, and they laughed.

X

"What are you thinking?" Lucas asked, breathing as deep as his lungs permitted as he laid back at his wife's side. He was just bordering on dizziness right about now, but in a really good way, a great, fantastic way.

"Many… many things, lots… and none of them decent…" Maya reported, doing a bit of breath catching herself, pulling her hair into something like order, especially where it had come to stick to her face. "But I think you knew that, yeah?" she asked, blindly nudging at his arm.

"Message received," he confirmed, making her chuckle before turning on to her side, the better to drop her head at his shoulder as he pulled her closer. "Hey, look at that," Lucas smiled as he happened to get a glimpse of the clock on his side of the bed. Maya turned her eyes up and saw, as he'd seen, that it was after midnight.

"When did that happen?" she made a surprised sound.

"Do you know what, I wasn't paying attention to the clock," Lucas pointed out.

"No?" Maya shook her head, grinning, as she stretched up to kiss him.

"No," Lucas responded in kind, and for a little while the world grew distant again, in every part that did not include the two of them. "Hate to even bring it up, but if we keep going like this, we'll be dead on our feet tomorrow… or in a few hours," he corrected, nodding to the clock.

"But very happy about it," Maya smirked, pressing a few kisses to his chest she knew would challenge his resolve. It definitely did that, and it was a fierce battle to put in another argument in the favor of sleep.

"What about tomorrow night though?" he asked, and after a beat of silence he heard a sigh before she lifted her head again and planted her chin.

"I could just take a nap in the afternoon," she suggested almost pitifully.

"You could. But I know you won't."

"You do, huh?" Maya asked, and he nodded. "Okay, tell me why then," she challenged.

"Because as much as you're going to think about tomorrow night, and our Date, you're also going to want to be there for your students, and you won't be any good to them if you're exhausted."

"Touché," she smiled, and now it was him who held her face in the palm of his hand.

For as long as they had been waiting for this chapter in their lives to begin, right then he couldn't help but look her and think… This was going to be the mother of his children. This beautiful woman with an impossibly kind heart… It was such a faraway dream before, and now it was… still a dream, so long as they had to wait before there was actually a baby on the way, but it could never have felt nearly as real as it did now, nearly as tangible. And even without her saying a word, he knew she was thinking it, too, about him, as he would be the father to her children.

Another year had come and gone, and every time they found themselves here, on the bridge between Halloween and the first of November, they could only feel how their love had yet to encounter a boundary strong enough to keep it from growing.

Sleep came and collected them soon enough, still locked into one another's arms rather than their customary spoon, and as the alarm pulled them back into the waking world a few brief hours later, they felt so at peace that moving felt cruel. Maya would just confine herself to his hold, making herself as small as she could, as though to compel him to do everything in his power never to let her go.

"You're giving a very strong argument there, Mrs. Friar," Lucas breathed, feeling her nod into his shoulder. "But your kids…"

"But _our_ kid," she countered.

"Does not exist yet," he kissed the top of her head, for lack of access to any part of her face as it hid beneath a spray of golden hair.

"But it could… if we tried _real_ hard."

"I can promise to do all that tonight… and then some." He caught a first glimpse of blue eyes at this, as though they asked 'what's this 'then some' you speak of?' "Tonight," he promised, and she sighed, relenting.

"I swear, if I didn't know you were such a man of your word," she shook her head.

"There has to be a reason you named me Huckleberry, right?" he laughed.

"Yeah, that was definitely up there in the why," Maya agreed, smiling back at him.

"Go on and get your shower," Lucas nodded out toward the door. "I'll get started on breakfast."

"Oh, right, we kicked out our chef for the night," she reached to her night stand and picked up her phone, confirming that Sam had texted her the night before upon arriving at the Schmidt twins' apartment. She chuckled to herself, thinking how he'd called her not seeing it when he sent it. He wouldn't be here tonight either, of course. "Hey, hey, what are you doing?" Maya called as she turned to find Lucas had climbed out of bed and now had pants on as he worked to pull a shirt on. He paused, peering at her with that innocent look, as though it was little more than a mask. When he tossed her the shirt and turned to head downstairs, she laughed. Yeah, that was definitely more like it. It _was_ their anniversary…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	302. Their Spooking of Home

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

October 28th 2020

_Chapter 302  
Their Spooking of Home_

Lucas had sort of teased her that she wouldn't be able to stop smiling all day as they'd been heading on their separate ways for the day, and as she pulled into the school lot, Maya was almost tempted to press her fingers into her cheeks to try and push them into a normal expression. Surely this was only because of what he'd said, and she would have to make him 'pay' later on.

All morning, she couldn't say how many people, on either side of the teacher/student divide had expressed a curiosity toward her smiling face in words or in looks. She could do nothing but pin the blame on a good Halloween night and a bit of a sugar rush having followed her into this day. The level of belief in this excuse also tended to follow the divide, with her fellow teachers taking great fun in teasing her, whether or not they had any way to know about her anniversary.

Literally overnight, much of the fall and Halloween-themed decorations had disappeared from around the school, replaced with something more in tune with the coming holidays. If that didn't contribute to her happiness, she would be shocked.

"Alright, you have to tell _me_ everything," Morgan walked into the art class shortly after the students had gone off to lunch. Maya looked at her, and to see the way her many thin braids were still swaying along, she had to smile, imagining her walking as swiftly as her feet would carry her from the music class.

"Sorry, can't."

"Why not?" Morgan asked, pouring on the pleading eyes. In response, Maya looked to her watch and just might have been able to time it to the second. Barely a moment later, there came Rochelle for her appointment. She could have pegged her for being pristinely punctual without having seen it at work, day after day since the start of the school year.

"Because," Maya indicated the girl. "You two haven't met, have you?" she guessed, pointing from one to the other and guessing music would not have factored in her student's schedule. Rochelle still knew who she was, if only for having seen her around. She introduced herself, and Morgan shook her hand, expressing that she was glad to finally put a face to a name. At this, Rochelle stole a look to her art teacher, as though to ask if she'd been talking about her. "I'll catch you up later, okay?" Maya told Morgan, and she was gone with a wave. "Come on in," Maya told Rochelle. "Did you bring your lunch?"

"Yeah," Rochelle held up a plastic bag. Maya brought an extra chair to her desk and they sat together, unpacking their meals. "I looked you guys up last night," Rochelle spoke up now. Maya had yet to encounter her student when she was actually engaged, instead of a walking definition of frustration, and it was such a change. As little as she would ever have doubted her confidence, she saw it here more than ever. There was her clever girl, there was the fire, in so few words.

"You did?" Maya asked, smiling.

"I never realized the school had a team," Rochelle went on as she nodded.

"Yeah, well, it didn't last too long after I graduated, I guess. But with the right people, I don't see why we can't bring it back, better than ever."

"Do we have to keep the name though?" Rochelle inquired, and Maya could have called it whiplash, going from thinking 'We, huh? You're already on board, aren't you?' to 'hey, what's wrong with the name?'

"I don't know, not necessarily," she shrugged. "We picked it because most of us on the team were also on the basketball teams."

"Oh… That makes more sense…" Rochelle blinked. "I don't play basketball."

"Didn't think so either. So, when we have the team together, you can pick a new name if you want. It'll signify a… new era."

"Who would be on the team?" Rochelle asked.

"I have a few candidates in mind. If you are up for all this, I will reach out to them."

"Okay, yeah, that works. When would we start?" If she could keep her looking this motivated all the time, oh…

"I will do my best for us have a meet on Monday," Maya promised. "Lunch again?"

"Done," Rochelle nodded and pulled out her phone, tapping at lightning speed, adding the new appointment to her calendar. Now that this was settled, and they were still halfway through lunch, she almost looked ready to pack up and head out, and in the spirit of striking while the iron was hot, she followed her instincts and got up. Walking and chewing at her bite of sandwich, she reached her slim bookcase in the corner and considered her options briefly before pulling down one tall and heavy volume. She had to stick her sandwich between her teeth to keep from dropping the book the way she'd grabbed it. Bringing it back to her desk, she presented it to Rochelle, who quickly wiped her hands before receiving it. "What's this?" Maya held up a finger, so she might finish her bite before speaking.

"A compromise, I guess," she told the girl, sitting again. "Look, I get that you didn't choose to be here, in my class." For once, she looked just a bit sorry about it. "Rochelle, I think you can still make the most of this… situation. The hands-on part's not your thing, I get it. There are other ways to learn about art, to appreciate art. Take the book, look through it, see what parts interest you the most and when you have that, I want you to write something for me." Rochelle was intrigued again. _This_ she could do.

"Does that mean I don't have to do drawings anymore?"

"Oh, you are still doing the other assignments," Maya shook her head, and Rochelle actually tried not to show her disappointment. "I want you to draw the way it comes to you, not the way you think I want you to do it. That's what it's all about. There's no right or wrong answer."

Having left her with this concept to reflect on, Maya watched her student quietly leaf through the borrowed book for the rest of the lunch period, sitting over at her station until the rest of the freshmen joined her. When the class was made to break out the paint, Maya kept as discreet of an eye on Rochelle as she could. She watched her stare at her blank page for what felt like the longest time, but in the end she picked up her brush, and she started.

"Hey, come take a look," Maya called to Morgan when the music teacher showed up again, midway through her free afternoon gap. She came to stand next to her and looked at the page she'd been observing.

"What is it supposed to be?" Morgan asked.

"I'm not actually sure," Maya told her, and she sounded so happy about it. "It's definitely something…" _It's her…_

The day came to a close, as simple and motivating as it had opened to be. With the last of her juniors clearing out, Maya felt her phone buzz and pulled it out.

_Lucas: Got the bag?_

_Maya: Right here. I feel like a spy. What's my mission?_

_Lucas: I don't know if it's a mission, but you usually excel in it. Open the bag, you'll know what to do._

_Lucas: Await my next instruction, Agent Friar._

With a laugh, Maya went and opened the bag. It wasn't so heavy, and she'd had plenty of time to explore the possibilities of what it might hold, but somehow it had never come to her that it might be clothes. Specifically, a dress, shoes… Not much on accessories, but now that she thought about it, the ones she wore today – which he had casually suggested that morning – did go with the dress very well.

"Alright, smooth move there, Agent Friar," she smiled.

One trip into the faculty bathroom later, Maya emerged again, dress and shoes on, hair and makeup touched up. She'd barely made it back to her class that there was a knock at the door, and there was her husband.

"That is _not_ what you were wearing this morning," she teased, smiling just as he was.

"I wasn't about to leave you hanging, was I?" Lucas shrugged, reaching her now and greeting her with a kiss.

"You've never done it before, so it would have been weird to start now," Maya shook her head.

Now that he'd pulled back, he looked her over, and he seemed to be considering the whole outfit as though something didn't work, or maybe as though something was missing. Catching the curious look on her face though, he smiled, pulling a thin, long box from inside his jacket.

"I know we said we'd keep gifts for the July anniversary, but…"

"But you couldn't keep from pulling a Huckleberry?" she guessed. He opened the box, revealing it held a necklace. "See, now, I don't have anything, because I had a feeling you might do this, but then what if you didn't, and I went back and forth on it over and over, and…" she explained, looking back to him even as he worked the clasp open, the better to put the gift on her.

"And you made the right call," he assured her. Maya looked to the pendant, touched it as it sat in tandem with her father's guitar pick.

"Thank you, I love it," she looked back up.

"Ready to go?"

"Yeah, just need to…" she hurried to gather her things before joining him off into the hall and toward the exit after closing up her class. "So, where are we headed? Or is that still a secret, Agent?"

"Right, so here's the thing," Lucas nodded. "I have plans, yes, I have a reservation somewhere, and we will go there tonight, unless you decide you'd rather go for option two."

"Option two sounds intriguing, tell me," she tapped his arm, making him laugh.

"Well, we have the house to ourselves tonight, and we did get it by request, so it would be a shame if we didn't benefit from it, wouldn't it?"

"You know, for a guy who went to all this trouble to set up this whole look right now," Maya gestured to her dress, "Option two sounds a lot like I won't need it anymore."

"Well…" Lucas laughed, and it made his wife very amused to see him borderline red in the face. "I wasn't exactly," he assured her.

"But now you're rethinking it?" she played into the teasing, leaning to his arm as they went. "Is this like option three, or option 2a?"

"It's option… entirely up to you," he replied. Maya considered these options for a moment before finally declaring herself for option one. "Yeah?" Lucas asked.

"Dinner, then home," Maya nodded, and that was what they'd do.

At the restaurant, he told her about his day, his classes. Sometimes he'd try and cut corners, feeling that it had to be boring for her, even though every time she would tell him that it wasn't, not when he talked about it all motivated like that. In turn, she told him about _her_ day, and her start of a breakthrough with Rochelle. Oh, how she'd been dying to share that with him, and it showed. For how excited she was, Lucas shared in the feeling, too. He'd been hearing about this student, as he'd heard about the others, too, and Maya spoke of them all with so much care that he felt he knew them, too. If he met some of those he hadn't met yet, he would probably surprise them for how much he knew of them already.

When dinner was ended, they drove on home. Oh, they tried to enjoy this evening to themselves in some way, with more conversation, or maybe a movie… They could have done all that, but then who would they have been kidding? They both knew exactly where this night would end, and with the activation of the baby plan, they did feel inescapably and magnetically called to one another.

Now here they were, back again in bed, breathless again. Lucas held her, trailing his hand along the tattoo along the back of her shoulder, the one she'd gotten in Paris over their honeymoon, and if she wasn't so awake in that moment, the lazy lines he dragged along her skin might have had her drifting off to sleep. Instead they kept her looking into his eyes, as he looked into hers.

"Do you ever wonder sometimes what it would have been like if Sam hadn't come to live with us? The last three years could have been one big 'we have the house to ourselves' thing," Maya joked, and Lucas gave his best raised eyebrow in response, getting her to be the one laughing instead.

"I can go change the locks right now," he pointed over his shoulder.

"Tempting… But then who would make us breakfast all the time?"

"True…"

"Anyway, I think I have a more compelling option in mind than locksmithing."

"Consider me compelled…" he replied, and she laughed, pressing up to him with a slow kiss.

With this renewed energy good and serviced on both counts, it would have been easy to just call it a night and drift off as they were, but then after a few quiet minutes, Maya had slipped out, throwing her robe on and heading down the stairs as Lucas called after her, curious. She returned before long, poking her head into the doorway.

"Remember when I said I had nothing? That wasn't _exactly_ true. It's not a necklace, but…" she stepped into the room proper now. In her hands sat a cardboard box with a familiar logo on the side.

"Alright, now I gotta hear about this," Lucas sat up as she came and joined him, opening box to reveal Isabel Garcia's honey cake, right out of Houston.

"Asher had to come back again today, and I happened to know about it, so I asked if he minded running an errand for me. I didn't have time to check if he'd brought it when we got here, because, well…" she gestured to indicate them, and the bed, the various items of discarded clothing about the floor.

"Right…" he laughed. They'd had a lot of good memories with this cake over the years. One bite, and it felt like a conduit back into those memories. If that was the case, then what better new entry to this chain than this night, the two of them looking forward to days of parenthood?

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	303. Their Hope to Grow

October 29th 2020

_Chapter 303  
Their Hope to Grow_

"If we had a name, we could get t-shirts made or something," Ariel Su stated, passing a confident look around the table. It was a valid statement, though hardly one that felt new. They had been stuck, unsatisfied with any and all ideas they had so far put forth, over the past few weeks of being a team, and while they could be satisfied to hold on to the Basket Cases name between them, for the time being, now they had cause to seek out a new and official name: they had a match coming up.

True, it wasn't really official, more of a friendly thing, which they'd been called to participate in and had accepted as a way to test the waters, to see how the four of them fared when put under any kind of pressure. But whether it involved anything more than bragging rights, they still needed to come up with their name, or else they would have to accept to remain the Basket Cases going forward. They didn't dislike the name, but they also liked the idea of their being their own thing, since they were bringing the team back from the dead.

As the conversation started up again, with name ideas being tossed around, debated, and ultimately either rejected or pushed into a 'maybe' list, Maya would find herself not so much paying attention to the talk itself and more to the girls themselves, sitting around the table. It was just as she'd first slated it, the first names that popped in her head, thinking they would be good fits for the team. The day after her meeting with Rochelle, she had pulled each of her picks aside at the start or end of their respective periods in her classroom and made them the pitch.

She had one member out of each of the four classes, which had some potential for being an easy rotation, as one senior would go and a new freshman could be slotted into the team. Maybe it wouldn't work out that way, but for now… Along with current freshman Rochelle, she had called to sophomore Stella. Maya had been prepared to meet some resistance from her shy bird, but in the end there really wasn't so much of it. Stella had been making so many strides in the year and some months since she'd joined their school, and yes, Maya was ridiculously proud of her for all of it. Sometimes she would see her, having lunch in the cafeteria with Phoebe and the other students, and it was so different from the girl who would eat in her classroom every day the year before, too uncomfortable to be around that many people and that much noise. And much as she couldn't gauge exactly how well most of her students did in a non-art setting, she had a good feeling that Stella could be a valued secret weapon among the team.

On that first meeting, the first Monday of November, it had been right there, how the other girls looked at her, standing so much quieter than the rest of them, like they were wondering if she would cut it. But as soon as Maya and Cory had given them all their first sort of trial run, Stella Buckley had bolted out from the dark, and she'd caught them all by surprise. That little smile on her face… It had been as delicious to Maya as it had been to Stella herself.

From the juniors, of course, she had Ariel Su. As soon as Maya had mentioned the quiz team to her, the girl's eyes had lit up and she'd said yes. Maya had laughed, trying to give her more details, but all the while Ariel would just nod, and nod, showing she was on board with every part of it, and the only thing she really needed to know was when they would start. Maya had a feeling, and come Monday she'd been proven correct, that Ariel and Rochelle would hit it off right away. That was the thing she'd been hoping for, secretly. All she really needed was the means to socialize, and then she _would_ lift her head, she _would_ find more in the world than her studies. Without a doubt, studying would be involved, both girls were dutiful students, but somewhere in between, there would be other discussions, there just had to be.

Rounding up the team, she'd called on her senior, Helena Zimmerman. For her, Maya could think how, after having been out of class, out of school, for over a year, the idea of getting involved in something like this might be just what Helena needed. She had wanted to try out for the basketball team, to get back to the sport she'd once loved, but her parents had refused her, saying they had agreed to let her go back to school, but they would draw the line at her exerting herself in that way. She'd been heartbroken over it, about how her parents continued to coddle her even though she was completely well again and would not suddenly take a turn again from playing a sport. Maya had actually offered herself to speak to Helena's parents about it, but Helena had said it would not matter, that it would only make things worse. She would just have to let it go.

So now, here was a counteroffer of sorts. The quiz team was sure to please the Zimmermans, but would it please Helena?

She'd hesitated at first, maybe still pining over her lost team, but after thinking it over, she'd come to find her art teacher on Friday morning and said she would do it. Just like that, they were set for Monday. When she had come around over lunch that day, there had been a definite sense that the other girls had seen Helena around the school, hard to miss as she was, tall and slender and with that short short hair. They also seemed aware that she was the girl who'd been out of school for a while because she was sick. Maya had worried briefly that this would make things awkward between them, that the girls would make Helena reconsider. But then leave it to her shy bird to step up and make the first introduction, and soon the others had followed, and the awkwardness had faded away as though it had never existed.

In the last few weeks, they'd had many more of these meetings. After Monday, they'd been able to come up with a schedule, and so they would meet, three times a week. Two of these were after school, handled by Cory, while the third, on Fridays, happened over lunch in the art room. Every time they had come together so far, it felt to Maya as though her little team was growing tighter and tighter, gelling as they should, which would be a good and necessary thing, as they settled in for this friendly match over the weekend.

"We could keep the initials," Rochelle suggested, and for a moment the conversation paused, everyone looking at her like she'd finally brought them on to one path after they'd been going aimlessly. "B-something C-something, Basket Cases Junior," she went on, making them laugh.

They had to leave it there for now in the end, as lunch was ending and all but Rochelle had to get to classes which weren't this one. Maya was almost certain that at some point before the end of the day one of those girls would come and find her with a name idea, and she could only wonder which of them would be the one.

One thing was for certain, and it was that the addition of the quiz team had been a most welcome distraction, not for anything bad, just for… well, anticipation.

With the anniversary well behind them and the efforts for getting pregnant moving along, it became the weirdest sort of waiting game. Oh, it had not gotten anywhere that made Lucas or her feel detached from the process, but then it did add a different layer on to it all and _that_ was weird. It wasn't just about them anymore, it was about making something happen, and much as they tried to put all their chances on their side, there was nothing they could do that would take them directly from point a to point b. So they carried on, and they waited, and they hoped, oh, how they hoped.

As the other girls had gone away, Maya turned back to find Rochelle had wandered over to the bookcase, where she inspected the various book spines. More than one of them had come from a museum she had been to over the years, or from a trip to the bookstore. The others had been gifts, some from Patty Robinson, and others from Lucas, who had been known to come home from work at the bookstore with a volume he would happily present to her, saying he'd been looking at the new arrivals and it just jumped out at him. She liked having them all here, in her classroom, where she could either read them herself, when she had a free break, or she could share them with her students, either with the whole group or one on one… It always sort of felt different when they could look at some work or another on a page instead of a screen.

"See anything you like?" Maya asked, and Rochelle turned to look at her, halfway startled as though she wasn't supposed to touch the books. Maya smiled and moved to join her. "If I can make a suggestion? This one here," she pulled one of her more recent acquisition, another husband gift. "From what you wrote in that first paper, I think you'll find something else to interest you here."

"Okay," Rochelle took the book and stared at the cover a moment before flipping it over and reading over the blurb.

These last few weeks, Maya had seen so much more of the girl's smiles, of intrigue, of curiosity and genuine motivation that now she couldn't get enough of it. She was so far from the grumpy beast she'd been at the start of the school year, and though Maya suspected a part of her still felt that her time might have been put to better use in a strictly academic setting, she could also say that she no longer dragged herself through the period. Even when they would be put to some hands-on task or another, she would give effort, with a critical eye but also an audacious one. She just might have made it through this imposed class yet.

"Mrs. Friar!" Both Maya and Rochelle heard the call and looked back to the door, even as the speaker actually reached the room and came to stand in the doorway, breathless from running.

"Phoebe? What are you…" Maya started to ask, just as Stella caught up with her best friend and bumped into her in an effort to come to a stop. She raised a hand in greeting, as though she hadn't been there minutes ago. "You two are going to be late to…"

"But she found us a name," Stella cut in, pointing to Phoebe who now nodded.

"You did?" Maya looked to the sophomore, while Rochelle joined them, book still in hand.

"Yeah, well, she told me about you all looking for something, and the initials – which was great, by the way," Phoebe cut in, mid-rattle. "And then it came to me."

"What is it?" Rochelle asked. Phoebe and Stella shared a look, as though deciding which of them would say it, the one who'd come up with it or the one who would be one of its members. Maya cleared her throat. They really needed to get to class, and now the freshmen were arriving.

"I told her," Phoebe finally made the call and spoke, "You all would kick butt at that match, because you were all… _Born Curious_."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	304. Their Hope to Love

_**A/N: (NOVEMBER 3RD) TAKING A CHANCE THAT THIS WILL WORK:** I know that there has been an issue with the latest chapters showing up on the site. If you can get it, they CAN be seen if you have the app. Guest reviewer: Hi! I would have written back to you but I can't because you are not signed in. Anyway, I hope this helps! I'm still going to post today's things later on, no clue if they'll come up on the site, but the app should be good!_

* * *

October 30th 2020

_Chapter 304  
Their Hope to Love_

"No, yeah, that's fine… Yeah, just get them back here as soon as you can, okay? Great, thanks," Maya hung up, slipping her phone back in her pocket with a breath as she headed back to see how Missy was faring with the printer. "Are they coming out alright?" she asked her neighbor and student.

"Yeah, check it out!" Missy held up one of the prints before herself, pausing for a moment before flipping it over. "Can you see it?"

"I see it," Maya confirmed, smiling, and Missy set the print back along with the others already laid out in wait of their shirts, which would be here as soon as Sam got them and brought them back.

With the very brief time they had between the selection of the team name and their first unofficial match, it had become the teacher and advisor's mission to get her girls their shirts in time. The first thing she had to do then was to come up with a logo, the better to then get it approved and printed off. It wasn't her first go at home made shirts like this, so the actual design was the only part she really needed to focus on. The name had been approved among the team, and in her extended afternoon break, after the freshmen had gone on their way, Maya had gone and sat at her desk to sketch out a few options.

"Ariel, hey, come here," she'd waved the girl over as soon as she came into the room for last period. When she came along, Maya showed her the three designs she'd gotten it down to.

"Wow," Ariel blinked, inspecting each one with great interest. "I think this one," she pointed to the one on the right.

"Do me a favor? Can you send a picture to the others and let me know what they think? Quick, before class starts?"

Ariel had taken a picture and sent it off, fingers flying over her phone keyboard. Soon, replies came in, and while it wasn't a clean sweep, eventually they decided on a final design, adding in their respective sizes. This also came with requests regarding extra shirts for family members who might want them, and Maya promised to get those to them in the next week. For now, the team had to take priority.

As to colors, Maya had taken her cue from having seen how each girl dressed from day to day, from seeing bags, and binders… Each shirt would have the logo on the front, and the members' surnames on the back. The one branded McNEIL would be calm orange over a deep blue. The BUCKLEY print would be white over a violet shirt, while the SU one would be yellow over a turquoise. And the ZIMMERMAN shirt would be a dark red, the print in gray. Along with these four would be two nameless shirts, a black on yellow for herself and a white on dark green for Cory.

"Can I have one, too?" Missy asked, as the last one came from the printer and was laid on the kitchen table with the others. "You know, to support them," she smiled.

"Sure, of course," Maya laughed before considering the girl standing before her. It seemed only a minute ago she'd been so much smaller, back when Lucas and her had moved into the house, but now here she stood, sixteen years old… "I think yellow on… magenta?" Missy beamed at this. "I will mark you down for the next batch." After a beat, she had to ask. "Would you have wanted to be on the team?" She hadn't asked, the lineup having come to her so easily, but then it would not have been a bad idea to cultivate alternates, right?

"Oh, no," Missy shook her head. "I mean, I would have been honored if you asked me, but I wouldn't be good out there."

"Don't sell yourself short, you're doing so well," Maya promised.

"I know that," Missy replied. "It's not about my grades, I just know that I would freeze the second I had to answer anything. I'd forget everything, or I'd get sick… You've never seen me present in front of class, it's a train wreck."

"What about the project last year?" Maya pointed out, trying not to chuckle.

"Total fluke," Missy shook her head with a sheepish grin. "I think it was just that it was your class. Trust me, I can be a great supporter but do _not_ put me on that team."

"Alright, alright, I won't," Maya held up her hands in 'surrender.'

She could have done the shirts on her own, sure, but then she'd seen her neighbor out walking Coraline that morning, so she'd asked her if she wanted to make shirts with her, and that had been that. Truth be told, she was glad for the assistance, for the team up. She was so antsy for the next day's match that she could easily have spiraled into making changes to the design until they ran out of time. It had been a while since she'd had an opportunity like this, where she struggled so keep calm in the face of some event or another. She was sure she'd gotten to a point where she could confidently surge onward, and yet here they were. Maybe it was just that she was nervous for the girls. She so wanted this to be a good start for them.

And okay, sure, she had plenty of things going on right now that would keep her mind overloaded, things that would make this small match feel so much bigger all of a sudden. There was the whole baby thing, of course, which was bound to hold the bulk of her mind if the door was opened even a crack. And then the more she'd think about it, the more she'd start thinking about Nadine, and Zay, how they'd tried, how that had all ended, how now they continued to wait for the day when things would start going their way… It didn't feel right to compare their situations, but how could she _not_ think about it?

Beyond that, maybe it wasn't so much about stress, but then by virtue of their connection to the various parties involved, she and Lucas both would find themselves the unwitting audience to the developments in the story of Sam, and Dora, and Cecilia, and now Tony Janacek…

It had been almost four weeks since Halloween, and it could have felt like the blink of an eye for all of them, except for all that had had time to unfold in that time.

Whatever the two of them had come to decide regarding their relationship, currently oscillating on the edge between friends and more-than, Sam and Dora were both showing ample signs of which side their hearts championed. For one thing, Lucas' young cousin had been becoming more and more of a presence at the house since Halloween. It wasn't as though she had not been a repeated visitor beforehand, but where they might have seen her once every other week before, now it was occasionally every other day, sometimes consecutive days. She would join them for dinner about as frequently as Cecilia once did, and on the nights where she wasn't with them, Sam usually wasn't either, suggesting that they might have been having dinner at _her_ apartment. What else they may or may not have done back there, his sister and brother-in-law could not say for certain, nor did they try to find out. Lucas was of a mind that the reason they were at the house with them more often than not was specifically to act as a safeguard, to keep them both in line when they were trying to advance cautiously into this new reality of theirs. Maya was now having to resist the desire to tell him to just ask her out already, since he clearly wanted to be with her. She knew better than to interfere though, especially as they were figuring things out for themselves. She also knew how sometimes waiting was the best course of action. Wasn't that what she and Lucas had done? And now here they were.

Meanwhile, there was Cecilia. Though they had no genuine proof of it, both Maya and Lucas believed that Sam had spoken with her, in the days after the party. They _had_ kept in touch before this, though they had struggled with it, enough that there would be little more than the occasional, brief text between the two. They had not found the way to actually converse, to do as they had wanted to do and save their friendship. It had been left to flounder for a time, and then the weekend after the party, she'd come over and joined them for dinner and a movie night. There was nothing of lovey-dovey looks and hand holding and kissing between her and Sam, but otherwise it could have been exactly as things had previously been, in the days before the trip to Hawaii and the covert break.

Since then, Cecilia had been coming around the house more often, too, at least more often than she'd been doing since the breakup. It wasn't nearly as often as she used to do, or as Dora now did, but she would be around at least twice a week, some as much as four. Sometimes it would be her and Dora both, sometimes she would come when Sam wasn't around at all, and she and Maya would hang out, happily so. She had found a sister when she had come into Sam Hart-Lane's world, and she was not to lose her.

When she did come around to hang with Maya solo, there had finally been an opportunity for the topic of Cecilia's conversation with Tony Janacek to be addressed. She looked so surprised to realize Maya had seen them that night, but at the same time she was almost relieved. It facilitated her into talking about it with someone.

They hadn't known so much about one another or where they fit into anything on Halloween, when Cecilia had gone to find him again. She hadn't known he was one of Maya's former students, and he didn't know she was his teacher's brother's ex. They were just two people at the party, and after the brief encounter in the living room, they'd ended up sitting in the kitchen and talking until her father had come to pick her up. On a whim, she'd told him how to find her online.

"The whole ride home, I sat there trying not to freak out. Don't know why I did it, but I did, and I wasn't sure I'd ever hear from him again, but when I got home, I had a message waiting," Cecilia revealed with a happy little smile.

"And now?" Maya asked, trying to keep her face from slipping into a total grin.

"We've been writing back and forth a lot," Cecilia revealed. "He's really nice to talk to, you know?"

"I haven't had the chance to talk to him as much as you have, but yes, I think I do." They were forging a friendship, that much was clear. Whether or not they would go any further remained to be seen. As it was, she was seventeen and finishing high school, while he was nineteen and starting college. Friendship was probably as far as it would go, for the time being or beyond. It didn't matter near as much as the fact that they had both found someone they could talk to, be open with, and something like that was precious in and of itself.

By the time Lucas returned home from work that night, six shirts sat neatly folded in a pile on the kitchen table, each branded with the Born Curious logo and ready to be rolled out the following day.

"What, I don't get one?" he asked, smirking.

"I haven't decided on your colors yet," Maya informed him. "Need the right shades."

"You are such a nerd," he shook his head at her, his tone lifting the words like a declaration of love. It made Maya smile. She knew.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	305. Their Hope to Win

October 31st 2020

_Chapter 305  
Their Hope to Win_

"Do you remember when you'd have a match, with the Basket Cases? You'd text me, first thing in the morning," Lucas smirked, one hand keeping his head propped up while the other walked his fingers along Maya's arm. She laughed.

"Quiz me! Come on, hit me with a question!" she intoned. "You always had good ones, too."

"Truth time? _May_ have hit the internet for those," he confessed. Maya replied by giving an exaggerated sort of 'I am shocked' sound. "I really wish I could be out there with you today, cheering on the girls… in my non-shirt," Lucas went on, then off her giggling, "You know what I mean."

"I do, I do," she promised, flopping over on to her back. "I wish you could be there, too. It's okay though, it's totally informal."

"Do you think I haven't known you long enough to see your nerves working in there?" Lucas asked, prodding lightly at her brow and making her scrunch up her nose.

"It's not for me though, it's them, the girls," she sighed. "Teacher feelings…"

"Mom feelings?" he teased.

"You _know_ I would bring them all home in a heartbeat," she teased right back.

"We're going to need a bigger house."

She must have checked four or five times that she had all the shirts, everything she'd need for today, especially the addresses to the four girls' homes. She was set to pick them up now, meeting Cory with them up at the school of their opponents. After one more check, she was off for her first pick-up, Ariel Su. Pulling up to the house, she could see her from further up the street. The girl sat outside, bent over a stack of flash cards. Even after the minivan came to a stop at the curb, there was no breaking her concentration. Maya finally had to hit her horn, and Ariel's head bolted up at once. She spotted her teacher and jogged over. Climbing into the back, she was presented with her shirt. The thrilled sort of gasp she gave on seeing the yellow and turquoise was kind of priceless.

"Just wait until we get there to put it on, yeah?" Maya laughed.

"I could get it on under my jacket…"

"Kind of responsible for you right now, so how about you buckle up and hold on to that shirt for later, yeah?"

"Okay, that's fair."

Next up was Helena's house. Ariel had texted her when they were coming up to her street, and so she came right out as they approached. She joined Ariel in the back and one more shirt was passed to its owner. As much as the first had been admired for its colors, this one… Maya could see in the rear-view mirror how she was shown her name on the back. She saw it, and it made her smile, so much that she might have cried.

"I got the idea because of you," Maya admitted, and Helena looked at her, her smile trembling with appreciation. She was back on a team.

Getting to Stella's house after this, Maya knew the sophomore did not want to have any big deal made of who her mother was, so she had a feeling she might have been outside the house already by the time she got the 'we're almost there' message. Ariel and Helena both went leaning out the open window, calling their teammate over like she might have been coming on to the basketball court. Maya chuckled, seeing how Stella appeared startled at first, before finally speeding over as Helena opened the door for her. She climbed in, greeting everyone in turn before receiving her shirt. Like their senior member, being part of a team meant something to her, not for having lost one but for never having been part of one at all.

Last of all was Rochelle, and when the minivan came up to her building, she was waiting outside, headphones over her ears. She pulled them down when she spotted her teammates and teacher giving her a four-strong cheer. She was as surprised as Stella had been, though not for shyness so much as… inclusion. Joining her teammates in the back, she received her shirt, and Maya was happy to see she had aimed correctly as far as the colors.

"What are you listening to?" she asked, and Rochelle looked to her headphones, remembering to hit pause.

"I record myself reading my notes so I can listen to them while I'm doing other things," she explained. Maya had assumed it to be music, but… Yeah, this might have made more sense.

"Alright, next stop, final stop."

They had gotten this friendly match through Morgan Stewart. The music teacher's sister, Natasha, was also a teacher, in science, at another high school. The two had always been competitive, playfully so, and when Morgan had mentioned the team, Natasha had pointed out that her school had one, too, and from there, well… here they were.

"You guys look like a bunch of winners, let's go," Morgan laughed. Of course, she had to be here today, like her sister, and they met up with her after having gone into the bathroom to change. "Where's _my_ shirt?" she demanded of her friend while the girls stopped for a team selfie, showing their shirts.

"I'll get you one next time," Maya promised, breathing deep.

"You okay?" Morgan asked.

"Yeah, I've got just… sympathy nerves," Maya explained, stealing a look to the quartet and smiling. Turning back to her colleague though, it felt like she did not believe her. "Come on, you're worse than my husband. You just don't want to lose to your sister."

"You're not wrong," Morgan was forced to admit, and Maya gave a weighted nod. "But seriously, you look… I don't know, did you have breakfast? I've got…" she reached into her bag. She was diabetic, more often than not had something to eat with her wherever she went.

"I did, I'm good," Maya stalled her, though at the same time she _was_ starting to wonder if Morgan was a little right. She _did_ feel off, but that was the nerves, she was sure… mostly sure. When she expressed this sentiment, Morgan gave her a new look. "What?"

"I don't know, but do you think maybe…" she whispered, her gaze pointing down and up again. Maya did not follow at first, but once she got there, she blinked.

"No, no… no… No, it's too soon, we've only been…" she insisted.

"Oh, so you were Captain Celibate before that?" Morgan challenged. Maya looked back to the girls for a moment, confirming they were still talking amongst themselves.

"First off, that's a solid nickname," she whispered back to her friend. "Second, I see your point but… I don't know, I…" she sighed. "It's not my first time thinking I was pregnant, and I was wrong both times. I'm not seeing how this is any different." Morgan gave her a 'ha ha!' smile. "Okay, fine, it did cross my mind, how can it not? But this is so not the time, and if you keep poking at this, I won't be able to think about anything else. I need to focus on those girls. This is their day."

"Alright, I get it. But I'm watching you," Morgan pointed at her.

"By all means," Maya thanked her, just as the girls moved toward them.

"Where do we go? We can't be late," Rochelle informed them.

"Mr. Matthews is back there already, with Nat and the other team and their advisor," Morgan informed the group. "Follow me."

Maya led her girls along the hallway, looking at each one to spot any who might have been in need of a pep talk, anything to dash away some nerves. So far they seemed to be doing okay, a whole lot better than her, actually, which bordered on frustrating. _Maybe that's because there's nothing to worry about, and this thing you're feeling is not about nerves._

She really wished Morgan hadn't brought this up. The thought had first come to her when she'd been driving off to the Su house, and it had been dismissed at what felt like lightning speed, for the very reasons she had given to Morgan. This was not the time, and it was probably another false alarm. There were a couple other times where the thought tried to get to her, where it nudged at her like 'but what if it's for real this time?' or 'if this is real now, what happens to Ree's tour?' The worst was 'imagine the look on Lucas' face,' because if she gave _that_ thought any sort of traction then she really wouldn't be able to put it aside, not until she knew for sure, and when _that_ happened…

Oh, now, see? She was playing herself. She was thinking about it, and she wasn't supposed to, not now. Today was about Rochelle, and Stella, and Ariel, and Helena. Born Curious. _Born like babies? Like the one you might have in you now?_ This was going to be a nightmare.

"That's the other team?" Stella was the first to speak up, noticing the other teens in the classroom. The girls looked and discovered that their opponents were an all-boy team.

"I am liking this more and more," Rochelle declared, with a new fire in her eyes at the thought of taking down some boys, her and the other girls. It definitely managed to rattle a couple of those guys upon seeing it.

"Helena?" one of the boys asked, spotting her. He looked to be a senior like her, and by the way she moved to greet him with a hug, she was very happy to see him, too. "You're back in school?"

"Yeah, senior year," she nodded.

"And the team?" the boy asked, in a way that easily read as referring to the basketball team.

"No, my parents wouldn't let me," she confided, and the boy's sympathetic disappointment placed him as a player on this school's boys team before Helena revealed it to her own teammates, along with introducing him as Eric Wilshire.

"Oh, yeah, I've seen you play," Maya commented. The boy looked back at her, and for once she was recognized not for her music but for her days as a player on their girls' team.

"I think you played against my sister when she was on the team. Amanda Wilshire? Number eighteen?"

"Was she the one with the braid?" Maya gestured.

"Yeah, that's her," Eric nodded.

"She was a beast out there," she laughed, memories seeming to step over one another to get to the top first. The younger brother looked pleased to hear this.

"Still is."

They could not have hoped for a better way to break the ice and, in Maya's case, to help nudge the thought of 'nerves or baby?' out of the way, for now at least. She did feel a little better now, so maybe it really was just nerves?

"You need to go change," she tossed Cory his shirt. He caught it and looked upon the logo with a smile before heading to do just that.

While the teams introduced themselves to one another, the process facilitated by unofficial team captains Helena and Eric, Maya did the same with the other advisor and with Morgan's sister. She looked to be only a few years older, but the family resemblance was unmistakable.

Cory soon returned, now sporting the team shirt identical to Maya's. They looked to each other and, even after a year of being colleagues, and after having worked on the team together for a few weeks, they found there could still be instances where they would be reminded of how they used to be teacher and student to one another. It had not lost its ability to amuse them both.

"Don't worry, they'll do great," he whispered to her.

"I know they will," Maya assured him, clearing her throat as she looked to the two teams taking their places on either side of the room. Did he see it, too?

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	306. Their Hope to Imagine

November 1st 2020

_Chapter 306  
Their Hope to Imagine_

Sundays at the bookstore were generally busy, that much Lucas knew to expect. Still, some weeks were less busy than expected, while others were just non-stop, all day long. Today was one of the latter. Even before the store actually opened, there was just a feeling in the air like it would be 'one of those.' He didn't know where it came from, or what defined it, but he had it, and he wasn't the only one. He'd shown up, and Maeve definitely walked around with a business-sort of attitude about her. She might not have been as out there as she used to be, back when he'd started working here, but she was still one hundred percent in her element when she walked through the store, like no one else he'd ever known. He had a feeling that he could walk in here, thirty years from now, and she'd still be here, and she'd still love every second of it.

"Red alert… battle stations…" she muttered at him when the clock struck ten and from above they saw Ted go and open the doors. The first customers of the day entered, and they were off. It wasn't as though they had hundreds upon hundreds of people coming in, no. But then people would come along, and they'd need something, and helping them and seeing them off on their merry way could take anywhere from one minute to ten, and as soon as they'd be done with one person, there would be one, sometimes more than one other waiting to start them all up again. And it never stopped. By the time Maeve tapped him out to go and have his lunch, Lucas was more than happy to go and have some quiet time to himself.

It would have seemed as though he'd prefer to just sit and eat and do nothing else, but instead he'd brought one of his textbooks, in order to get ahead on his readings for class. For a while, he sat there, in the crowded food court, the noise of people talking falling to something like a drone he could ignore. He ate his sandwich, and he read, and it _was_ peaceful. And then, somewhere nearby, his attention was pulled away from the text by the sound of a baby crying.

Lucas looked up, soon finding the origin of the cry, just a few tables away. An old man sat with a wailing baby in his arms, no more than weeks old for how small it was, while a younger woman dug through a bag in search of some object or another for her child. The old man looked so happy in trying to calm the little one, probably his grandchild. Finally, the woman had found what she was looking for, and as she moved around the table, Lucas turned his head back down to his tray and his book, not wanting to come off like he was spying on them.

Maya used to tease him, saying he had baby fever. That was long before they were actively trying to make one, so now that they had reached this point, oh… the fever had spiked. It got to the point now where it felt as though his entire brain was wired on to that frequency alone sometimes. Even now, though he wasn't staring at the trio nearby, he could still hear the child, heard how its cries eventually tapered down, and stopped, and turned to gurgles and generally happy noises, and then he just had to close his textbook. He was not going to get anywhere. So, he just went on eating, his mind wandering off.

The whole waiting game could really be stressful at times, in ways he could not have anticipated before. He'd heard it from Zay, from Farkle, even his own father, and Shawn, too. They'd told him about their own experiences of this moment, whether successful or not. Even so, it hadn't come and contextualized itself, not until this time, through the month of November as it advanced nearer and nearer to December. He tried not to put too much of it on himself, knowing that for as stressful as it was for him, it could never possibly compare to what Maya had to be experiencing. She was the one who would be carrying and giving birth to this human they were attempting to create. She'd be the one who'd have all these things happening to her body, all the while doing her very best to give this baby the best chances of coming into the world.

Maybe that was the root of his own stress though. What could _he_ do? Once they actually got pregnant, sure, he'd be there to support her, to help her, but it would be next to nothing by comparison to what she had to do. And he just wished he could do so much more.

What he was also realizing was that, for as much as they had gotten to a place in their lives where they were both generally successful and balanced adults, somewhere inside them there still lived those two kids they used to be. Those kids had all these insecurities within their hearts and minds, and they could be so much more debilitating than they looked. He knew Maya could get so wrapped up in those thoughts, until she could barely move, and then him… She would see right through him, seeing when he would allow himself to ignore his own feelings, his own concerns, because his instincts were always to think of others' first, hers especially. Eventually he had been able to recognize it in himself, too, and he worked hard to be honest with himself, to not push it all down, because he knew it didn't do any good, not to him, not to anyone.

But here he was again, caught between what he might have been feeling and whether or not he should give it any sort of thought, especially over what his wife would be experiencing. In this case, it did feel more warranted than usual, but then what would Maya say if she knew? _She'd tell me to speak up, be honest with her. She'd want to back me up, too, same as I do for her._

He'd known he wanted kids for a long time, maybe longer than most people would tend to even consider it. And all this time, the thought had been there, and it made him happy, especially when he added Maya into the picture. And now that it was more than a thought, now that it was a plan, he was forced to consider what it would be like, for this child to exist and to have him as a father. He would be a good one, wouldn't he? What if he wasn't? What if all this time they had been so focused on having this child, and in the meantime they had not considered that the child would be having them in return? Maya as a mother, that wasn't even a question, not to him anyway. Was it one to her? Him as a father… Everyone who had expressed their opinion on this matter, directly or not, would tell him he would be a great father, but he wasn't one yet, was he? How did they know? How did anyone know?

Having finished his lunch, mostly eating by reflex while his mind was far away, Lucas made his way back to the store, so he could take Maeve's place while she went and had her own break. When he arrived up on their floor, he found his friend and co-worker had visitors, specifically Ramona and niece Erin. Maeve was showing some books which he'd seen stowed away under their counter that morning. He'd wondered how they'd gotten there, since they were clearly kids' books, baby and toddler ones specifically, and those were not on their floor. She'd told him to leave them there anyway, and now he understood.

"Hey," he walked up, greeting his other friend and classmate. Ramona turned and echoed his greeting, smiling warmly.

In her arms, little Erin looked up and raised a small hand and smaller fingers. The more she grew, the more of Maeve they saw in her, enough to think that she'd grow up to look an awful lot like her birth mother, which was bound to raise questions if she continued to be in her life.

"Can I?" Lucas pointed to the girl, and Ramona passed her over into his arms. "You two keep looking at those. We are going to take a tour, yeah?" he looked to the one-year-old.

"Yee," she declared, making Lucas smile.

"Alright then, off we go. Now, what are you looking for today, miss?" he asked as he took her along on a leisurely stroll around the floor.

It was impossible not to be cheerful around the small girl, but then wasn't that always the way with small children? Alright, he guessed that not everyone felt that way, that some people were visibly, knowingly uncomfortable around children, but that had never been him. Between his cousins, and his friends' siblings, especially Maya's brothers and sisters, a lot of them since they had been newborns… he had always had an ease with them, always felt happy to be near them, just as they responded in kind.

A customer approached him while he walked with Erin, looking unsure whether he was available, but he assured her that he was, and so he went, with the child balanced in one arm, careful to keep those small fingers of hers from ending up anywhere they shouldn't. She mostly saw it as a funny game. When he found what the woman had been looking for and was thanked, the usual sign that he was no longer needed and could carry on, the customer commented on how good he was with Erin, believing her to be his daughter. He thanked her even as he corrected her, and she gave a quick apology.

"Don't worry about it," he told her, turning a smile back to the girl. "It meant more than you know that you thought she was."

More often than not, when those worries and insecurities would come at him, even if they came and went more than once, when they did go away, they usually left him wondering why he'd been worried in the first place. He looked to Erin as they went on walking, back to find Ramona and Maeve. She may not have been his, but she was still a small child, and he had been around those enough to know that if they felt in any way displeased with their situation they would make it known. Erin, their mini-Maeve, was the picture of total contentment here in his arms, as many others had been before. If that was the case, then what did he have to worry himself over, as though his own child would somehow be the exception to the rule.

"Did you two have fun out there?" Ramona asked, taking Erin back.

"I think she has potential as a book seller," Lucas nodded.

"That might just be the baby thing, they're very agreeable," Maeve pointed out, picking up the books Ramona had selected. "I'll be back after lunch, left you a few notes back there."

"Got it," he nodded.

"Say bye, Erin," Ramona told the girl in her arms, showing the motion with her own hand, soon imitated to the best of the one-year-old's abilities.

"Bye, Erin, thanks for the help," Lucas waved back. Erin kept waving, and he did, too, until she was out of sight, on her way down the escalator with her aunt and birth mother. After they were gone, he just had to take a deep breath, let it out. That baby fever really was no joke, was it?

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	307. Their Hope to Learn

**_A/N:_**_ Hey everyone, don't know if this is going to work. For some reason the chapters from the last two days are no longer visible, so this one might not show up._

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November 2nd 2020

_Chapter 307  
Their Hope to Learn_

Whether or not this feeling was nerves, it was keeping Maya well on her toes as the morning progressed. There were thirteen of them in that room, none more, just two teams of four, and two advisors here, one advisor and observing teacher there, with someone asking the questions in the middle, in this case Morgan, standing all on her own on the fourth side of their square. It could not have been more informal, and yet to look at some of them, Maya included, it did get to have a similar feeling to loaded gyms on game days. They weren't being noisy about it, but oh were they ever concentrated.

Maya might have felt like she _needed_ to keep focused, like any sliver of distraction would just bring her back to a place that would not release her again, would make it so she wasn't doing what she was supposed to do, which was to be there for her students.

By the looks of them, the opposing team was still fairly new, too, in its current configuration at least. Two of the boys were freshmen, on their first year as part of the team, while the third looked like he might have been a sophomore, junior at the most. He and Eric both had clearly been doing this a while longer, and it showed in their ease. On the whole, they didn't look mean-spirited in any way. They welcomed the competition and they played clean. Born Curious could not have asked for a better kick-off match than this.

For all their good sportsmanship and despite their recent lineup, the thing that mattered the most for today was how good they were. They were very good. They weren't flawless by any means, but they were very solid, a formidable opponent. Maya had become aware of this fairly early on, and it definitely did not help in keeping her calm.

As much as it could have sent her spiraling though, she would turn and look upon her girls, and just as quickly she would be shown that, new as they were, having been a team for less than a month, they were no pushovers. They were very good, too. She could pinpoint the exact moment when the other team realized it. They practically straightened up in their chairs, as though collectively thinking 'oh, this is on now.' The girls were more than up to the challenge, too.

With three of them, the BC could just as well have stood for 'Born Competitive.' It was a trait Maya had recognized in each of them, whether she'd known them for a year or a couple of months. Ariel Su, from day one, showed it in how organized she was. It could have seemed to a lot of people as though Maya's being 'only the art teacher' would have no bearing on how they did in more academic subjects, but this couldn't have been further from the truth. She could tell plenty about any of her students for how they handled themselves in her class and from the works they produced. Ariel was her laser focus girl, and she could tell practically from day one that she'd be one who came with a natural ease in learning. It had nothing to do with aspirations toward one career or another, although she would have those, too. She was just smart in a way that was just… hyperaware… and organized.

In this match today, she showed this from question one. She sat there, her posture impeccable, locked in. She never looked away from the table across from them, where the boys sat, her hand hovering at the ready over her buzzer. When she answered questions, her hand would hit that little object so quickly that she practically had to close her hand around it even as she pressed down, so not to let it slide away and off the front of the table.

Then Helena, well… The time she'd spent out of school, for what Maya knew of it, had not been easy, no, but Helena had always been a very industrious girl, who liked to keep busy, to get involved. Maya had picked up on that from the day of the then juniors' field trip to the museum. When she and Lucas had driven her home, Helena had invited them into her house, to share some of her drawings with her future art teacher. This had brought Maya into Helena's room, which might as well have been called Helena's world, her mind, her heart. There were plenty of items showing her days being on the basketball team, her involvement in story hours at the library, her ties to the school's LGBTQIA+ club, her drawings of course, and her schoolbooks to help her keep up with her studies… Once she'd come back to school in September, it was clear that she'd do all she needed in order to get herself to where she needed to be, to get back on track, and that was a drive Maya understood very well.

She was much more relaxed than Ariel when she'd answer, but this in no way made her any less driven. She showed so much confidence, and though this was a bunch of people sitting down the whole time, it gave Maya a solid impression of what she would have been like on the basketball court.

Now Rochelle, oh… This whole thing had come together because of her, because it had felt like just the thing to bring her out of that sturdy shell of hers, to break her tunnel vision. And while Maya was aware that there would be so much work left to be done, that she still had so much growing to do, there had already been a lot of change to note. The difference in under a month bordered on staggering. Sure, Maya had not had the chance to see what Rochelle was like when she was in science class, or English, or history… For all she knew, she could have been like this anywhere but in art class, but Maya didn't believe it, or else the counselors would not have seen fit to drop the girl on her class doorstep. And then she only had to look to Cory, and how he'd speak of her following those team sessions he advised, to know that he was seeing noted changes from her, too.

One thing was for certain, she may have been the youngest on their team, but she had presence. She'd rattled the freshmen boys on the other side before the match had even started, and she kept that attitude going throughout the match. More than once, Maya suspected one of those boys had missed answering a question because of the pointed look aimed back at them from across the table. Rochelle was in her element, and she had not even known it might be hers until it was handed to her.

With the three of them as competitive as they were, it had been clear to Maya even before she'd seen them all in action that they would need something to counterbalance them, something, _someone_ to see that they didn't get carried away. And that was Stella. The shy bird tended to have that effect on people. She commanded respect and no one really realized it, for how unassuming she was. You could have been excused for not even realizing she was there at first sometimes. Certainly, it could be said that the boys didn't realize what they had in their midst at first. And then, just as she'd shown the other girls on her team, she'd sneak in and show herself for the secret weapon that she was.

Before she'd been in school with the rest of them, back when she'd been home schooled, she had devoured information. She just liked to read a lot, and she was pretty good at retaining what she read. She was the kind of person who could find just about anything interesting, especially if it was something she didn't know a lot about. She'd once told Maya how she'd gotten bored one summer and ended up reading a dictionary. She'd liked to see all the words, see how some of them shared roots, or just discover definitions to words she'd heard before without knowing what they meant… This had led to a few weeks deep diving for spelling bee videos, where she'd sit there and quietly spell the words along without looking. Apparently, she'd keep score. To Maya, it felt so very much like Stella to do something like that.

So, that was her team, her Born Curious. The more she saw of them here today, the more she knew they could not have found a better name for themselves if they tried.

As much as she knew about them and could have championed each one of them on and on, Maya could see that it wouldn't be that simple. She and Cory would watch the score as they advanced through the match. It would tip back and forth, sometimes toward one team, sometimes toward the other. It could spend a few questions tipping deeper in one direction, but sooner or later the other side would inch and inch closer before finally overtaking the leaders, and then it'd start all over again.

At one time, Maya felt a touch at her knee and nearly startled, looking back to Cory at her side. He gave her a look she took to mean 'are you alright?' She let out a breath, sitting back in her chair and realizing that she'd been leaning forward, good and hunched for a while, following the girls' ascension back to the lead after the boys had had it for several questions.

Now that he'd said it, it was like the thing she'd been ignoring had needed nothing more than this small sliver of an opening. The moment it had that, it could shoot through and regain power. The line was really thin now in her mind, wondering if this was nerves or early pregnancy signs. The new wrinkle then became something like 'If this _is_ because I might be pregnant, then I should try to calm down, shouldn't I?' This match really needed to end… It would get easier after this first one, wouldn't it? There was no doubt in her mind that the thing that was tugging at her anxiety was the affection she had for her students. It might be said that before she ever had kids of her own, she'd had all of them first.

One thing was certain now. On her way home, she was going to have to make a stop to pick up a test. It was too real in her head now, and she had to know, regardless of the result. A follow-up to this errand would possibly be a bit of research on relaxation techniques.

Maya gave Cory her best sort of look to convey that she was just really zoned in to the match. It made perfect sense; the match _was_ intense, continuing its tipping back and forth as it went on.

It did get to a point where they saw how close they were to the end, and at the same time they noticed this, the boys broke the current tie in their favor. And then they advanced a little further. The girls simply ran out of chances to catch up to them this time, and so they had lost.

Both teams, students and advisors alike, had exchanged congratulations as well as declarations that they needed to do this again another time. Rematches were always fun, and for how heated their first encounter had been, it felt as though they had no choice but to go further.

"Alright, well, I was going to say this whether we won or not, so don't see this as a pity offering," Maya told the girls as they walked back down the hall together. "Let's go get something to eat. Lunch is on me."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	308. Their Hope to Evolve

_**A/N: **__Again, until the problem with the site is fixed no one will see this unless they're on the app, but here we are :) Also, I updated my profile with LP info so... yeah :)_

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November 3rd 2020

_Chapter 308  
Their Hope to Evolve_

As easy as it would have been to say that she'd take the girls over to Ma Maggie's, which felt like the perfect place to go in the event of a disappointment, the better to have one's feelings raised back up by the power of waffles, or pancakes, or any number of other plates, Maya and the quiz team ended up at Nando's diner.

There'd been no telling how the team felt in the moments right after their defeat. They had all been the picture of courtesy with the other team, the teachers, everyone. They had accepted Maya's lunch invitation at once, and with many thanks. But then they had climbed back into the minivan, headed for the diner, and as Maya drove on, all she could notice was the silence which reigned in the seats behind her. She would steal the occasional glance, whenever the car came to a stop, to try and see how they were doing. She wasn't actually sure whether this silence was brought on by any personal disappointments. Alright, sure, some of it was bound to be for that, but all the same, Maya was left with the impression that part of this silence was actually fueled by feelings of regret, for their teammates, and an uncertainty about what to say about it. And then the longer that lasted, well, they'd have to start wondering if any of the others were upset with them, or with themselves, in which case they would need space, and so it was given to them.

Once they ended up at the diner, the five of them around one of the corner booths, Maya took it upon herself to give those girls their voices back.

"I used to work here, when I was in high school," she revealed, pointing around the diner. The girls looked at her. "When my band started doing albums, Nando would insist on having some of them to sell at the register. He still does," she chuckled, and the girls were heard at last, joining in.

"I think I have one of those at home somewhere," Helena nodded. "I remember one time being in here when I was… I think nine or ten… and I saw CDs on the counter, like the picture, so I took one back to my mom and my aunt so they'd buy it for me."

"He only ever sold ours here, so yeah, that'd be one of them," Maya confirmed with a nod, trying not to think about how her students would have been small children in the early days of TXNY. The ice had been broken, so that was working in their favor. Maya wasn't going to allow it to seize up again. "You were all so good back there today. I think you really showed those boys they had competition out there now."

The girls looked to one another at this, and it really felt like they were most concerned with one another, more so than with themselves.

"Now that we did one match, we'll know what we need to work on," Ariel affirmed with full assurance.

"I recorded the whole thing," Rochelle added, following up on her teammate and growing friend's statement. "I can review it and make some notes."

"I liked the part where you answered your first question," Helena turned a smile to Stella, who had been sitting almost like a little ball, between the wall and her teacher, quietly sorting out the sugar packets. She looked up again now, meeting the senior's confidence with what little of her own she had. She nodded in thanks and then her eyes turned to Maya, who tipped her head at her. Of the four of them, there was no surprise at the discovery that she'd be the most shaken by the loss. It would have mattered to her maybe most of all that the rest of the team not be let down. She could easily decide to drop out, so not to get in the way where she felt she had done so, when it could not be further from the truth. The rest of the team must have known this, too, as they soon echoed Helena's praise.

"That little guy, Gilbert, you got him shook up by the end, did you see that?" Rochelle asked, and Maya hid her smile in taking a sip from her glass, to see her former grumpy one actually showing her attention and letting it benefit her teammate, her friend. Stella looked momentarily bolder for it, only to be just as quickly startled at Ariel's follow up.

"Pretty sure he's crushing on you now," she nodded, and Stella had no words, only a short shake of the head to deny it, and a hoodie-sleeved hand laid innocently in place to hide any trace of pinkness in her cheeks. Unfortunately for her, it also travelled to her ears, though no one pointed this out.

"I think we need to get jackets next, for when we have real competitions. It'll make us look a lot more… imposing, won't it?" Rochelle suggested, changing the subject much to Stella's appreciation.

"We can earn up for them, like a bake sale or something," Ariel suggested.

"I can't bake," Rochelle chimed in at once.

"I can," Stella lifted her hand away from her face now, just barely. Helena added her own capability to this, before offering for the others to come to her house so they could make cookies and cupcakes, once they had a go to hold the sale.

"We can make them for Christmas!" Ariel shared the thought even as it came to her. "And Hannukah, too," she added in the next breath, looking to Helena and Rochelle, who had not even had the time to point out they didn't do Christmas.

"If you show me what to do, I can probably decorate stuff," Rochelle finally agreed to help with the baking. "Just don't let me do anything that might mean I make anyone sick."

"I get the impression that you have a precise hand," Helena stated. "We'll have you icing cookies in no time."

"You guys aren't in art class with me, I can't draw, ask her," Rochelle pointed back to Maya, who bit back a laugh at being called on in this way.

"My personal – and professional – opinion is that you have your strengths, and your own style," she stated. "Here, try this," she pulled a pen from her bag and flipped her paper placemat over. There, she drew a fairly simple outline of cartoon dog before sliding paper and pen over to Rochelle. "Now do it again," she instructed. The girl hesitated when put on the spot, but finally she cleared her throat and picked up the pen. Carefully, she drew the dog again before setting the pen down as one might when they'd finished a test in school. Maya and the other girls leaned in to observe.

"See? I told you," Helena tapped Rochelle on the arm. The freshman looked somewhere between humbled and proud at this, and from the looks of her she had no idea how to respond to it.

The rest of the lunch went by with the very opposite to what the ride over to the diner had been. To see the girls interacting in this way, Maya found it harder and harder not to just sit there with a huge smile on her face. Oh, far be it for her to take credit for anything, she was just so happy to see how they all were becoming genuine friends, a little cluster of their own. The fact that they were all in different grades would keep them from sharing any class time with one another, but Maya was about certain this would not in fact be a problem for them.

No one would possibly guess that they'd just lost their first match, not from how they animatedly talked amongst themselves. If anything every minute that went by made them more and more ready for their next try, possibly one that wasn't simply informal.

After lunch, it was back into the minivan, now to drop off the girls back home. By virtue of the errand she needed to make on the way home, Maya ended up seeing the girls off in the same order she'd picked them up rather than the reverse. Ariel was first out, with many thanks until they'd see each other the next day at school. Then it was Helena at her house, where she thanked Maya again for the shirt. Rochelle asked if she could be dropped off at her father's instead of her mother's, so she ended up going next, leaving Stella to be the last. Maya had her come and sit in the front for the home stretch.

"You had fun today, right?" she asked as they neared her house.

"Oh, yeah, definitely," Stella nodded, smiling. As shy as she could be, she wouldn't have been one to lie in this situation, and Maya was glad for the response.

"So what are you up to now?"

"I was thinking I wanted to check out my dad's encyclopedias. He's got this whole big set in his office," Stella explained, stretching out her arms to encompass this set of books.

"Well, I'll… I'll leave you to that," Maya nodded, smiling, and her student did as much in return. "See you tomorrow."

"You, too," Stella climbed out, jogging off to her house but pausing to turn and wave. Maya waved back before pulling back on to the street and driving off.

As she went along, tapping her hands on the steering wheel to the beat of the music from the radio, she felt good. She felt so much better than she'd done earlier, which now left her wondering if she even needed to stop at the store. She'd been so sure that it was only nerves, hadn't even let herself think it could be anything else until Morgan had said something, so… What was the point of feeding hope when it would in all likelihood be for nothing?

_Because you won't stop wondering until you know for sure._ She sighed. There was no way she was going to let it go, was there? Not now. Earlier, maybe, but now? Maybe what she was feeling now wasn't so much the release of nerves but rather these good feelings brought on by her lunch with the quiz team just sort of… masking whatever was going on underneath. Either way, that would be what her brain would hold on to, so what choice did she have?

"Fine, fine…" she breathed, driving off toward the store. This was not her first time down that aisle, was it? It would not be the last, especially if she came off with a negative today.

Lucas would not be home for a few hours still. By the time _she_ got there, she was going to have to pull all her focus on to some task or another, all to ensure that she wouldn't open that box right away. Then again, maybe she _should_ open it, get it over with. She was about ninety-nine percent sure that it would be negative, so what was even the point, right? _But that one percent could mean…_ Yes, she knew what that percent could mean, and that was the thing. She had to do something, had to make the time go by. The Hex… She'd go into the Hex, and she'd call her Aunt Charlie, maybe they could have themselves a long-distance jam session… Or Ree, she could call her for one of those, too. Yeah, that might do it…

Today had been so good, loss or no… Whatever would happen once Lucas got home, well… She'd do her best to let it go along in the way the match's result had gone with the girls, just a bump in the road, not anything capable of bringing them to a full stop.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	309. Their Hope to Life

_**A/N: **__(Even though most people can't see these right now...) The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!_

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November 4th 2020

_Chapter 309  
Their Hope to Life_

With the store closed at last, Lucas was soon out in his car and driving home. He'd barely be in there a few minutes, seeing as he and Maya were due for dinner at Zay and Nadine's that night, but he was eager to get there nonetheless. He hadn't heard back from Maya about the girls' match yet, and knowing her he took this to be her wanting to wait until they could talk freely and with some length rather than writing him while he was at work. She'd been so eager and nervous this morning though, and he had to know how it had gone. He had all the confidence in the world that one way or another it would be a success.

"Hello?" he called, walking into the house. The first to greet him, as was usually the case, were the dogs, and he gave them each their due in pats and scratches before carefully walking around them. "Maya?" he tried again, cutting into the kitchen to confirm the Hex keys were still on the hook, which would mean she was in the house.

The keys were gone, so he walked out the back door and went up to the studio. The light wasn't on to signal he couldn't come in, so he turned the knob. The door was locked. Frowning, he tried to look through the windows, but there was no one inside. This was only getting more confusing, but he went back to the house, taking the steps two at a time until he got to the top. He walked with the intent of heading into the attic to check if Maya was up there, but even as he did he turned his head and there she was, sitting on the bed in their room.

"Hey… I was calling you before, didn't you hear me?" he asked. He vaguely noticed the Hex keys on the nightstand near her, so that explained that.

"Yeah, I, uh… I was just sort of in my head, sorry," Maya replied. Looking at her now, he couldn't help but see how strange she looked, just sort of… lost up in her head.

"Was it that bad today?" he asked, moving to sit with her.

"Huh? Oh, no… I mean, we lost, but it was actually really good," she told him. When she turned her head to look at him, it was like she was realizing he was there for the first time. She straightened up, turning herself sideway and folding her leg as she went. "So, here's the thing," she breathed. He didn't know what was going on, but so far she wasn't doing much to keep him from worrying about her. "I…" she started, then paused, like she had changed her mind on whatever she'd first intended to say.

"Hey…" he took her hand.

"I was so nervous this morning, about the girls, and the match, and that is a whole thing I might talk to Riley about, see what she thinks, you know? But then I was also… I just felt sort of… off, you know? And even Morgan could see it, and I think Mr. Matthews, too." She was getting better and better at calling him Cory when they were at work, but for some reason when she spoke about him with any of her friends or family, he was Mr. Matthews again. "So, the thought was that maybe this was… you know…"

The way she looked at him now, it realigned his thoughts in a whole new way, and his eyes flickered into wideness, to which Maya immediately pointed.

"No, see, I didn't want that to happen, because I'm pretty sure that's not what it is, and I'm just being nervous for no reason about the team, so I don't want you to get your hopes up too high, yeah?"

"I mean, I can try," he slowly responded, even as he felt like his insides were coming alive with anticipation, which was a weird concept to imagine really…

"Yeah, well, so, I went and bought a test on the way home, and I tried to go in the Hex to just distract myself until you got home, so that we could look together. But I just sat in there for like an hour and nothing would come to me, and you know that is _not_ something that happens to me a lot… if ever. I came back in here, and all I could think was that it would be my nerves, like I'd been telling everyone, and if that was the case, then there was no reason to get you caught up in that and have you be disappointed, too." He shook his head, seeking to reassure her he didn't mind the disappointment, that he would want to be there anyway. "I know," she sighed, squeezing his hand.

"So, did you…"

"I took the test," she confirmed. "But then I… As soon as I finished, when I had to put the timer and wait, I thought how even if I'm ninety-nine percent sure that it will be negative, there's still a chance that it won't, and if that's what happens, then I want to have you there with me. So… I haven't actually looked at it yet. It's still sitting back there, next to the sink in the bathroom."

"How long have you been sitting here since then?" he wondered. Maya looked to the alarm clock.

"Couple of hours," she estimated. "Been staring at the wall long enough that I kind of want to paint it now," she admitted, and Lucas chuckled, which made her smile a bit. "I can't go. Can you just… Just look at it and then you can tell me, yeah? It's only fair."

"Are you sure?" he asked, and she nodded. "Okay," he leaned forward to press a kiss to her forehead, then to her lips, which he held for an extra beat before looking at her again. If this was the one percent, then everything was about to change, wasn't it?

Finally, he got up and walked out of the room, stealing another look back to her before moving down the hall and into the bathroom. As promised, there sat the test, with the box and everything else. He didn't have to look too long to see what it said. It had had more than enough time to render its results.

He was only gone for half a minute, and still to Maya it felt ridiculously long. She'd been working so hard not to get her hopes up for nothing, but now it felt as though her hopes were trying to climb up and take control. Her assurances were only going to be able to keep control for so long before they'd break through, so Lucas really needed to…

When he finally returned, he came through the door and he didn't keep her hanging too long before giving a shake of his head, bringing an end to the battle at once.

"See? What did I tell you?" she breathed out, letting herself tip back to the mattress. After a beat, it sank at her side, bringing her husband into view. Lucas put his arm around her waist and she followed her drive to nudge herself closer to him. "It's fine, I mean, it's like I said. I was pretty sure it was just nerves." She didn't even need to look at him to know his face would be making an expression that boiled down to 'yeah, but you also thought the other thing.' "What about you? You're not too…"

"Hey, no," he promised, bowing his head for a moment to rest with hers before lifting it again so he might see her face. "We're just starting, yeah? We told ourselves we weren't going to put too much pressure on ourselves, that it was going to take the time it took. We had those tests," he reminded her, and she nodded.

Maybe for thinking about their friends' struggles, and even thinking about the fact that both their mothers had at one time miscarried, they'd went and gotten tests done, to ensure they were all set so far as conceiving, which they were. It didn't mean that they'd be in the clear once that happened, but they at least knew that it wasn't impossible for one or both of them.

"It's fine, really," Maya promised, moving to sit and running a hand through her hair as she did so. Lucas moved back into a seated position as well. "Maybe I put a bit more into it because I figured like 'third time's the charm' and all. It's stupid."

"Well, if it is, then I'm right there with you," Lucas pointed out, and it made her laugh. "Are you good to go for…" he asked, and she looked like she was just remembering now that they were expected at Nadine and Zay's for dinner.

"Yeah, I just need to change," she looked down to her Born Curious shirt.

"Looks good to me," Lucas shrugged. "Would look better if I had one, too, but…"

"I will make you one, alright?" Maya rolled her eyes, smiling.

So, they got changed, and they headed down to Lucas' car, taking off just as Sam came home from work. They asked if he wanted to come along, but he was waiting on Dora and Cecilia, who would be joining him for a movie night, so they went on without him.

"Can I get the story now?" Lucas asked as he drove. Maya frowned, not following for a moment before it clicked. It almost felt as though the match had been some other day, easily weeks ago already.

So, she told him about the whole thing, about picking up the girls, and heading to the school to join Morgan, and Cory, and the team and their people. She left out the part about her conversation with Morgan, since they had already more than dealt with it back home. She told him about the other team, and how tight the game had been, and how the girls had done so well despite the fact that they had been defeated in the end.

"They were so quiet when we left, I was worried it had really got them down, but we got to the diner and…" she shook her head, beaming. She loved all her students, she did, even the ones who caused her trouble in some strange way, but she had a feeling those four girls together were going to hold a special place in her heart for years to come and long after they had graduated out of her class, and the team, and the school altogether. She told Lucas about the desire for jackets and the bake sale it inspired, promising upon prompt that she would bring him back a few.

"Good," he nodded appreciatively.

"What about you, how was it today? Busy?"

"Regular Sunday busy," Lucas confirmed, which was to say that it would have been considered overly busy on most days, but for a Sunday it was neither more or less than was to be expected. "Ramona did drop by with Erin around lunch though, to pick up some books from Maeve." At the mention of the little Hastings girl, Maya's smile slipped swiftly over her face. "I took her around the store with me for a bit." Maya made a snorting sort of noise, which he took to be an 'accusation' of his baby fever.

"Babies _are_ good for business," she finally stated, as though to let him save face.

"The one woman I helped when I had her, she thought Erin was mine," he revealed.

"Well, you are really good with her," Maya chuckled.

"Yeah…" Lucas could only agree, recalling his earlier concerns, all of them squashed away by the mini Maeve. He also thought of how he would have to mention those concerns to his wife, in an effort not to keep anything bottled up as he had sometimes done, though it would have to wait until after they came home from the Babineaux house.

Arriving there, they had barely been let through the door by Zay that they were accosted by Charlie the dog, he who had once upon a time nearly been called Sneezy. As with his other brothers and sisters, spread out among various friends and family, he would come along as though he could smell his brother Crowley on them.

"Hey, hello!" Maya scooped him up, receiving the many kisses she was given with a laugh.

"Gotta get back in there," Zay indicated the kitchen, leading them in that direction. "I'm supposed to keep an eye on the stove and make sure nothing burns. Nadine's upstairs, she's on the phone with the hospital about a patient, I think," he explained, peering into the pan, giving it a stir. "Hey, how was your thing today?" he asked, turning back to Maya.

"Oh, it was good," she replied, setting the dog down again. Charlie went and kept a firm post at Zay's side now, eyes up and at the ready for any offerings of food. "We lost, but it was good."

"Alright," Zay nodded, understanding. "You know, I was thinking I could start one of those at _my_ school. I know the kids are smaller, but it's never too early to get them started, right?"

"Zay!" Nadine's voice was heard from above, followed by steps on the stairs.

"I haven't burned anything, I swear!" Zay called back, even as he gave the food in the pan a hard look and turned to Maya and Lucas for confirmation. Nadine came into the kitchen now, and Zay indicated the pan. She blinked at it for a moment, but then shook her head.

"I don't care…" she breathed, and just now they all looked at her like she was about to pass out. "Zay, it's happening," she spoke, her voice coming sort of untethered to reality.

"What is?" he asked, and out of the haze, Nadine smiled. Maya was the first to understand, and she gasped, head swivelling from Nadine to Zay and back, smiling along. Now Lucas got it, too, and he turned to his best friend, nodding at him. Finally, the spoon dropped from his hand, clattering to the ground where it was greeted by a happy Charlie. "Wha… Are you sure? I mean, it's not… Last time, they…" he went up to her, and getting just a bit more agency, Nadine shook her head at him.

"Not like last time," she promised him. "The mother… She'd already selected us, they were setting things in motion, and then she went into labor." This small bit of news was like a second shot, and the others reacted in turn.

"Wait… Wait, so that… that means…" Zay blinked, swallowing to combat a throat gone dry as he realized what this meant.

"It means our baby is being born, right now. We have to go…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	310. Their Welcoming of Family

**_A/N: _**_Knock knock, we're back? :)_

* * *

November 5th 2020

_Chapter 310  
Their Welcoming of Family_

"You know, this takes me back," Dylan told Lucas as the two of them carried the large and heavy box up the stairs. Lucas inquired on where he felt taken, minding the corner as they turned and carried on. You know, when we all snuck in and moved Maya's room into the basement, turned her room into a nursery for her sisters. Only this time we're not having to sneak around."

"That _is_ a relief," Lucas agreed. "Also, more lighting. I don't know how we ever managed to pull that off."

"Teamwork, Friar!" Dylan laughed, and Lucas had to steady his grip so that his own laughter wouldn't make him drop his end of the box.

There had been a room in the Babineaux house dedicated to their eventual child, for as long as they'd begun their adoption process. Many times over, they had considered actually filling it up, preparing it ahead of time, but each time they had reconsidered, for valid reasons. The one at the top was that they didn't actually know if they would get a baby, or a small child, or a bigger child. Much as they couldn't help but imagine themselves with a baby, they had been equally open to welcoming older children, who would need something other than a crib, or a changing table… So, the room remained empty, waiting to learn its eventual purpose.

Despite all this, Zay and Nadine did not lack for preparation. It became something midway between common sense and compulsion. Their basement contained many items kept at the ready, unassembled pieces of furniture, clothing, and toys, and books, and other items for decorating a baby or a child's room. Nadine would call herself the primary culprit in this matter, being found occasionally to enter stores and find some thing or another to add to their growing stock pile of belongings for children they did not yet have, but Zay was not entirely innocent of this either.

But now it had all come together for the better. Amelia Geraldine Babineaux, Mia as she was to be called, was born two days ago now, and she was coming home.

None but Maya and Lucas, who had been there with Nadine and Zay as they had gotten the call and learned of their impending parenthood could really understand exactly the level of joy this news brought to the new parents. After so many sorrowful losses, so much wait, so much disappointment and anxiety, they had gotten good news. Not just good news but the best news, _the_ news, the one they had been waiting on for so long. There was a young woman up in Midland, and she was giving birth to a child she sought to put up for adoption, and she had chosen them. They didn't have too much more in the way of details at the time, except that they were assured there would be no coming back on this decision, not like the last time they'd been called.

There was little time for them to think of much else but to get on the road, knowing they'd have a few hours between them and their destination. Maya and Lucas had told their friends to go on ahead. They would put away the food and then they'd be right behind them. They also promised to get the word out, to the future grandparents, future aunts, and many future friend-family members. It wasn't as though Nadine was the one giving birth to this child, so they did not all aim to drive up to the hospital along with them, wanting in no way to crowd the baby's birth mother. Still, both Zay and Nadine's parents would be joining them.

Maya and Lucas had been no more than a half hour behind, and once they'd arrived to the hospital and rejoined their friends, the baby had still yet to be born. Zay and Nadine were in the delivery room, as they had been allowed within by the mother, so their friends waited nearby, soon joined by the grandparents. This child may not have been their blood, may not even have existed in their consciousness until a few hours prior, but it was clear at once that she was already part of the family.

Finally, Zay had come along, looking like his brain was ready to explode for how quickly his day had turned around, and clearly unable to spot his people. His father had called his name, and he'd turned around, coming up to them and greeting his Isaiah Sr's extended arm as an invitation to hug him, which was precisely what he did.

"Breathe, now," Senior told him. Zay had absolutely inherited his frame and his height from his mother's side, but he had without a doubt gotten that smile from his father. "What's going on back there, is the baby here?"

"She's here, and she's ours," Zay confirmed, sounding the most joyfully affected they had seen him be since the day he'd married Nadine. And then to be embraced and congratulated as he was, they could not have invented a better day than this one.

They were just into the early hours of the next morning by then, and both Maya and Lucas were going to be looking to a tired day at school and at work but they could not leave without going to meet little Mia. Zay brought them to the room, separate from the birth mother's, where Nadine now looked over the baby. She held her and looked upon her with so much love in her that they could hardly make her realize anyone else was in the room.

But at last she'd looked up, and she'd invited her friends to come forward, to meet her daughter. She was just about as perfect as any newborn could hope to be, not too big, not too small, and everything was just as it should be. They would be able to take her home very soon.

What little they could share, from what they'd gotten to discuss with the birth mother, was that she'd been hoping to find a family for her child who might look like her, half black, half Chinese… It had not been a guarantee, sure, but then there had been Zay and Nadine, and if their picture had been the thing to draw her eye, everything else she'd learned about them only proved that she'd been right to look for them. She would have arranged to meet them, to talk, but then she'd gone into labor, and so it had all happened very, very fast.

On the drive back to Austin, the night fast progressing, neither Maya nor Lucas could imagine even sleeping for a minute. Instead, they got to plotting what was to be the creation of Mia Babineaux' nursery, before she came home with her parents. Zay and Nadine would be staying up in Midland until this happened, the grandparents seeing to bringing whatever they'd need to make that journey back.

"I'm just saying, I will swear to anyone who asks," Maya intoned as Lucas drove them home. "This whole thing today, with thinking we were having a baby, that was just like… a premonition." Lucas laughed. "Well, did a baby come or what?" Maya grinned at him.

Getting to go to work that day, telling those few teachers who'd been there when she'd been a student that two others of their former students had just had a baby, that was about the best spreading of cheer one could hope to find.

All through the day, where time permitted, a conversation had been going on, over texts and calls, regarding the nursery. This was actually their third time stepping in to help create one of these, between the Hunter twins' and Zola Obi's, after Willow's delivery had gone so badly. While the first one had been done by a bunch of teenagers in the middle of the night, and the other by concerned friends over days, this one was easily the most laid back, much as they remained on something of a deadline.

"How's it going in here? Can we bring the crib?" Lucas asked, peering through the door, where Maya had several of the others helping her with the walls, paintbrushes working along.

"If you keep to the center of the room, definitely," she turned and replied at once.

"Right, okay," Lucas nodded, giving a look to Dylan to make sure he understood before they brought the box in.

"Hey, trade with me?" Dylan moved to Asher. "You're better at this than I am."

"You said it, not me," Asher smiled, passing his brush and paint over before checking that he didn't have any splatter on him. "We had to build two of these. I'm not ashamed to say, the first one took way longer to finish than the second. We did it all together, me and Ray and Sophie, and it made all of us feel surprisingly dumb here and there."

It had been tricky enough to find the time to do all this, as it was a weekday and they all had work, or classes… They'd started the previous evening and hadn't done nearly as much as they would have liked, though there had been some errands to run and they'd gone to do those first, the better to have everything they needed once they got started, so it wasn't without reason. As for today, any of them who was able to do so had come out here and done what little they could before leaving again, reuniting at the end of the day to give the big push. By now, the Babineaux family, along with the baby, would have returned from Midland but, per their friends' request, would then head to the Zhu house to wait for the okay to come home. This was more than acceptable to them. For one, they had known their friends long enough and had been involved in group efforts like this one enough times to graciously let it happen. And then, of course, this would be the first time that Mia's aunts, Marley, Michaela, and Olivia, would get to meet her.

"Are we almost done?" Riley asked, some time later.

"Think so?" Rosa looked to the others.

"I think we can tell them to come. By the time they get in the car and drive out here, we'll be done," Maya confidently stated.

It was a bit tighter of a call than they might have preferred, as the last touches were being made even as Rebecca came to report that the car was arriving. What mattered was that, when Zay and Nadine came through the door, the former carrying the baby in her car seat, the group had made it down the stairs for a muted but enthusiastic welcome. The wait had been so long, and this, the homecoming, was such an important milestone, too. The new parents were very well aware of it, too, and it showed in their eyes, in their smiles, overflowing with gratitude for their friends even as they took in this still surreal moment. They were home, with their baby girl…

"We've barely slept since she was born, it still feels like I could have imagined it, but… she's here, and she's real… She's so real…" Nadine declared, looking upon her sleeping daughter after she'd set her down in her crib. She looked around the room, still just taking it all in, and as she turned back to her friend, her bandmate… her sister… she had tears in her eyes.

"Yes, she is," Maya smiled. She was not spared her own happy tears. Not too far back, Zay stood with Lucas, looking to his wife being the happiest she had been in so long, and he was so pensive that his best friend had to ask what he was thinking.

"Just that… I look at our girl and I… All this time that we waited, and we thought it would never happen, all of that was so hard, but… If it hadn't taken as long as it did, then we wouldn't have _her_. She hasn't done anything else but sleep, and eat, and cry, and all of that, but I love her. Man, I love her so much, and I wouldn't want any other kid but her."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	311. Their Welcoming of Lights

November 6th 2020

_Chapter 311  
Their Welcoming of Lights_

"Are you building yourself a private stash or something? Got some private decorating plans?" Maya asked as she found Lucas setting one of the garlands in a box where he'd already put some string lights and a few ribbons.

"No, that's just for later, after we finish here," he replied, returning to where she was checking the lights about to go along the roof. "Every year, at Christmas, my grandmother would decorate the stables, to bring some of all that cheer over to the horses. After she died, my mother and I did it for her for a while, and eventually Juliet took over. I figured I couldn't let Trooper miss out this year, just because he's not at the ranch anymore."

"No, you really can't," she agreed and smiled.

"But first things first," Lucas joined her in the light check.

It was his day off today, and so they were using it to transform the house into its most jolly of settings. Christmas was still about three weeks away, but really it was about time. Lucas didn't think Maya could have waited even one more day.

"Would I be jinxing us if I said that I can't wait until next Christmas?" he asked as they moved out with the bunches of lights. He looked back at her and was happy to find her smiling, understanding what he was getting at.

"I can't wait either," she told him, and he leaned in to kiss her, lightly so. Next year, provided luck was on their side, there would be one more stocking up in their house. "Where is your assistant?" Maya inquired when he pulled back. "Not that I'm not ready to go up there with you, but what is the point of having a kid brother if you can't make him do stuff for you?"

"I am pretty sure he's upstairs… making out with my cousin," Lucas cleared his throat.

"Oh, that…" Maya slowly nodded. "They're really slipping on the whole subtlety thing, aren't they?"

"When were they ever subtle?" Lucas wondered.

"Not one second," Maya agreed. "Should I go get him?"

"You might want to announce yourself as you go."

"You are so funny. Hilarious."

Maya did call out Sam's name as she reached the top of the stairs, and for the way both he and Dora came from his room, she had to think a minute more would have taken them into a whole other zone. After telling Sam where he was needed and watching him dash past her, Maya turned back to Dora. Even fully dressed, she still looked like she had not forgotten one bit of that awkward encounter on Halloween. Whenever it was just the two of them, there would always be that little hiccup, and Maya resisted showing how it just made her laugh now.

"Can you help me get the ornaments from the basement?"

"Yes, I can do that," Dora breathed before following back down the stairs.

Outside, Lucas stood a few paces from the house, the better to recall the 'route' he would take to achieve the lay of the lights along the roof. It didn't exactly change from year to year, but it still made sense to him to run it back through. He could imagine that, after several years of this he would be able to do it all with next to no second thought.

This would be their fourth Christmas at the house already, and that felt impossible in and of itself. Every year, there would always be that moment where he'd wonder where the time had gone, and he couldn't say if he looked forward to not feeling it anymore or if he hoped to feel it for as long as he could. This year, this Christmas, did feel like the last of a small era in this house. The Sam Years, they could call it, or the years before he and Maya became parents… Both would have been appropriate.

For all the times they had wondered, Maya and him, about what Sam would do once he finished college, once his whole purpose for even moving to Austin had run its course, they couldn't say that they had ever foreseen this curve in the road. They had long hoped for him to stay in town with them, couldn't help wanting him to stick around, and then they'd gotten it. He _was_ staying here… The way things were going, they saw him and Dora moving in together by summer's end. Whether or not it was logical, with how recent things were between them and not even defined in any way beyond the physical side of it all, Lucas and Maya both could see his cousin and her brother looking to one another, thinking that this would be a perfect solution. He wanted to stay here, she had an apartment and a roommate who was leaving Texas at the end of the year… Who knew, maybe they'd make it work. If this all just crashed and burned on them, then… Yeah, it might have been better not to think too far ahead. For now things were just… what they were.

As to the other part, the other chapter closing, well… It wasn't closed yet, was it? They were putting so much faith in the belief that they'd be expecting their first child before long, but there really was no telling, was there?

Lucas had spoken with his father, not long after his worries had emerged, after Mia Babineaux had come into their world. He'd needed to speak to him, to have him say the things only he could tell him. He'd told Maya all about it, as promised, and he was glad for her words, always, but this was just something else. He needed to talk to him, father to prospective father. It had done him as much good as he could hope to find, both conversations had, and now… Well, it wasn't as though he didn't keep wondering when it would happen, didn't keep feeling the burn of that baby fever, but it did feel a bit more like he was in control of himself.

"Hey, I'm here, sorry," Sam came to join him.

Lucas gave him a look, and his face gave the slightest twitch like he had resisted the urge to run. Sooner or later, Lucas would have to tell Sam he didn't need to have to go around like he was going to get smacked for going after Dora, but then he sort of didn't see why he should. Sure, he understood that it came from a place of respect, and of not wanting to do anything that would alter their dynamics as brothers, but then what did he really owe him? It wasn't Lucas' place to decide what his cousin could or couldn't do, and the same could be said for him and Sam. It might have been another matter if Sam wasn't a good guy, but that was neither here nor there, was it?

Maybe the reason he hadn't said anything to Sam was that, much as he didn't disapprove, it would just have felt weird to put himself in the middle of all that… It _was_ his cousin.

"You remember what to do?" Lucas moved to climb the ladder.

"Yeah, I got you," Sam promised.

While the guys saw to the lights outside, Maya and Dora worked to get the tree decorated. Dora would share stories of coming to Christmas parties out here when she was little, back when Pappy Joe still lived here, and how she would play hide and seek with her brothers and Lucas. She told of one year where she had ended up finding a hiding place which was already occupied… by presents. It was the first year after she'd known that Santa wasn't real, but then her younger brother had still believed. She'd been so concerned with preserving that secret, and so she'd been very quiet, the better not to be found, and then to protect the secret stash.

Lucas was the one tasked with finding the others on that round, and he _had_ found her. When he'd realized where she was, he must have had the same thought about his cousin Alex. He'd allowed Dora to remain unfound and then, once the Cassidy boys had been found and brought well away from her hiding spot, Lucas had admitted defeat and she had snuck out and finally revealed herself. Alex had never found the presents, and the secret was preserved… at least until a few months later, when the cat had been let out of the bag. What mattered most was that that they gotten him through one last Christmas.

"Was it a good hiding spot?" Maya asked. "Just to know, for future reference." Dora happily showed it to her, and Maya was stunned that, after nearly three and a half years, she had never been aware of some aspect of her house. "Huh…" she blinked.

The lights were up outside, along with the rest of the decorations on and around the house, just as the tree was completed and joined with a number of indoor decorations. The house could not have been any readier if it tried. Now, they had one more box to unload, and it took them up the road to the Sanderson farm.

"We're just going to go check out how crowded the skating rink is," Sam told Maya and Lucas, indicating himself and Dora as they went.

"Sure, alright. Just be back for dinner," Maya told them, and they were off. "I mean, they're cute, you gotta give them that," she stated. Lucas chuckled.

Reaching the farm, they waved to Missy, who was in the midst of some decorating of her own along with her mother and grandfather. They continued on toward the stable, where they were greeted by a very happy horse. Trooper had settled well enough into his new home by now, and it certainly helped that Lucas and Maya both visited as often as they could.

"Hey, Troop, look what we got for you," Lucas smiled. As they got the decorations up, the horse did look as though the additions reminded him of something from before. Maya could see this, as much as she saw how happy it made her husband to bring this touch of his grandmother to the animal.

"I know I've said it before, but I really wish I could have known her when she was alive," she told him as they took Trooper around for a walk out of the stable before they'd head back home to start on dinner. Lucas had loved his Granny Marianne so much, it showed whenever he spoke of her. More than that, the more she learned of her, of all she'd done, Maya really got to admire the woman.

"All those horses, they mattered so much to her. She could have lost the ranch and she wouldn't have batted an eye, not so long as she knew that the horses would go on to places where they'd be well cared for and looked after."

"No wonder she wrote you into her will then," Maya chimed in, loving to see how the notion made him smile.

As Trooper was returned to his festive stable, Maya and Lucas walked back up the road toward home. The sun had started to come down already, giving just enough of darkness so that they came upon the house with its colorful lights and it really just felt like Christmas was upon them. They never got tired of that first sight of it.

"Hey, so Dora told me about that little hidey-hole where your grandparents used to hide the presents," Maya revealed as they continued up toward the house. Lucas let out an almost exasperated sigh, which Maya took to mean he had been using that space to hide gifts from _her_, and now he couldn't do it anymore. "Sorry," she sheepishly laughed. "We'll come up with a code. I won't look, I swear."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	312. Their Welcoming of Cookies

November 7th 2020

_Chapter 312  
Their Welcoming of Cookies_

"I think you have enough here that everyone will have one… or five…" Maya blinked when she saw the number of containers already had stacked to take into the school. There were also several empty cardboard boxes, small paper bags, and rolls of ribbon, all in one container free of baked goods. The supplies were promptly explained.

"Ariel had the idea that we could sell them individually but also in boxes," Stella explained, straining under the weight of the stacked containers in her arms. Maya quickly went to relieve her of half of it. "They make nice gifts, don't they?" Stella continued, undeterred.

"Yeah, I guess so," Maya smiled. It was hard not to follow along, seeing how happy it made her shy bird to be a part of this endeavor. "How much did you guys spend on supplies?"

"Really not that much. Rochelle says if we sell it all we will have more than earned back what we put in, and we'll have enough for six jackets, plus some extra for the next girl to join us… or boy, I guess. It is kind of fun the way it is now, just us girls…" she smiled, remembering the task at hand and moving to add her containers to the wheeled cart. Maya felt that swell of teacherly pride all over again, witnessing the scope of the girls' cooperation, and the benefits it returned on to them.

"So, how was it with the baking?" she went on to ask Rochelle, who was carrying another load to the cart, the last one out of Helena's uncle's truck, which had been borrowed for the occasion.

"It took the whole weekend," Rochelle declared, sounding as though the memory was both pleasing and exhausting.

"Wow," Maya laughed. "And did you come around to doing more than decorating?" she had to ask.

"No way. We were on a clock, there was no time for me to scrap anything. I think we made like a thousand cookies. As soon as one batch was out, another went in."

"A nice assembly line, huh?"

"Oh, yeah," Rochelle confirmed, sounding like she very much appreciated the efficiency. "Ariel and I did the decorating, and Helena and Stella did the baking. Ariel helped with that, too. I kept count and put everything ready to go once they were all finished. Everyone did their part." Maya gave her a look, letting her eyes do the asking. _And did you have fun?_ "When we stopped, on Saturday night, Helena said she could show me how to do it on my own, when we're not making so many at once."

"Yeah? You should go," Maya encouraged. "I'm sure you can learn, and I speak as someone who used to be a _disaster_ in the kitchen."

"I don't know. I don't have a lot of time, and I already lost two days from doing all these," Rochelle shrugged, looking up and down the stack of containers. Even as she did though, it felt like there was something at the back of her eyes, like echoes of memories, and Maya could see just the ghost of a smile.

"I wouldn't see it as a loss," she pointed out, discreetly, letting the thought settle into the freshman's mind. "You got to hang out with friends… develop new skills… and make a _load_ of baked treats which will make you all in high demand in there, especially around lunch… or the teachers' lounge."

"I suggested we should hang around the gym, too, so when people get out of there they'll buy stuff from us," Rochelle added.

"That, too," Maya laughed before moving to help with the cart. As they pushed it along, Rochelle seemed to be contemplating things in her head.

"I guess it might be a good thing if I knew how to make some of these. I could make them for my brothers, and they'll probably be better than the ones from the grocery store."

"They usually are," Maya agreed. "How many brothers do you have again?"

"Five," Rochelle frowned, more from the effort than the boys. "I'm the only girl, and the oldest. Technically, I have one full brother, two steps, and two half, and they're not from the same half. It's kind of complicated."

"I've got no full siblings myself, but I have three half-sisters and a half-brother on my mom's side, two half-brothers and two half-sisters on my dad's side, plus a step-brother and two-stepsisters from my stepmother's second marriage, after my father passed. Two of those are from her husband, one is with her. But they're still my siblings," Maya counted off.

"Yeah," Rochelle replied, like she knew exactly what her teacher meant.

"If you don't mind me asking, when did your parents split?"

"When I was eight. My brother was two," Rochelle told her. In her voice, Maya could hear so much that wasn't actually spoken but felt like an old song she hadn't heard in a while, still remembering every word. She tried not to show the old hurt, tried to act like it wasn't there anymore, but it still was, would always be. "My dad remarried when I was eleven, and my stepmom already had two boys, from her first husband, but he died. They had a baby a year after that, he's three now. And my mom, she got married again just two years ago, had the baby less than a year after."

"Yeah… cookies might be helpful, all those boys…" Maya guessed, and that got a laugh out of her student. She could have dug a little deeper, to keep her talking, but at this point it would have felt too much like she was fishing for something, which she really wasn't. Still, it wasn't difficult to guess that Rochelle didn't often talk about herself, and it did feel like maybe she needed to.

As had been agreed, the girls could run their sale table at the start of the day before classes, then at lunch, then right after school. They were also free to use the time between classes to try and do more, but that was providing that they showed up on time to class. If they ended up late, they would not be excused for it. Maya and Cory both could have volunteered of their own time to pitch in, but they had decided together that this needed to be the girls' task alone, and so they let them go on without interfering.

They absolutely made a killing in the teachers' lounge, unloading a number of those boxes well before the lunch break, when they parked themselves just outside the cafeteria. They did have a small boost from putting the word out in history class, and art class, too. Maya's 'quiz mom' nerves – as nicknamed by Morgan – reared up again, thinking that the table might not do nearly well enough to reach its goal. It didn't take long for her to find however that she had been dead wrong. The clientele was a constant swarm, so much so that the four girls could hardly be seen unless you were standing in front of the table.

"Alright, alright, classes are about to start, off you go," Maya finally had to come up, clapping her hands to get people's attention. "They'll be back at the end of the day… right?" she turned to get a look at what was still available. There really wasn't that much left.

"Yes, we will," Ariel promised with a winning smile.

"There, see? Go, go, maybe share amongst yourselves. Make a friend," she teased, turning back to the team with an impressed smile. "You know if this whole quiz thing doesn't work out, you all might have a future in business together."

"We're four cute girls selling cookies and cupcakes to a bunch of hungry teenagers, one from each grade so most people know at least one of us from class… It's not a hard formula," Rochelle stated matter-of-factly, pulling the cash box from the stool between herself and Helena. The senior girl couldn't help but laugh at this, while Ariel grinned, and Stella went pink in the ears. "Well, we are," Rochelle shrugged.

"Hey, own it," Maya found herself once more on the precipice of giggles, courtesy of one of her students. "I guess this means we'll be putting in for those jackets soon, huh?"

"Will we have them in time for January?" Ariel asked. "I think we're ready for a rematch with the Think Tank," she nodded. "We'll look so good in those," she went on, straightening up an imaginary jacket. "Should we have ties, too?"

"I do like a tie on a girl…" Helena hummed for a moment before sitting up and then standing altogether. "We should get all this picked up and head to class."

"Here, we can handle it, yeah?" Maya nodded to Rochelle, who would be in art class in this next period. She accepted at once, and so the other three headed off to their lockers before moving to their respective classes. "Tell me you all managed to have lunch somewhere in there," Maya asked Rochelle, as the notion only hit her now. They had been so busy for the whole lunch period that, for all she knew, they hadn't gotten a single minute to themselves.

"Oh, we did, yeah. We planned ahead," Rochelle promised.

"Of course you did," Maya nodded to herself. Why did she even doubt it?

As was to be expected, with how little remained, the girls sold out the rest of their stock almost as soon as they popped up at their table after last period. They then presented both Maya and Cory with a box each, their own supply of cookies to take home 'on the house.'

"I have to say, these look pretty good," Lucas declared, when he came home to find the box of cookies on the kitchen counter.

"Right? And they taste kind of amazing, too," Maya informed him. He looked up. "What? I had to have one," she insisted, making him smile. "You know, I can't tell who decorated what, but I know Rochelle did some of them, and for a girl who struggled so hard in my class in the beginning, I really think she's starting to come into her own style."

"You should make this an annual thing," Lucas suggested, swiping one of the cookies. It was only fair, if she'd had one already.

"Trust me, I don't even have to consider it, they've got this thing down, the four of them. I barely have to do anything, and I never thought that'd be something that made me happy for _these_ reasons."

"You know how I feel about seeing you be all proud teacher," Lucas stated, after he'd swallowed up the last bite of his cookie. "Damn, these are really good."

"Better than the GiGi cookies your lovely wife makes?" Maya intoned.

"Please, nothing can touch those," Lucas replied with deep assurance.

"With words like that, _you_ can definitely touch something," Maya whispered, getting a pleasantly intrigued smirk from her husband.

"Are those from the bake sale?" Sam's voice broke in, and Maya and Lucas turned around as one, forcing whatever mood had been settling in to now evaporate.

"Yes, yeah, but dinner first," Maya told her brother. Sam only pointed to Lucas' face. Maya looked over and bit back a laugh, seeing the crumbs in his growing Santa beard. "Dude, come on," she reached up to wipe them away.

"I'm practicing," Lucas came in with a swift answer, lifting his chin. "Ho, ho, ho," he added for good measure. Maya gave him two thumbs up, even as she had to hide her face in his chest to contain her laughter.

"You guys are so weird," Sam shook his head, moving to the fridge. "What are we making?"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	313. Their Welcoming of the Stage

November 8th 2020

_Chapter 313  
Their Welcoming of the Stage_

Of all the things Maya thought she'd have in mind as they set out that night, about the last one she'd expected was 'I hope there aren't any reporters hanging around.' But now… now it might actually have been a possibility, and she really hoped it would not come to be true.

At the start of the final week before the holiday break, she had awakened to an abundance of notifications on her phone, which was always very good or very bad, and this time should absolutely have been categorized as very good, although it did not come without a certain wrinkle in the middle.

_Tickets soon on sale for the just revealed dates of the new Ree Forster summer world tour, featuring songwriter Maya Hart._

She'd woken Lucas up at once, even as she looked through the messages and replies, from fans and strangers as much as from people she knew, friends, and family, who'd had no idea that this was coming. It was amusing, seeing them freak out over this huge thing, when she'd had her own freak out months ago, when Ree had even asked her to do this. And there was so much love from them, so much pride… It warmed her heart and primed her to face the day at school, wondering how her colleagues and students would react upon finding out about it all.

As ever, her first contact had been Stella Buckley and Phoebe Munroe, the latter of which had come to school in her best TXNY shirt that day, opening her coat to show it. She was beyond excited, and so was Stella, in her own way. She had never been to a concert like this, and she wanted to go. Maya had asked her if she was sure, pointing out how crowded and loud it would be. She hesitated, briefly, but she still wanted it, which left her teacher to wonder if there'd be any way for her to get hold of some tickets for her students, even if she had to pay for them. Maybe it would have been weird. She would consider it.

Throughout the day, she was faced with many more excited people coming up to her. Some knew about her music career, others were only finding out about it. Only a handful realized she had already written songs that they knew and loved. And then at lunch time, the wrinkle had started to present itself. It had been coming along earlier, but she'd been so busy with her classes and then with a number of other things around the school in her free periods that she hadn't really looked at her phone. When she did, she found several missed calls and messages. Reporters were reaching out to her, wanting to speak with her about the tour.

She had no idea how they'd even tracked her down this fast, especially seeing as Maya Hart was the one they sought and she only went by that name for her music anymore, while Maya Friar was the art teacher out here. But then she only had to think about it briefly, about what would come up if they looked for Maya Hart. They'd probably find TXNY, and Stage Ready. Then, if they looked more into the theater, they'd find she now went by a new name, so from there the last leap to the school would have been a breeze, wouldn't it?

She hadn't known what to do about those. It wasn't that she'd never had any exposure to this side before, but this felt so different, so much bigger, and she didn't want to just jump in and end up making a mistake. She'd left a message with Ree, asking that she call her back when she could. This didn't happen until the evening, once she was back home, by which point she'd only seen the number of messages increase. Ree gave her what advice she could in navigating it all, mostly in seeing that it wouldn't all land directly on her like this, all the while promising that she'd get in touch with a number of the people who were trying to reach her, those Ree herself had had enough contact with over the years to make the process smoother for Maya's sake.

"I'm really sorry, I should have done this part before the announcement went out. I'm usually so much more on top of everything. Tell you what though, I'll get some tickets out to you for the Austin show. A hundred maybe? Two hundred? I'll get back to you with a number."

Talking to Ree had definitely been the right thing to do, and Maya had felt much better afterward. In the following days, she'd been able to get through a number of calls, answering questions… Now there were articles out there, talking about Maya Hart, who she was, how she'd come up to be so in demand as to work an entire album with Ree Forster. She'd asked each time that they keep her school and her married name out of it, and so far this had been respected. It was still so very strange to think that this was all part of her life now.

But tonight… Tonight wasn't supposed to be about her, and after a few encounters in recent days, she couldn't help imagining some person or another showing up outside the elementary school to ask her more questions. It felt like she needed to push the notion out of her head before it became an expectation that stalled her from going about her life. She was nothing more than a big sister tonight, going to see her little sisters' Christmas play.

"Hey, Mrs. Friar." They'd just walked into the school when the familiar call brought her to find Khalil Russell, standing there in a suit, accompanied by an older couple who would have to be his grandparents. Maya quickly excused herself from Lucas and Sam before moving to greet them. She had met the senior Russells before, from parent-teacher night to play times between her sisters and their granddaughter, and they were pleased to see her each time.

"Is Desi doing alright? Not too nervous?"

"She's been practicing her speech all week, any chance she gets," Khalil proudly revealed.

"And he does mean every chance," Mr. Russell added with a jovial laugh. "She'll be in the bathroom, taking her bath, and we'll hear her, going at it like she's going to get herself an Oscar."

"She's been repeating it so many times, we could all be her understudies," Mrs. Russell added.

Moving along, Maya, Lucas, and Sam came upon Katy and Shawn and Haley, the last of which was not looking cheerful in the slightest, crying as her father tried to calm her down.

"Hey, hey, what's the matter?" Maya asked her little sister, who sniffled and turned her head in response to the sound of her voice.

"She's just a little upset because she can't go up there with the girls and MJ," Katy breathed, looking sympathetically to her youngest. Maya was right there with her, imagining how the four-year-old would feel at being left out.

"Do you think she might like to join me over at camp?" she wondered aloud.

"At Stage Ready?" Katy asked. "The holiday camp?"

"Yeah," Maya nodded, smiling as she caught a curious look from her sister. "I could use a small but talented assistant up on that stage…"

"What do you say, Shutterbug?" Shawn asked the little Hunter. "Want to go with your sister to the theater?" Barely pausing between crisis face and happy face, Haley sat up in his arms and gave a nod.

"Good, you're hired," Maya chuckled, receiving her when she stretched out her arms toward her. "That is a nice dress you've got here," she complimented, clearing the girl's porcelain face of its tears.

As the audience of family members went ahead and got to their seats in the auditorium, Maya and Lucas both thought of their people backstage. Nellie and Gracie were both taking part in the fourth grade's piece, with their own roles to play, completely different. To anyone who knew them, their handling of the whole play and their involvement in it came as no surprise. Nellie was ready to take on the thing, head on, while Gracie looked slightly less sure. She was to do a dance solo, and though she did great in her classes, and among the rest of her group whenever they did showcases, this was the first time she'd find herself in the spotlight, and she was struggling to hide how much it frightened her.

Meanwhile, a couple grades down, the newly seven-year-old MJ was excited about doing a song, and he'd been getting his big sister to help him prepare it, because clearly who else would he want to ask for something like this? He did well enough for his age, and for all they knew he would get even better as he grew older.

Beyond the Hunter kids, they spared a thought for Zay, looking after his fourth graders even as he was riding that sleepless wave of fatherhood in its first weeks. Nadine was back home with the baby tonight, what with her being not even a month old, but she had made Zay promise her a recording of the show, and especially his group's performance.

"You're staying right here with me," Maya told Haley as they sat down and she set the girl in her lap, wrapping her arms around her. Haley didn't have any complaints on this whatsoever, settling back and turning her face up to find her sister's with a smile. Maya responded by planting a kiss to her forehead. "You know, in a couple years, you can go there, too," she promised her, and Haley looked thrilled to hear it.

"The first time _you_ got up there, now that was something," Katy was heard chuckling, across the empty seat at Maya's side. It was to be Haley's if she ever decided to come down from Maya's lap, as unlikely as that was.

"You really don't need to bring it up, you know?" Maya shook her head, even as she had to smile.

"She doesn't need to, I've seen the video," Lucas pointed out, on Maya's other side. At this, both Sam and Shawn raised their hands to signify that they, too, had seen little Maya Hart's first 'spectacular' outing on to the stage at the age of six.

"Everyone's a critic," Maya shook her head to her little sister, who had no idea what they were all going on about.

Thankfully, they were spared from any more discussion of this as the lights went down and the evening began.

When MJ's group came along, it was anyone's pick which of his mother, father, or sister had the most trouble keeping their emotions in check. He had worked so hard on his song, and it had much of what might be expected from a seven-year-old, but oh if it wasn't the best thing… No, the best thing was definitely the smile on his face, when he finished and people applauded. That might have been the precise moment where the performing bug went and claimed him.

The biggest piece of the night – for the Hunter-Hart-Friar crew at least – was the fourth graders' play, as led by Mr. Babineaux. Desi Russell gave a rousing speech, putting it all out there for her family in the audience as well as those far beyond Texas that night. Nellie Hunter gave her very most best, which might not have gotten her any awards in the long run, but no one could fault her on her enthusiasm. As to Gracie Hunter though, Maya's little Mouse-Mouse of a sister conquered her fear, taking center stage with her dance and leaving many in the audience, family or no, genuinely moved. By the end of the night, Maya had completely forgotten about her concerns regarding reporters. Now, she couldn't stop thinking about days of seeing her own children up there on that stage… someday…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	314. Their Welcoming of Camp

November 9th 2020

_Chapter 314  
Their Welcoming of Camp_

When she had gotten the job, when she'd become a teacher at last, Maya had worried about what it would do to her other job, at the theater, if she held on to it, too. She had those, and her music, too… In most people's hands, it would probably had been too much, but in hers, in time, she'd come to see that she could actually make it work. She could find a time and a place for everything, and that felt good. Now here they were, for another round of the shorter sort of workshop they called the holiday camp, up at Stage Ready. It held a special place in Maya's heart, and how could it not? All that holiday magic around them, that cheerful air. It was perfect.

So, it made sense to her that she should hold it as her farewell to the program. Once it was over, she would bow out from Stage Ready and the theater, leaving Siobhan and Lily to decide how to proceed without her.

It had not been an easy choice to make, but at this time, it felt necessary. She was juggling plenty already, with the school, the quiz team, the band, the song writing, and the theater… But she also had her family, her parents and siblings, yes, but also her husband, and their marriage, and soon enough children. It wasn't as though she was giving everything up, but something had to give, and of all the branches in her life, the theater was the logical one to cut away, so the rest could continue to grow. The program would be left in good hands, she believed it, and it made things easier… not easy, just… easier.

If she needed anything to make these days even better, bringing her little sister along was really the best choice. She picked up Haley bright and early, finding her staring out the living room window as she drove up, so clearly she'd been waiting for her to arrive. And when she'd gone up and entered the house, Maya had found she had dressed up for the part, specifically by donning her bird costume from Halloween.

"That's what we're going with today?" Maya asked, and Haley nodded. "What made you choose it?"

"They had a costume, too," Haley replied.

"Ah," Maya smiled. "Aren't you scared you might lose a feather or two today?" She was not. "Works for me then. Let's go."

Rather than having to transfer any seats from one minivan to another, she'd simply left hers at the house and borrowed her parents'. Haley watched her big sister with great intent and care for her 'wings' as she was strapped in. She needed to detach them for the ride, so she could fit her arms in her coat's sleeves. Finally, they were off on their way to the theater. Maya put on some music, and while Haley was not one to below along to the songs whether she knew the words or not, she would shimmy about and kick her legs along if it was an upbeat kind of tune, so her sister made sure to keep her supplied in those as much as possible.

When they walked through the theater, which was not yet open at this time, Haley quickly demanded that she lose her coat so her wings might be restored. Maya obliged her, kneeling to clip the things back into place. Haley gave them a flap and was satisfied with the result.

"Okay," Maya breathed, brushing hair away from her face before getting her own coat off, too, suddenly warm from being indoors. "We'll go and drop these off and then we can go and wait for everyone to arrive, yeah?" In response, Haley stretched out her hand, and Maya took it once she was back on her feet, the better to walk her little bird sister to the back, toward her office.

The coats were stashed there, and they went back up the hall. Haley briefly stopped to look through the window running alongside Katy's office door. She knew the place well, had been here too many times to count. From there, they followed the path that would take them up to the large stage. The lights were not more than half up, so they stopped at the box where the sisters worked in tandem to brighten up the whole vast room. With this achieved, Haley dashed off, wings in flight as she took full advantage of the empty stage.

"Don't go too close to the edge!" Maya called after her, moving to intercept.

"Okay, Maya!" Haley called back, making her sister laugh. After a while, it looked like she was trying to dance the way Gracie had done, during the Christmas play. She would likely only recall bits and pieces of it, and even then would only repeat it to the best of her ability, but she was having fun, and that was all that mattered. After a while, she paused, looked around until she could see her sister. "You have to sit there!" she pointed down to the seats with her wing.

"Not that I don't trust you, but I'm going to stay where I can keep you from going too close to the edge, okay?" Maya went down to stand in front of the stage. This appeared acceptable, and so Haley started again. Maya casually took out her phone, the better to save this for posterity and her parents' amusement later.

The sisters' solo enjoyment of the stage could only last so long before others started to arrive. First came the various teachers and coaches. Haley knew them, too, as they knew her, and when they joined in, either as additional audience or extra performers, it was as though her wish to do as her older siblings had done had come even more true. Once she'd gotten that, she was good to go to tag along with her sister for the rest of the day. She also became aware that the bird costume might not have been the most practical, so it was a good thing that Katy had passed Maya a change of clothes to bring along. The costume joined the coats in the office, where Haley was changed into pants and a knitted shirt. Wherever Maya went, she'd be right at her heel.

The holiday camp was generally a smaller group, with registration limited. The spots tended to fill up very quickly, so in time it had been decided that people could only attend it one year. If they'd already attended the year before, they could not return. They could still participate in the regular program, or attend the summer camp, but this shorter holiday stint was a one time deal. One of them at least had found a loophole.

"Maya!" the thirteen-year-old girl called as she walked into the theater lobby. Lea Sullivan-Reyes could easily have taken over and run the whole program if it wasn't that she was in seventh grade. She was here, week to week for the regular program, never missed summer camp, and when she'd been met with the likelihood of missing out on holiday camp due to the one-time rule, she had made a proposition that she could be hired on as something like a camp counselor, an assistant, supremely qualified thanks to the training she had already received from Stage Ready. Maya would have liked to see anyone try and say no to her.

"Hey!" Maya laughed as Lucas' cousin nearly pounced her way into a hug. By now, she was nearly as tall as her, which felt simply impossible. Equally astounding was the thought that, in a little under two years, she'd be starting the ninth grade… at her school. "All set for today?"

"When am I not?" Lea challenged.

"Good point, I don't even know why I asked." Maya agreed.

"Hi, Haley!" Lea turned to her, and the four-year-old gave her customary arm raising. Lea picked her up at once. "I didn't know you were coming to the camp."

"She's not really, but I brought her along," Maya explained. "Technicality."

"Best thing out there," Lea smirked before finally putting the girl down. She may have been small, but the other girl wasn't so big herself.

The holiday camp was to run for the few days leading up to Christmas Eve, closing for that and the twenty-fifth, before resuming again from the twenty-sixth to the thirtieth. Whether Haley would want to follow her big sister there on each one of those days, Maya couldn't say, but for those few leading to the eve, she was ready to go, every morning when the minivan arrived, and she followed her all day long, until camp was over for the day, at which point she'd be driven home. Each time, she would make sure to ask Maya if she would be back again in the morning, and Maya would promise it.

At the end of the day on the twenty-third, when everyone else was gone, Maya had already pointed out to Haley that there would be no camp for a couple of days, but then they would still see each other, as it would be Christmas. Finding her little sister still couldn't help but be a bit disappointed, Maya smiled.

"Hey, I have an idea. Come on," she pulled her sister up and into her arms without prompt.

They went on into the back, past the office, until they reached the room where all the costume pieces would be kept. Maya knew which doors were not to be opened, but she also knew which ones could be pulled, the better to reveal some items to make the girl's shining eyes shine even more.

"Woah…" she breathed.

"A lot of these are way too big for you, but… I think… Yeah, see?" Maya pulled down a short cape with a great flourish, the better to drape it around her sister's thin shoulders. "Tie it here, and… Yeah, that works," Maya smiled. "But now you need… Yes…" she dug around again before finding a hat, which she now set on Haley's golden head. "Go on, take a look," she pointed to the mirrors, and Haley ran off. With the mirrors as tall as they were, many together and creating a near half circle, the small girl was surrounded by this new image of herself.

Maya heard her giggling and taking on what might have been another dance number she had observed earlier. Here was her littlest Hunter sibling, and just as her parents had to face the fact, so did her big sister. She was growing up, more and more, becoming her own person. It had always been amazing to watch any of her brothers and sisters grow up, but now, maybe because she was an adult herself, one seeking to become a mother, it just didn't resonate the same anymore. It went and grabbed at her heart, seeing how, even if she was still relatively small, she was making her way out of it. She wasn't out of it yet though, was she? They were just going to have to keep nurturing that childish innocence in her, for as long as it lasted.

"Alright, we need to go home now," she finally had to tell Haley, who turned back to her, holding on to her hat.

"Why?"

"Because if we don't then you'll be really tired later, and then you won't feel as awake tomorrow, and I hear Santa might be coming by the house…" Maya shrugged as casually as one could, and it did the trick. Haley returned to her at once, pulling the hat from her head. It was returned to its place, that and the cape, and Maya lifted her up in her arms again as they went back for their coats. "Thank you for being here with me today," Maya told her little sister as they walked out of the theater, one of the last times while she still worked there. "Couldn't have done it without you."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	315. Their Welcoming of Spirit

November 10th 2020

_Chapter 315  
Their Welcoming of Spirit_

As Christmas mornings went, the one they had that year in Austin was possibly one of the warmest they'd had in a long time. It wasn't _hot_, but then it wasn't chilly cold either, and there wasn't one single flake of snow in sight. This could potentially feel more frustrating to anyone who had grown up in colder places, but even if that was the case, most of those involved here had been here more than enough to take it all in stride. There was plenty more to the spirit of the day than temperature.

"You know, I had a few other ideas for this morning," Maya whispered to Lucas, as the two of them lay in the dark in her bedroom at the Hunter Hart house.

"Did you?" Lucas whispered back, with a strong feeling like he knew exactly what at least some of those ideas were. Still, he waited until she'd nod, and she did. "So, what's stopping you?" he asked. He knew the answer to this as well.

Maya opened her mouth to reply but stopped all at once, as she heard something… and he heard it, too… and it came closer… The door opened a crack, and a strange outline appeared in the shadows before it came forward and they realized Haley was holding a very docile pup. Una, the first of Coraline's puppies to be born, had previously been nicknamed Sleepy, which continued to feel appropriate. She was still relatively small, just so that the four-year-old was able to loop her arms around her and lift her off the ground.

"Right," Lucas whispered, and Maya smirked, kissing him just where his beard relented to his face before rising out of the bed to gather both girl and dog at once.

"Oh, okay, that's one big sack of potatoes," she intoned in what felt like an impression of Pappy Joe. It got a laugh out of her little sister at least, before she remembered herself and quietly spoke.

"Merry Christmas?"

"Yeah, I think so," Maya laughed, kissing her little cheek before bringing her to where she might release her armload on to the bed. The dog soon found her feet and climbed up toward Lucas, who collected her and brought her around. A few more wishes were exchanged, in every combination they could have come up with, between Maya, and Haley, and Lucas, and Una the dog, too, as Haley insisted.

"Are the others awake yet?" Lucas asked the girl.

"Uh huh," she nodded.

"Mom and Dad, too?" Maya asked, and at this she shrugged. "But the twins and MJ are up."

"No, down," Haley shook her head.

"Right, okay," Maya scooped her up again, and out they went toward the living room, where they found the trio sitting and crouching around the tree. "Hey, hey, show me your hands," Maya called to them as she set down Haley and the young one dashed to join her siblings.

"Show me your hands!" she repeated. Nellie, Gracie and MJ all did as told.

"We didn't open anything," Nellie promised.

"She wouldn't let us," MJ revealed, pointing to Gracie.

"We're not supposed to," she reminded him, better not to come up like a tattle.

"Hey, you know what we could do right now?" Lucas asked, coming along with the dog at his heels. She carried along and went to settle between the twins. The little Hunters looked up and shook their heads, all of them looking like such an array of Katy and Shawn's features mixed into a trio of combinations.

What they could do, as they soon leapt to do, was a Christmas breakfast, the better to surprise them once they came down the stairs. They split into two teams, Maya and Lucas each taking one of the twins and one of the smaller kids. Maya, Gracie, and MJ went along preparing some fruit, and a special hot chocolate mix shared by their grandmother over in Arkansas, while Lucas, Nellie, and Haley set themselves to mixing up a good batch of pancake batter. They could have had just this, all of them in their best holiday PJs, making breakfast with the little Hunters, and it could already have been a perfect Christmas, all before Shawn and Katy even had the time to come along to find the six of them had moved on to other items to add to the table.

Moments like these, it was impossible not to look at the parents here, both of them having come such a long way, too, since _they_ had started their lives in Texas. After nearly fourteen years of it, they couldn't exactly say 'it seems like not so long ago' anymore, and yet it was still in them, this past where a table full of noisy, happy kids on Christmas morning, seemed as unlikely as anything. But they had made it happen, together, and it was everything they could ever want.

As curious as the kids had been about the presents earlier, they had completely forgotten about them as they'd helped prepare and then ate their breakfast. MJ shared the dream he'd had in the night, and it was almost an epic in and of itself, involving Santa and a kidnapped reindeer. He was given all the space to tell his tale, and he did so gladly, making the twins giggle while Haley looked at him with wide eyes and a hanging jaw repeatedly nudged into chewing by her father.

Finally, they had ended up around the tree, and presents were exchanged. They'd already opened one present each already of course. The day before, when they'd gone to the elder Friars' house for their Christmas Eve party, they had been visited by Santa Claus himself, who had presented them each with their one special gift, in thanks for how good they'd been that year. After he'd gone, Haley had taken it upon herself to comfort Lucas, who sadly had completely missed the visit by some pure coincidence. She went on and on, saying that Lucas would have liked him, because he had a good beard, just like Lucas had a good beard. When she found some kind of white residue on her fingers after touching his face, she was informed, much to her pleasure, that Santa must have left some magic with her. She had then gone around, poking everyone she could see, the better to share her magic with them.

As tended to be the case, Maya and Lucas spent all morning and until after lunch at the Hunter Hart house before driving off to the elder Friars' for the afternoon and evening, with dinner in between. After the presents had all been unwrapped and all the paper collected thanks to Lucas' quick thinking, inspired by a long ago competition of 'find the candy wrappers' in a haunted house, the question had turned to what they'd do next. No going out to play in the snow today, that was for sure, and it was bright and sunny outside but what they all wanted to do was be here, together, so…

So, they turned the living room into a veritable blizzard of paper snowflakes before enjoying their lunch – just this once – on the couch and the floor, where they could enjoy the movie of their choice. It didn't even have anything to do with Christmas, truth be told, but it was what the kids wanted, and getting all four of them to agree on a movie was hard enough to make happen on a regular day, so no one argued.

With the movie over, Maya and Lucas had been left to relinquish their cozy PJ morning, as they got dressed and collected their things, wishing everyone a great rest of the day before heading out. Maya was made to promise that she would pick up Haley the next morning, for Stage Ready holiday camp.

It was such a contrast, to go from the house full of little Hunters, over to join Thomas and Melinda, along with Pappy Joe and Patty. It was by no means boring, not in the slightest, but maybe for how much their lives were presently commanded by this endeavor for children, it felt harder to leave them.

If their moods had been in any way lessened by this split, the car ride treated them to an unmistakable lift. The first single off Ree's new collaborative album was just now starting to get airtime, and Christmas early afternoon was the moment where Maya and Lucas both got to hear it on the radio for the first time. The album had been released just three days ago, and already was doing very well for itself. Between camp and Christmas, it hadn't really hit Maya entirely, everything it could mean for Ree, and herself, and the album. Sitting in the car though, hearing the song was in high demand, it was hard for it not to feel as real as could be. It was just as well that she wasn't the one driving for how excited she got. Before long, Lucas just had to go ahead and pull the car to the curb, so he might partake in his wife's giddy joy.

"Are we sure we didn't pass out under all those snowflakes and this isn't a dream?" Maya asked with a smirk still lingering.

"It _would _be like us to have synchronized our dreams," Lucas suggested, making her laugh.

The whole day so far, from making breakfast, to making snowflakes, to just enjoying themselves with Shawn and Katy and the kids, and now to have this moment of celebration in the car… They could almost call it the perfect balance to their snowless Christmas, each thing strengthening the belief. And the streak carried on.

Reaching the elder Friars' home, it felt like arriving in the midst of Santa's village before even making it through the door. After last year, with the fire, with Thomas and Melinda's brief relocation to their son and daughter-in-law's house while the repairs were underway, it seemed as though the two of them had gotten it in mind to make this as good as two Christmases, one for this year and one for the one before.

"This kind of reminds me of the Christmas we had, in the middle of summer," Lucas stated as they walked up from the car, arms loaded.

"You mean the time we made it winter even though it was crazy hot outside? Yeah, I kind of see it," Maya nodded. "At least this time the other houses are decorated, too, so it doesn't seem so weird."

Melinda Friar had never lacked for very festive outfits on Christmas Eve and Day, and this year did not disappoint one bit. It might have been her very top one as far as Lucas could recall in his lifetime. If it wasn't for all their previous years seeing her in outfits like this, they might have found it so hard not to laugh even a little bit, but they managed it in the end.

They came to find Thomas and Joseph Friar in the midst of an 'argument' as to a previous Christmas, some thirty-odd years prior. Both of them were certain that they remembered a funny incident at the family's party a certain way, and they would go over it again and again, telling Patty Robinson about it all as though she had been appointed to decide which of them was right. So far, all she managed to do was look from her husband to her stepson with an amused smile. The two of them were so alike, especially as they argued their sides of it all, that everyone just had to listen and watch and guard their own laughter. In the end, it was impossible, and they were all laughing over it, taking it as a starting point to the sharing of many more stories, of memories, which made the rest of this Christmas Day as good as that which came before.

About two years later, quite by chance in chatting with Mr. Sanderson, Missy's grandfather, Lucas would get an account of that infamous party, confirming which of his father or grandfather had gotten it right. He never saw the point in telling them. The memory they had was perfect all on its own.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	316. Their Welcoming of a Year

**_A/N:_** _The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is... not up yet, because I'm about to start writing it. I don't know if it will be up tonight or just tomorrow, but I will do my best. The reason for the delay is a good one though... I was finishing up the last chapters of THIS story, and I didn't want to jump between timelines :)_

* * *

November 11th 2020

_Chapter 316  
Their Welcoming of a Year_

It was difficult if not impossible not to wake up on December 31st and feel at least the tiniest bit contemplative of the year on its way out and the one ticking closer by the minute to come and replace it, starting from another blank slate. All that could be said about this was that, as of yet, there had been very few of those which left either Maya or Lucas to stop and think it had been a bad one, or at least just… not good. There had been the year when they'd had their accident, when her parents had not wanted the two of them to see one another because they held him responsible, and even then… much as it colored the tail end of that year, it could not be said to spoil all that had come before. And by the end of the following year, all was well once more.

As far as this year went, they looked upon 2028 as one of the good ones, the very good ones. True, it had started off with them playing hosts to the elder Friars after the fire, but then they were here, they were alive and healing, and spending that time together had actually been a good thing, for all those involved. From there, so much had happened, to them and between them, and their families, and their friends… Katy had gotten to fly to LA, to guest star on a TV show! When the night had come that her first of two episodes had aired, oh… It had been one of the most wonderfully surreal things any of them could have witnessed. When they had shown the scenes to the little Hunters, they'd all been beside themselves, seeing their mother on the screen. Sure, they'd known that she'd gone to do exactly that, but it didn't feel real, truly real, not until that exact moment.

There had been yet another Sleepster, and even if they had one every year, as was the plan, none of them would ever feel exactly as the last one had done, and that was what made them special. It was so rare that they all got to be together, and of course they _hadn't_ all been together, but they had made the best of it. Next year… Next year they'd have to do what they could to get as many of them together as possible. This year though, it hadn't just been about the sleepover, had it? There was also the dress… And that was another thing that happened this year. Dylan's grand proposal, his and Riley's long-awaited wedding… They'd made it all happen in what could be considered a short time to a lot of people, but oh how it had been a success. Now, months later, there were whispers going around like they might have been close on the subject of kids, too, just as Maya and Lucas were. If they actually went and managed to get pregnant around the same time, oh… that would be some pretty amazing bit of chaos, and they sort of didn't hate the idea.

And Maya and Lucas, they'd celebrated their first wedding anniversary this year, yes, and it had a way of making it feel as though the memories of that day, near on a year and a half ago now, never had the chance to fade, not even a little. From there, they had not been far off from their self-imposed 'baby start line,' and even though they continued to wait for their big moment, the year had really been a busy one where it came to babies. They'd had Bertie Minkus, back in February, and Giulia Choi in August, and surprise of all surprises, Mia Babineaux in November. Though one was very far away and more often than not to be seen on a screen, the girls had been theirs to cradle and marvel at, both of them standing like arguments in the favor of patience and determination. They had not gotten to see Giulia on her first Christmas, as she and all four of her parents had gone out to Italy for a much-needed visit Chiara's family.

There had been little sort of isolated moments across the year, each of them memorable in their own ways, too. Trooper had come to live at the Sanderson farm and was thriving! They had planted pumpkins! Planted and grown and harvested them, and the whole thing had been such a simple yet rewarding experience that they already looked forward with great eagerness to the time when they'd get to plant their next batch. And then they'd had the trampoline, at the end of year party in the spring… Silly or not, it had been a long-standing dream, and it had come true. Of course, the trampoline had been theirs to keep, and while they didn't exactly use it all the time, it did not sit there gathering dust. Maya used it sometimes, she swore, as a sure-fire way of 'getting ideas moving' in her head.

And they'd gone to Hawaii! That had been… the unfortunate site of Sam and Cecilia's breakup, but at this point they doubted either one of them regretted any of that trip. They were doing well, both of them, together as friends and apart, one having gained a new friend and the other… well, things were going very well with the other and Dora, if anyone wanted to know, not that they'd claim there was anything actually going on… And it had been beautiful… truly beautiful… Maya had written so many wonderful songs out there…

And then there'd been everything with Ree… Technically, she and Maya had started on the album back last year, but the bulk of it had been recorded this year, in several sessions, each one as rewarding as the last, all of it culminating in an album which was now out in the world. It had been a little over a week now, but it was generating so much talk, positive talk, that it still felt like a dream. It was very real, and they would remember that moment in the car at Christmas, but… How could either of them have possibly envisioned any of it, back at the start of the year? How could they have imagined they'd now be looking forward to going on a _world tour_ with Ree Forster over the coming summer? Of all the things that could ever have them seeking someone to pinch them…

Both of them had also seen much with regards to their respective careers, or at least… It was to expected that there would be so much more on Maya's side, as she was out there, a teacher, making things happen, but Lucas in no way felt short changed. He was moving forward, too, even if it took more time. He'd signed up for this after all. And every step which took him closer to the dream he had long ago cultivated with his grandmother, well… They were all important to him. And this year he had started to become more involved in the goings on at the ranch, especially with Trooper and his transfer to the Sanderson farm, but beyond that, too. It really made him appreciate why it was so necessary for him to go through each and every level on his way to being a veterinarian, to taking his place at Sullivan Stables.

Maya's years had never really stopped feeling as though they didn't simply start on January 1st and end on December 31st. No, more than that, her years started in September and ended in June, with something of a bridge in between. On one side of that bridge, she'd seen her first graduates through to the end, and as much as it had affected her emotionally she didn't regret it one bit. She would also remember their field trips, her and Lucas and all those kids. She would remember helping August Matthews open up and deal with the secrets that had weighed him down, even as she had to do some of this for Milena Janacek as well. She would remember dance lessons with Phoebe Munroe, and seeing her shy bird Stella Buckley go from lunches in the art room to lunches in the cafeteria, which might not have seemed such a big deal to most people, but to her, to them…

And now, on this side of the bridge, as she'd kicked off her second year of teaching, oh… New kids for her to get to know, that… that was bound to be a highlight every year from now on. Just as the ones she'd gotten to know over her first year, she had taken them all into that part of her heart that looked like her classroom. This year was the year of Helena, of Roman, and Khalil, and Rochelle, all her freshmen… And it was the year that Born Curious had clawed its way into the world from the ashes of the Basket Cases, and in such a short time that little group had gone and taken hold, the beginning of a legacy… She could see it already, and she would fight for it, for what it represented and what it could do. Part of her thought they might have benefited from having more than one team, but for now she could not see herself dividing her attention away from Helena, Ariel, Stella, or Rochelle.

Now they were about to start a brand-new year, all of them… And to come off of a year so loaded with memories as they'd had, oh… Would it be crazy to aim even higher?

"Is it just me, or is that snow?" Lucas spoke quietly, in the event that Maya had dozed off again, as they'd basked in a lazy start to the day, just the two of them while Sam was again back in Tucson with the Hart-Lanes.

"What?" Maya lifted her head, answering his question and startling him all at once. She looked out the window, and with a noise of surprise she dropped back to the mattress before turning about to face him. "Was this on the forecast?"

"They said it'd be cold," Lucas shrugged.

"Yeah, they weren't wrong about that," Maya shivered, burrowing herself closer to him, soon enveloped in arms glad to warm her. He heard and – by virtue of her face being just about at his chest – felt her laugh.

"What's up?" he asked, attempting to move hair off her face so he could see her.

"Just that a week ago we were hoping for some of this, and now here it is. Weird skies, always."

"Well, I know a bunch of kids who are going to be very happy about this today," Lucas smiled, which led to Maya looking up at him.

"What time is it?" she asked, and he peered past her to the alarm clock.

"Almost nine," he reported, and she hummed. "You wanted to be there when they saw it?" he guessed, to which she nodded. "Is there any chance that they haven't seen it yet?"

"Are you kidding? What do you think the odds are that not one of those kids had looked outside any one window in the… hour or more that they've been awake?" Maya asked, laughing.

"Alright, now that you mention it…" Lucas chuckled in return. "Yeah, they have to know by now. But hey… it doesn't mean that we can't do anything about it now, right?"

"Oh, no, now is definitely the part where we do something about it… It may involve shovels…" Maya nodded, and there was that spark in her eye he loved so much.

"I'm listening."

It wasn't as though they had been granted some great blizzard, but there was sufficient of a snow fall so that, by the time they left the house after breakfast and a quick walk with the dog, the snow was staying on the ground and accumulating enough that they needed boots rather than shoes.

_Maya: Can you keep the kids away from the windows looking on to the backyard until I say so?_

_Katy: Okay._

_Katy: Why?_

_Maya: You'll see._

_Maya: Can you keep them away from the east side windows, too?_

It was a longer process than anticipated, and by the end of it they were very glad for having thought to bring gloves. By the end of it, they had used the snow, both in the yard and a bit from the path leading to the yard on one side, to create outlines and numbers, ten squares, each with a number, counting down, until after the 1 there was a display looking like bursting fireworks around the number 2029. The finishing touch, which would only really be observable later on, in the evening, involved glow in the dark paint…

When the little Hunters had discovered Maya and Lucas had arrived, their excitement was only a kickoff to even more of it once they got a look at the yard. It was tempting for them to come up and touch the snow, but they were instructed to leave it be for the time being, and so they did. The snowfall was still going, but not nearly as much as before, and soon it had stopped altogether, which could have been said to be ideal, at least as far as preserving everything for that night.

At one point, after dinner, the kids had been sent off to bed, but only so that later on, with minutes to midnight, they could be awakened again, the better to participate in the countdown, as they always wanted to do. As they were led out into the yard again, the place looked very different from what it had been in the morning. Suddenly the colors in the snow were bright against the darkness of night.

"Alright, it's coming, are you ready?" Lucas asked the kids, who did not take long at all to understand what this was all for.

They came and stood together in front of the first square, and as they counted down from twenty, they waited, and waited, until they called 'ten!' and they rushed to hop on the first square. Then it was on to nine, and eight, and seven, and on and on, until the one, and then with a mighty leap they breached into the new year, their cheers joined by that of their parents, their older siblings, and the crack of real fireworks in the distance.

"What do you think? Are we going to top that old year?" Lucas quietly asked, leaning to his wife's ear. Maya smiled back at him.

"I don't see how we have a choice?" she declared, and he agreed with a nod and then a kiss. This would be a year they'd never forget, they could already feel it.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	317. Their Growth in School

November 12th 2020

_Chapter 317  
Their Growth in School_

All morning, Maya had been itching for it to be lunch time already, getting some kind of less creepy version of the Telltale Heart from the boxes she knew were hidden in the supply closet Every time any of the seniors or sophomores went to grab something from there, she'd sweep in, cool as ever, grabbing what they'd need for them so they wouldn't open the door out and show what was hidden inside. At least one time they had a close call of sorts, but eventually she was in the clear and all she had to do was wait until everyone went to lunch and the quiz team came to the art room for their weekly meet with 'Advisor Friar.'

They came in due time, each girl with her lunch, which they enjoyed as they sat around a station table with their teacher. It had been near on three months now since Born Curious had come together, and while they hadn't seen an official match yet, they'd been carrying with their playful 'rivalry' with the boys of the Think Tank on a monthly basis. The boys had won the first, back in November, yes, but upon the rematch in December the girls had claimed the top spot, right before the holiday break. They had not needed to prove anything to anyone, but that had definitely felt great, even more as they'd gone on to hit a repeat with their January match. Now, February was upon them, and the tension was making itself felt. Would they create a streak, winning a third time in a row, or would the boys reclaim the winning side? It had been clear from the day one that they were fairly evenly matched, with each final score reflecting this, and all this did for them was make them that much more determined to end up on top.

That was all business though, and it had been a long-standing rule among them that there was not to be 'team talk' while they ate. Helena had been the one to come up with it, and Maya was glad for it. The girls did hang out outside of the meetings and the matches, she'd seen them, heard them talk about it, but even here it felt important that they allowed themselves this down time, to just breathe, and eat, and talk, before jumping into everything else. Seeing them like this, Maya could see so much of how the time had knitted them all together. There were still isolated patches, letting her believe that they weren't entirely open with one another, but that was fine, that was normal.

On the flipside, they did share with one another, things they would never have done in the beginning. Stella had come around and shared about her mother, and growing up in LA, and though the others would sometimes ask her if she'd ever met this one celebrity or another, on the whole they were very respectful of her privacy, her secret. Helena spoke of some of the harder times, back when she'd been sick, when she'd come so close to losing her battle, and how she came back from it all. Ariel confessed her compulsions for perfection, how for a time she had let it affect her so much that her parents had put her in therapy. It wasn't something she liked to talk about a lot, or at all, but she felt able to do so here, with them, and she was happy to say she had improved. It hadn't all gone away, but she coped much better than before.

Rochelle had been slowest to come around and talk of herself, of anything past basic surface facts. Even if she wasn't there all the time to witness it all, Maya could tell. But the more time she'd spent with these new friends, the possibility of opening up and letting some things out didn't come off as pointless or scary as it had once been. So, she shared the weight of her experience, being of mixed race, her and her brother being the only ones, their father's new wife being black like him and their mother's new husband being white like her. Adding to that the fact that she kept to her mother's faith, it had been another place where she stood out among people who were meant to be her own. There was plenty that felt unstable around her, but the things she could control by herself, like her education, oh…

Today, the discussion around the table had been inevitable. The Valentines dance was coming up. Ariel was happy to reveal that she'd poached Neil from the Think Tank as her date, which had rung the bell of 'scandal' for her crossing into 'enemy' territory, but she didn't care. The boy was – according to Ariel – ridiculously good-looking, and he moved well so they'd actually get to dance at the dance. When she went on to suggest that Stella might see if Neil's teammate, Gilbert, wanted to go with her, she had immediately gone babbling, shaking her head and insisting she didn't want to go. As many strides as she'd made over the past year and a half she just was not ready for this.

"Maybe you are, but you're never going to know if you don't try," Helena tried to encourage her, but Stella still shook her head.

"Is it being at the dance that freaks you out or the part about dancing up close to someone?" Rochelle asked, showing some perceptiveness. "I get that," she went on to admit, which did get Stella to meet their eyes again.

"You don't have to bring anyone, just come," Maya pitched in.

"But it's the Valentines dance," Stella pointed out. "Isn't it the whole point to have someone?"

"We could always use someone at the drinks table," Maya offered, and Stella considered this. Rochelle raised her hand. "You, too, if that's what you want."

"But what about…" Ariel whispered, and Rochelle turned a pointed look at her.

"What about what?" Helena grinned. "What about _who_?"

"No one, no one," Rochelle replied, the first to Helena, the second to Ariel, who now tried to play it cool. Thankfully, none of the others were the type to pry, so they let it go. "What about you?" Rochelle changed the subject by turning to Helena. The senior girl sighed.

"Complicated," she stated.

"Why, because they won't let you go with a girl?" Rochelle asked, sounding ready to brandish a large sign and demand it.

"Oh, no, no, that's fine," Helena assured her, though she did steal a look to Maya as though to ask 'it is, right?' Maya tipped her head. If anyone tried to say she couldn't _she'd_ handle it, no signs needed. "No, it's just… There _is_ someone, but… Well, she's not out, and I get it, I'm not going to force her to do anything she's not ready to do. So, I can't go with her. I could just go with someone else, but if she can't then…"

"Drinks table?" Maya sympathetically asked. Helena chuckled.

"Can we sell those drinks?" Rochelle asked. "Get more money in for the team? We might as well, if three of us are going to be there," she went on, turning a look to Ariel, she of the Think Tank fraternizing.

"Look me in the eye and tell me the guy is not hot, come on!" Ariel insisted of her friend. From the look she got back, Rochelle evidently could not fault her on this part at least, and it got the rest of the table laughing.

"Oh, hey, now that we're done with lunch," Maya stood up all at once, like she had almost forgotten about her Telltale boxes.

"Is it about the thing hiding in the supply closet?" Stella casually asked, and Maya turned back to her, receiving a shrug. Of course, she would have pieced it together.

"What's in the supply closet?" Ariel asked, all the girls now watching their teacher as she went to the door. Almost as soon as she'd asked this though, she gasped. "Did they finally come?" she asked, and when Maya smirked the teammates stood from their stools and approached.

The order for the team's jackets had been put out, good and prompt, back in December. However, after some kind of mix up in shipping, they had ended up getting sent elsewhere, and then they'd been lost altogether. By the time they'd gotten it all sorted with the company who'd made them, they'd been carrying on with their team shirts alone, which had been fine for the Think Tank, but they were coming up on their first official match and they really wanted the jackets they had worked so hard to earn. When the shipment had finally shown up at the school, Maya was easily as giddy as the girls now were, waiting for her to bring them out.

"Okay, let me just see…" Maya brought out the stack of boxes and carried them to her desk, the girls following and reminding her of the dogs keeping underfoot whenever she had food in her hands. "Miss Zimmerman," she declared, after having checked the label on the side of the top box. After passing it to a smiling Helena, she gave her a look to ensure she'd wait for the others. "Miss Su," she checked the next box, and Ariel was there with her hands out in the blink of an eye. "Geez… okay…" Maya laughed. "Miss Buckley," she followed, and Stella received her box like it was so very precious. "And Miss McNeil," Maya turned and handed the next box to Rochelle, who received it with the wavering determination of a kid in front of a present they couldn't open yet. "Okay, go, go," Maya waved at them, and they didn't have to be told twice.

For all the concerns the girls had expressed about expectations versus reality, and measurements, and colors on a screen and in real life, the jackets were a perfect fit, and with all of them in the same colors, it rendered the four of them in the most team-like appearance they'd ever achieved. This included a more streamlined logo for the team, along with BORN CURIOUS in neat letters underneath, all of it stitched on the pocket. Inside, stitched into the lining, they'd find their own names, in looped letters rather than blocked.

"Wow…" Maya breathed, bursting with pride and the tingle of near tears at the sight of them. "Here, here, stand in front of the board," she moved out with her phone, the better to capture the image. The girls gladly posed, jackets tugged straight.

"Wait, what about yours?" Stella asked, after the picture was shown to them. They looked to the two boxes still on the desk, and they spoke over each other, all of them insisting that she put hers on, too, and so she did, leading to another picture. Moments later, the five of them were marching through the school's halls, looking their most team-like as they sought out Cory Matthews.

"By the way, Mr. Matthews is going to be running the Friday lunch meeting next week," Maya told the girls, as a stop at the teachers' lounge redirected them toward the history classroom.

"How come?" Helena asked.

"I'm actually going to be absent all of next week," Maya revealed. "I should have mentioned it this morning, slipped my mind, I'm sorry."

"Where are you going?" Stella asked. Maya smiled.

"Well, something came up, and I put in for some of my days off," she told her and the rest of the team. True to their name, they were very curious to know what she was talking about, and she could have left them to figure it out for themselves, but that wouldn't have felt right, would it? "You might still see me though…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	318. Their Growth in Presence

November 13th 2020

_Chapter 318  
Their Growth in Presence_

After the tour had been announced, and the album had come out, and everything had just sort of gone a bit all over the place, Maya had figured that, in time, things would calm down again. And on the whole, they had. The album was still doing very well for itself, which continued to be a source of amusement and surprise from time to time. The tour dates were selling out all over the place, guaranteeing that Ree and Maya would be playing to some unimaginably large crowds of people. Whether it had been the intent or not – and Maya suspected that part of Ree's reasoning in bringing her on to this album the way she'd done had something to do with giving her the boost the singer felt she deserved – a lot of eyes were now turned on to her. She still had her life, out here in Austin, with her husband, with her family, with her job, but people in the business were really getting to pay more attention to this young songwriter out of Texas.

And then there were the fans. Already, the TXNY followers had taken hold of Ree's album as something to discover, but in return, there were suddenly a lot more people who were getting to know this little band of over a decade. And with more people looking to them, the attention turned even more eyes on to them, from sources the band had known for some time. The years had seen them coming together in Austin, before shifting to Houston during their college years, and now they'd been back in Austin again for going on four years. They had done shows, loads of them, in both cities, as they had also appeared on morning shows on television and done interviews and performances there and on the radio, too.

With the upswing of demand for TXNY, Maya had been left to field a number of requests, for shows and appearances in both cities. It had all dropped in her lap at about the same time, in late January, and so she'd had to come up with a plan, promising she'd get back to them all once she'd discussed it all with the band. Before she could even do that though, she'd turned to Lucas, who was easily the best equipped to help her sort out the mess of ideas in her head before she offered any of it to the band.

"So it's goodbye Bearded Huckleberry, huh?" she'd asked, finding him in the bathroom, half his face covered in shaving cream.

"Figured it was time," he'd nodded. "Until November."

"I'll miss you," she'd whispered, making him laugh.

As he'd worked the razor over his face, clearing away what remained of his beard, she'd explained the whole thing, with all the requests the band had received to appear and perform. The whole time, he would keep on nodding along, showing that he was listening, and was happy for her, without moving so much that he'd risk cutting himself.

"Why does it feel like you think this is a problem?" he finally asked as he rinsed his razor.

"I don't… It's not… I just… I don't know," she sighed. "It feels like a lot, and I have school, with my kids, and the quiz team, and then Nadine has Mia, and Riley has her patients, and Rosa has classes, and Kayla has her work… Does it really feel like the best time to take off like that? We're talking at least four gigs at night, and then the interviews, that's a solid week where we'll have to be doing mostly just that, and then what if…" She paused, and even as he was still shaving, she could practically hear him urge her on. _What if what?_ "It's going to sound so self-centered, and it's not, but if I look at the big picture, and how we even ended up in this position, I…"

"You think the others might get ignored?" Lucas guessed, turning to her. She looked up to him again, frowning and taking the razor from him to get at the spot he usually tended to miss.

"I don't want everything that's been coming with me and Ree to make it look all of a sudden like I'm the lead and they're my back-up. That's not us, that's never been us. And if I'm going to ask them all to rearrange a week of their lives for it, then it has to be as a band, all of us together. Stop smiling, now, before I cut you," she smiled herself, while he relaxed his face again and let her finish. "There, all done." Lucas cleaned up the rest of the way, picking up after himself before turning to Maya again and soon finding her hands over his cheeks. "I have missed you, too," she whispered. He held her hands over his face.

"You get to stack the deck as you want it," Lucas reminded her. "People are looking at you guys now, then fine. Show them who you are." She considered this, and after a moment she stretched up on her toes to kiss him.

"Right on the money as always, thanks," she moved to leave and just as quickly returned as she was, kissing him again, enough that he eventually had to get his arms around her, compensating for her stretching up to meet him. "That was… very necessary…" she breathed.

Now with something of a plan, she'd gone on her way into the Hex, refining that plan even as she sent out a message to the rest of the band, asking if/when they might be able to come over for a brief meeting. By some chance, they'd been able to come together that very night, and so the plan had become that much sturdier already. She _had_ been sitting on a few as yet unrecorded songs she'd earmarked for the band, and a lot of those had felt perfectly suited to one bandmate or another's voice, even as some might be for her own. She guessed that after writing for other people for a while now it got easier to mold her creations to other people where it used to happen almost more by chance. Lucas was right, now was the perfect time to bring along something new, to go along with these new people coming to discover the band. They could premiere some of these at their shows, or at any of their appearances.

First though, she needed to let the band in on this, and see if they were both willing and able.

"Oh, hey…" Maya quietly spoke as she stepped out to the porch to welcome Nadine, coming along with baby Mia in her arms. "I saw you from the window, I didn't know you were bringing her but I approve of the decision, hello…" she happily reached out for the girl as she was offered over to her.

"I was actually driving around with her to try and get her down when you wrote," Nadine revealed, smiling to see the two of them together.

"Please, feel free to let those drives bring you in this direction any time you want," Maya told her, keeping this information in mind as she lent herself to getting the baby to go back to sleep.

"Zay and I have been swapping nights with her, trying to diminish the exhaustion between the two of us," Nadine explained.

"How's that been working out?"

"Not that great," Nadine chuckled. "If it's our night off, we still wake up when she cries, so…"

"Right," Maya nodded, looking to the baby girl with thoughts of future nights like these for herself and Lucas. Maybe it was that they hadn't had those nights yet, but she still managed to look forward to it.

"I'd ask you what the meeting's about, but I'm guessing you won't say until the others get here?"

"Yeah… Want to take a nap while we wait?" Maya smiled. "Mia and I will be right here."

"Tempting as that is, I'll be fine. Long nights and I became good friends at the hospital."

So, they waited for the rest of the band. It didn't take long before the baby's presence became known to others in the house, and soon she was put into the care of Uncle Lucas, her godfather, who broke out a go-to lullaby, making it very hard for both his wife and his friend not to look at him and imagine a hat on his head and a guitar in his hands instead of a baby. Mia certainly seemed to enjoy it, as she soon dozed off, staying that way well until she was returned to her mother and on her way home.

The rest of the band had come along, equally distracted by the sleeping babe's presence before they were able to sit around the living room and hear what Maya had to tell them.

"Right, so, I know that all of us are busy these days, for a lot of reasons, work, family, school," she started. "So, really, this only works if we can all find a way to make it work, yeah?" The others nodded, still needing to be told more.

Maya ran through the first part, much as she'd done it with Lucas, telling them about this surge of attention TXNY had been getting – this part they knew – and about the calls she'd been getting, the requests to appear, on stage, at television studios and radio stations. She offered them a potential schedule, where the whole thing could be set out over the course of a week, in Austin and Houston and back again. She also let them know of the new songs she had been looking to, the better to alternate the features when they set down their song lists for the shows, which was always something they loved doing together. Again, there was the technicality that all of this depended on everyone's being on board, and available…

They got around to a yes, and a plan, a lot faster than she would have anticipated. None of them had gotten to anything close to band fatigue, instead they always wished to do more than what they did get to do these days. This only helped to motivate them into looking at their schedules, comparing notes, checking in with significant others, and all of a sudden they had dates. All they had to do now was let Maya get in touch with everyone involved, to see if this would work. There were several players in this, which could add that many more chances that they'd end up forced back to the drawing board. Instead, within days, they had an official schedule.

The message went out on their site, and various social pages. Meanwhile, the new songs were added to the roster, as set lists came together. It was going to be tricky, but if anyone could make this work, it would be them. They had grown with this band, with each other, always aware of resources within their reach. They would be staying over with either Sophie and Chiara or Asher and Ray on their Houston days, and rather than being on his own with the baby, Zay would be joined by Lucas as his backup while Nadine was away. Maya would miss being with her students in that week, but she trusted that they would get along while she was gone. And now that it was all coming together, it could not be denied… Oh, she was excited for this. She missed being on stage with her bandmates when it went too long between shows, and by now she was practically aching for it. She'd been caught up in Ree Forster world for a while, but now it was back to TXNY, the band that started it all.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	319. Their Growth in Demand

November 14th 2020

_Chapter 319  
Their Growth in Demand_

_Day 1, Monday. Interviews - Austin_

By now, her body had become so used to her schedule, waking up in the morning. Even when she didn't have to get up so early, on the weekends, she could never quite sleep in more than an extra hour. As soon as Monday rolled around then, she would open her eyes, and see the clock, most times a minute or two before her alarm even had a chance to go up, so that her finger would be out hovering over the button, ready to turn it off when it would start to beep. Today, although she wasn't going off to work, the time had been needed anyway. The band was due at the studio in a few hours, and by the time she was out the door and had the rest of them collected in Sparkles the minivan, they'd reach the studio right when they needed to reach it.

They didn't have _so _much to do today, the morning show first, and then in the afternoon the radio station. The rest of the day would be spent putting in more rehearsals for their first show, the following night, especially on their new songs.

"How long do you think it'll be before it's somewhere I can watch on my phone?" Lucas asked as they got up.

"I'm not sure… If I find it, I'll send it to you," Maya offered. "I can do a signal, a sort of 'hello, husband, I know you're watching, this one's for you,'" she intoned, making him laugh. "Not sure what it should be…"

"Whatever it is, I think I'll figure it out," Lucas pointed out.

"Challenge accepted," Maya tossed back. All along, as they got ready, and then downstairs over breakfast, she would 'practice' some potential signals to him. These, Lucas suspected, were in equal parts to amuse him and to confuse Sam. Actually, they were probably in majority to confuse Sam, who'd have no idea what they were going on about.

Picking up the rest of the band felt almost like doing pick ups on match days with the quiz team, where instead of a pack of high school girls she picked up a pack of grown women and long-time friends. Riley was first, though she had to double back when Door the dog followed her out and had to be convinced to go back inside. Then they got Rosa, dropping from the low wall outside her building where she'd been sitting in wait. Kayla came dashing out of her house, hands moving in such a way that her signs immediately had the intonation of frustration thanks to having accidentally overslept. Last of all was Nadine, who technically might have been picked up before both Rosa and Kayla, but then Maya had factored in the detour on her route, the better to give her extra time with the baby. They weren't headed away to Houston until tomorrow night, after the show, but Maya figured she'd want to bank as much time with Mia and with Zay as possible. When they pulled up to the house, the three of them were out there, with Mia in her father's arms, while her mother was leaning to kiss her face, and her little hand, several times over before finally kissing her father and hurrying toward the minivan.

"All good?" Maya asked when she climbed in.

"Yeah… Yeah… I've just… I haven't been away from her much since she was born," Nadine explained, looking like she was trying to give herself an internal pep talk at the same time. Having seen how this particular milestone had affected her and others before, it was one of those things Maya did _not_ look forward to experiencing herself.

It had been almost eight years since the first time the band had gone through those studio doors. They'd been high school seniors at the time, not so young that they couldn't handle themselves on their own, and for that they had walked in unaccompanied, just three girls as nervous as they were ready to go. Still, with everything that had happened in their lives between then and now… it did sort of feel like an eternity. But they were still here, Maya, Riley, Nadine… Even though one of them had taken a four-year break in the middle of all that, it was in the past, and now there were more of them, with Rosa and Kayla… They had brand new stories to tell.

_"What's on your mind?"_ Kayla asked Maya. She could always read people so well, which probably went hand in hand with having take her cues from something other than a voice or an intonation. Much as she wouldn't have seen herself lying, especially when asked point blank, the fact that Kayla was the one asking made Maya feel further compelled to explain.

_"I guess I'm a little worried that they'll just keep asking about Ree, and the album, and the tour, like we're not really the ones they wanted to hear about." _The rest of the band watched her signing, and it became clear to Maya that they had all been thinking it, privately.

She looked at them, and in her eyes she carried her sentiment on the matter. She was here as a member of TXNY, equal part, and that was always what she would be. They never had to worry about her putting herself ahead of them, of letting her head get big, full of hot air. And that was all they needed to know. They were looking back at her now, and their eyes said plenty, too. They were all on the same page.

_"Are we too old for group hugs?"_ Kayla asked, smiling.

_"To a hundred and three,"_ Rosa vowed.

_"To eternity,"_ Riley pitched in.

_"Whatever comes first,"_ Maya declared.

_"Works for me,"_ Nadine beamed, moving into their band hug.

By the time they ended up back at the Hex, practicing until the afternoon interview, they were fairly satisfied with how their week was going so far. There had definitely been a few attempts for the questions to take a certain turn, but the band had all worked together in ever so covertly course correcting the whole thing until finally the interviewer got the message. Whether this would lose them any points in the long run, they didn't know, and frankly if this was the reason then they didn't mind it.

As they paused for lunch, back in the kitchen, there was a moment for them to stop and rewatch their interview, which had found its way as a video on the internet. Maya had already sent it to Lucas, as promised, complete with a discreet tip of an invisible hat as they'd given their performance. They were waiting for the pizza they had ordered, and after the video, Kayla had waved her hand to get the others' attention.

_"So, Will got an offer for his job,"_ she started, and expressive as she'd always been, she couldn't mask a certain feeling, which already put something of a suggestion as to where this was all going. _"It's in Sweden," _she added after a moment. The rest of the band looked at her, then to one another. By the time they were looking at her again, there were tears in her eyes, and they moved at once to get closer to her, to comfort her. It wasn't the thought of following her fiancé to Europe that affected her, or even learning new sign language, new written language, not in this moment. It was the thought of leaving her friends, her bandmates of almost eight years.

_"When do you have to go?"_ Riley asked, once they were all sitting around the table again.

_"This summer," _Kayla replied. _"We already found a house. I've been looking for a job… There's so much to do before we have to go and I've been looking for the right time to tell you. I think maybe you should start taking the drums again,"_ she looked to Nadine._ "Either that or you all need to start looking for a new drummer as soon as possible. I don't know how long I'll be able to keep up with the rest of you the closer we get to the move."_

_"There's plenty of time to figure that out later," _Nadine insisted.

_"Let's not think about any replacements until after this week,"_ Maya agreed.

Much as they all felt this would have to be the way, that they'd need to set aside this news and carry on with the week as planned, it wasn't going to happen in the blink of an eye, was it? Once the pizza arrived, lunch was just a bit on the somber side, as they considered the loss of one of their own. She would always be one of them, just as Isadora was, just as Willow was, but she wouldn't be active among them, not anymore, and it would feel very weird not to see her sitting at those drums. Maya hated herself just a bit for thinking that she knew exactly who might join their lineup, if they sought to remain as five instead of going down to four. Now was not the time.

At least by the time they made it to the radio station they had taken enough of an upswing in order to get through the interview without sounding like someone had died. No mention was made of Kayla's departure, as was their intention, and thankfully their interviewer here only briefly touched on the Ree side of things, sticking instead to the band itself and their years on the local scene. It was a reasonable balm, getting them through the rest of the day and preparing them to face the next.

_"We have four shows this week," _Rosa stated, as the five of them sat to dinner that night, at a restaurant. _"If they're going to be some of our last as this version of the band, then they're going to be our best ones, right?"_

_"Count on it,"_ Kayla smiled.

Back at home for the night, the last until the end of their whirlwind tour, Maya had barely returned home that she'd led Lucas upstairs for what was either one more try in the baby games or something closer to 'today has been high highs and low lows and I need you.' Either way, Lucas was there for her, and as he held her afterward, he told her about watching the interview from the morning, and then listening to the one on the radio while he'd been tending to Trooper…

"Kayla and Will are moving," she cut in, her ear over his heart. His hand stalled where it had been drawing lines along her spine. "His job is sending him to Sweden, so they're going."

"I'm sorry," Lucas told her.

"Yeah…" she sighed, lifting her head to look at him. "She's been with us for… almost as long as the band's existed, I don't know. It feels like a huge part of us is going."

"The rest of you will keep it going," he promised, then, "Right?"

"Yeah, of course," Maya assured him. "It's just going to take some time to get used to it," she frowned, setting her chin against his chest. After a few seconds, remembering how they'd be apart for most of the next week, she moved up, the better to kiss him some more. Pulling back again, she kept his gaze, as though she still needed any help to draw him from memory. "Any chance I can have the watch to take with me?" she asked, smiling.

"I would think by now that you'd know the answer to that," Lucas replied, and she laughed.

"It's already in my bag, isn't it?"

"Been there all day," he confirmed, before she kissed him again.

"I'll take good care of it."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	320. Their Growth in Performance

November 15th 2020

_Chapter 320  
Their Growth in Performance_

_Day 2, Tuesday. Concert – Austin Night 1_

Maya took the driving seat that night, as they headed out to Houston for the next few days. She was always so wired after a show, so it felt like as good of a place to put that energy as any. It hadn't taken long to convince Nadine to use those two hours to get some sleep. There was already some doubt whether a part of her might try and keep waking her up throughout the night, out of a reflex from looking after Mia. She'd dozed off, and from there they had taken off for Houston in near silence. Rosa and Kayla were in the back with Nadine, and they were able to sign in the low lights. Riley had come up to the passenger seat to keep Maya company on the drive, but then she'd fallen asleep not long after Nadine. So, it was a very quiet ride. That was alright. Maya's ears were still ringing with the echo of their time on stage.

The day had started out slow. Once Lucas and Sam had gone off to their respective universities, Maya had the house to herself until the rest of the band arrived for their final practice before the night's show. Of all the things she might have done with that time, she'd gone and made a big batch of GiGi cookies for the guys to have while she was gone. Lucas would be headed to play the role of live-in uncle to baby Mia, while Sam, not dodging the truth one bit, would be spending the next few days over at Dora's apartment. All of them could do with some cookies.

She'd just gotten them all out of the oven by the time the others started to arrive, and it was a good thing that she'd made an extra batch for the band, as they fell on the still warm treats like a bunch of famished animals. Once the rest of the cookies had been put away, leaving no trace for the dogs to go hunting, they moved into the Hex for rehearsal. It was the first session they had in here where it really started to sink in. There wouldn't be many more of these, not the way they were now, not with Kayla as one of them. The notion could easily have derailed them, so much so that they lost their way. Instead, it became what the next few days were going to turn into. It became a celebration, of what they were now and what they had been for all those years. In the end, it became like an affirmation, a promise, that they weren't going to let the next however many months they had left turn into a pity party. They were going to be TXNY, their TXNY, for as long as they could be. That would be the memories with which Kayla flew off to Sweden that summer.

When they'd arrived at the venue, with the picture of the band out front, they'd stopped to take a picture of themselves with it. Here, what had briefly been sadness took a turn, becoming nostalgia, the good kind. Seeing that picture, it didn't matter how many times they'd done this by now, didn't matter that they weren't kids anymore. This wasn't what the picture was about. If they had to define it, they might say that it was about acknowledging the fact that they were here by the effort of their work as much as by the pure dumb luck of opportunities coming along at the right times, and they weren't taking any of it for granted, not ever.

_"One more, Kayla you go in the middle,"_ Riley nodded, and everyone moved at once, squeezing together, two on either side of their departing bandmate, who was bursting with smiles for the friendship and the sisterhood extended to her.

_"Alright, now we go into band mode,"_ Maya teased, turning on her best 'serious stage face.'

_"Yeah, they're going to take one look at us right now and think we're fans and not their big act for the night," _Rosa joked.

_"At the risk of damaging our image again, I need to check in with my mother before we go in there,"_ Nadine held up her phone. As she called home, where Mrs. Zhu was looking after Mia while Zay was at school, she indeed looked nothing like a musician, hours from taking the stage in front of a few hundred people. Right then, she was a mother, letting her baby daughter hear her voice over a phone held close to her. She may not have grown inside her mother's belly, but Mia Babineaux was so much a part of her, tethered to her heart so much now that the separation began to strain. After Nadine hung up with her mother, she needed a moment to pull herself together again. "Okay, let's go."

"You sure?" Maya asked her.

"Yeah… Yeah…" Nadine sniffed, pointing to the door. So, they went.

By now, it got to feel as though walking through those doors had them walking through a portal, to another world. When they walked in here, they became who they were whenever they stood on that stage. This other side of them slipped over them, like it was within their very own skin. They didn't have to reacclimate every time. They were here, they knew what to do. With all the changes happening in and around their lives lately, they were happy to come by this other persona. All they had to do now was get on that stage and do their thing.

Before they knew it, they had made it to just minutes before the start of the show. The buzz was in the air, and there were people out there, coming in and waiting for them. That was always the moment where they started to feel it come together, when the electricity came crackling at their fingertips, when their hearts, their very skin seemed to vibrate with anticipation. They were like racers at the start, waiting for the signal to go.

The five of them looked to one another now, and they grinned, folding into a quick hug all together before moving to take their places on stage. When they appeared, the energy in the room shifted, flipped, from buzzing anticipation to a burst, a rousing clamor. From there, there was nothing easier than for them to start the show and make damned sure that it would be one not soon forgotten. It was just as important, maybe now more than ever, that they gave a show that felt like them, like their TXNY, while it existed.

At one time or another throughout the show, more than once in some cases, everyone got their turn in the spotlight, whether in lyrics or the best showcase of their drummer's prowess. It did not matter whether or not they had met the expectations of the people who might have come looking for one specific thing. They gave a _great_ show, enough to make anyone forget anything but the fact that the music was solid, and so was the performance of it.

"It always goes by so fast…" Riley breathed, as they all ended up backstage for a little while before they hit the road, the better to breathe, grab some water… "If I wasn't so tired now, I'd say it just started."

"When we were back there, I was ready to keep going for a few more songs. Now? Can't even move," Rosa gave a pathetic attempt to raise her leg.

"So I guess you're not driving," Nadine laughed.

"Yeah, neither are you, Mama," Maya tapped her shoulder. "I got it. You sleep. The good ship Sparkles will carry you through dreamlands… and to Houston," she intoned, before bringing it back to her regular voice on the end.

"Are you sure? I don't mind," Nadine told her.

"Not only am I sure, I insist."

They stopped to grab some food after leaving the theater, and then they were off. As she drove, Maya thought about the show they'd just done, yes, but also about the ones she'd do over the summer with Ree. She couldn't imagine those would be exactly like the ones she gave with TXNY, definitely a bit more relaxed, but it did make her wonder how they'd swing it all, if she was in fact pregnant by that time. Right now, she was probably still running mostly on adrenaline, and by the time she'd reach a bed she'd be dead to the world until morning, so… How much would she manage to do when it wasn't just about her anymore?

She really wished she could turn on the radio right about now. With no one to talk to, and nothing to listen to, all she had were her thoughts, and with her being in post-show mode, her brain was basically on fire, shooting off any number of thoughts, and ideas, and there was little else she could do but let them go by, was there?

Oh, was she ever glad to pull on to those familiar streets, bringing her and her minivan full of bandmates ever closer to their destination?

"Is anyone still awake back there? We're here," she whispered. In response, she felt a hand tap her on the shoulder, and she looked to find Kayla smiling back at her. Rosa had also fallen asleep. "You guys are lucky I'm not mean enough to just honk the horn right now."

One by one, the sleeping three were awakened and guided to get out, heading toward the house which had been home to some of them. Sophie and Chiara herded them all inside, promising beds above and a couch below, leaving them to decide who went where.

"Is it a Moms night or Dads night?" Maya asked them.

"Dads," Chiara nodded. So, Giulia was with Asher and Ray tonight.

Rosa was more than fine sleeping on the couch, and she was down and out before long, not even bothering to change into her PJs. Kayla also went for the couch. She had no problem whatsoever with joking that it made sense, with her being unable to hear Rosa's snoring.

"So, that leaves the three of us squeezing in together, huh? What would our husbands say?" Maya asked in her favorite Southern Belle voice, making the others laugh, throwing on a bit of scandalized faces for good measure.

In no time, they were changed and drifting ever closer to sleep, with Riley in the middle and Maya and Nadine on either side of her. Riley went back to sleep in all of a wink, while Maya needed a little longer, as she had a feeling Nadine was not going back to easily. For some reason it had been easy in the car, but now… now she was realizing how far she was from her daughter, and what if something happened to her?

"Hey," Maya whispered, turning on her side toward the others, putting her arm over Riley until she could touch Nadine's hand. She said nothing, but she turned her hand and took Maya's. She looked at her from across their friend, who soon responded to the presence of the arm by burrowing herself closer to her best friend, probably thinking it might have been Dylan. Maya paid it no mind, focused instead on Nadine. They both needed to sleep, had to be up in a matter of hours for another morning show appearance, but their brains gave this little care, didn't they? Eventually, Nadine also turned on to her side, facing the others, and with her own arm over Riley, the two on the outside finally found sleep, and they hoped it to be restful.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	321. Their Growth in Years

November 16th 2020

_Chapter 321  
Their Growth in Years_

_Day 3, Wednesday. Appearances - Houston_

Morning felt as though it had come several hours ahead of anything remotely desirable. They would all have happily slept on, if Sophie hadn't done what she'd promised them to do. She'd come along, bringing more hands-on application than the alarms on their phones ever could in getting them to both wake up and stay awake until they'd get out of bed.

"I regret everything," Maya groaned as she sat up, trying to bring some sensation to her face and pushing her hair out of the way before looking over to the other two at her side. Riley looked the most rested of them, which made sense. Nadine was already reaching for her phone, no doubt checking to see if Zay had written anything or tried to call her. Soon, she was up and heading into the hall to call home. "Is there coffee?" Maya looked up to Sophie even as she had to dodge out of the way when Riley decided the best way out of the bed was to climb over her instead of going the other way.

"And breakfast," Sophie nodded. "Chiara went across the street."

"How's she doing?" Maya asked, letting conversation motivate her into wakefulness.

"It's been better, you know? Since we went out there to visit her family… Now she's determined to just sort of get in touch with them, even if they're far away, by sharing everything with Giulia. She only speaks to her in Italian now so she'll learn the language. She's been reading her stories from when she was little, and singing songs… I think she really can't wait until she's old enough for them to make things in the kitchen together. I found her this small little kid's apron back in Italy and it was like I gave her the best thing in the world. It's big enough for Giulia to use it as a blanket right now, but Chiara's got it hanging with the others in the kitchen, waiting to be usable."

"I kind of can't wait to see that, too," Maya smiled. "Do you all know when you might start it all again?" she asked, as the thought came to her. They had said before how they wanted more than one, with the notion of creating each possible combination. Their whole parenting plan had seemed sort of wild in the beginning, but to see them now… They really made it work.

"We're thinking about it," Sophie nodded. "But I think we want to wait until after Giulia's a year old at least. It'll be up to Chiara to decide."

As much as the start of the day required heavy doses of foot dragging after the previous night's show and drive out to Houston, Maya was still the first into the minivan, waiting for the others to finish getting ready and join her. So, she called to check in with Lucas.

"What are you wearing?" she asked, smirking, when he answered. By the ambient noise, she had to guess he was in his car, headed to university, and he had her on speaker.

"I'll send you a picture later," he promised, and she could hear the smile on his lips.

"It is ridiculous how much I miss you already," Maya hummed.

"I know what you mean," Lucas assured her. "Although I wouldn't go so far as to call it ridiculous."

"No, I guess you're right on that. How was it last night? Two men and a baby…"

"It was good," Lucas laughed. "I told Zay I'd get up to look after Mia when she needed it so he could sleep."

"Woke up anyway, huh?"

"Every time," Lucas confirmed. "She calms down easy enough though. Like, it's loud… very loud… but it doesn't last long. I'd pick her up, and she'd keep crying for a little while, but then she'd stop, and she'd look at me…"

"You know you'll have to give her back in a few days, right?" Maya smiled, even as the tale sent her own feelings for a spin.

"Trying not to think about it right now," Lucas tossed back, showing he was having the same 'issue.' "What about you? The show?"

"It was pretty great, just sort of… taking the fact that it was one of our last ones with Kayla and really running with it, you know?"

"I do. I wish I could have been there."

"You will be, at the last one," she reminded him. "Hey, the others are coming. Call me tonight?"

"Will do. Love you."

"Love you, too."

The morning show went better in Houston than it had done in Austin two days before. The questions hadn't veered so much off of the band as a whole that any of them felt they needed to work to redirect. They'd shown videos of some people's covers of their songs over the years at one point, and the whole band had been happy to see bits and pieces from people they remembered. They would say their names as they remembered them. Maya was especially glad when she spotted a clip from Shae.

It had been in the cards for them, even before seeing that clip, that they would use this time in Houston to check in on Miss Shayla Blake. Sometimes, Maya would recall how heartbroken the girl had been when she'd realized that she was leaving Houston, to head back to Austin after college. She'd been so worried that it would mean they'd never see each other anymore, but Maya had promised this would not be the case, and she kept that promise. It definitely became easier once she had been introduced to Missy Sanderson, the day Maya and Lucas had gotten married. The two had become fast friends and would get together whenever they had the chance, usually with a sleepover to compensate for the distance in between.

Before they could go and visit the Blakes – especially seeing as Shae would be in school at the moment and they didn't think descending upon the place as a band – they had to head to the radio station. This time, they were scheduled over the lunch time show. The highlight here was absolutely when they'd been surprised by a call coming in from Willow. As such, once they left the station after the interview, the minivan went on its way toward the Obi house.

Willow and Lion's children had come so close to one another as to prevent their mother from ever really returning to her job after one or the other had been born. But now Zola was almost six, Sekani was four, and Liam was three, and there would be no surprise fourth baby, or any planned one either, so Willow was back working at the hospital as a nurse. Today was her day off though, and knowing that her friends and former bandmates were going to be on the radio…

"Why does it look like a tornado hit in here?" Rosa asked as they walked into the living room.

"Well, today the plan is to go through the kids' stuff and figure out what can be sent on its merry way. There's too much as it is, and they don't use a bunch of it anymore. It's been accumulating for ages and we never got around to it, you know? Anyway, I'm bringing some out for Giulia, if there's anything you want," Willow turned to Nadine, who was already scanning over the toys, and the clothes… "The rest will be donations."

So, they ended up sitting around the living room, the better for Willow to carry on with the sorting. Here, Kayla shared the news that she was moving to Europe and thus leaving the band. Upon hearing it, Willow was naturally sad at the thought of her going away, but she was as supportive and understanding as the others. Plus, she knew what it was like, to come to the point where life took them away from TXNY, far enough that it would become something in their past. Where Nadine had left because she was moving to Boston, deep down there had always been a chance she'd return to them, and she had. In Kayla's case, well… As much as they could think that one of these days she and Will would move back, they really could not put so much stake into it.

"You should come and do the Houston shows with us!" Riley blurted out at once, and the others looked at her only a moment before turning to Willow.

"Oh, no, I couldn't," she insisted.

"Why not? It's only two nights, even one," Rosa encouraged.

"I haven't been up on a stage like that in so long," Willow still shook her head. "And besides, you probably have a load of new songs I don't know…"

"I can send them to you," Maya offered. "You can listen to them while you go through all that," she gestured to the piles of kids' things. "First show isn't until tomorrow night, and I know you, you are _good_ with taking in new material."

"I…" Willow was struggling to come up with a rebuttal on that, like the smallest thing could have tipped her over the edge. Kayla finally clinched it for them.

_"It would be nice to have all of us together one last time, you and me and Rosa joined at the same time after all."_

_"Last one standing,"_ Rosa signed after her, with her most 'dramatic fingers' and a sad face to boot.

"That is not fair," Willow laughed.

"Leave it to us to care enough to bait you," Nadine told her, all the while looking through a pile of baby clothes, occasionally setting a piece aside to a separate and growing pile.

The new songs were shared and, as they waited out the afternoon with their former and now temporarily reinstated bandmate, the six of them had something like an impromptu rehearsal, backed by little more than Maya's guitar, pulled from the back of the minivan. By now, the band had a separate set of instruments reserved for shows, leaving their standing set back at the Hex, and while the traveling set had already been sent ahead to the Houston venue, Maya always had her guitar with her, in the minivan.

It was really in moments like these where they felt the span of the years, of the band's existence. They had all gone through so much of growing up between the start and where they were now. High school, college… and now most of them had careers, marriages, and children coming into the picture… But they endured, always. It was a constant, and so long as people would have them, they would show up. If ever the day came when the people didn't care anymore, well… they'd still have each other, wouldn't they? So, TXNY lived.

Leaving Willow to the music and the sorting, they eventually went on their way to the Blake house. They arrived almost at the same time Shae did, coming up the street from her bus stop. They spotted her just as she saw them, and then she was running toward them, barely decelerating before throwing her arms around Maya, who laughed and just managed not to lose her balance as she hugged her back.

"Hey, kid," she smiled.

"I was going to try and see if you were at the house where you used to live, after dinner," Shae revealed.

"Beat you to it then," Rosa teased.

"Are you coming to either one of the shows out here?" Riley asked her.

"The second one, yeah," Shae confirmed.

"Good," Maya grinned, as they headed toward the house. "It just so happens that we have a proposition for you, Miss Shayla Blake…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	322. Their Growth in Bonds

November 17th 2020

_Chapter 322_  
_Their Growth in Bonds_

_Day 4, Thursday. Concert – Houston Night 1_

"How's it going out there today?" Lucas asked, once again surrounded with the sounds of the road around him. He was on his way home from class, off for another night with Zay and Mia.

"Well, a potential little wrinkle," Maya reported.

"How come?"

"Right, so, the whole thing with Willow getting up there with us for the show hinged on her being able to find someone to switch hours with her at the hospital. She had someone, and it was all set, but now that person can't work tonight anymore, so we're back to where Willow might have to there and not on stage."

"I'm sorry," Lucas replied, knowing as well as she did that her job would and should take precedent.

"She's trying to find someone else to do it, but we're cutting it pretty close, and if she's not there then we have to switch things back to the first way, and that's more than just moving things around, there's arrangements, and lights, and… yeah, so we're all crossing our fingers. We set ourself a deadline, and if she doesn't call us or text us by then to say she's good to go, then we have to go on without her, and she knows to let it go on her end, too."

"Can she do the show tomorrow instead?"

"No, she really can't. This whole week is going great so far, but let's face it, it's a wire act from start to finish and the slightest thing can throw us off balance, and then we're just… pancakes," she sighed.

"At the risk of sounding predictable, I have all the faith in the world that you are the right people to pull this off," Lucas told her. A moment later, hearing a noise, he had to ask. "What are you up to?"

"Playing with sweet little Jujube," Maya smiled, holding each of the six-month-old's little hands in either one of her own and moving them around, making the girl laugh. She had her perched in her lap, sitting on Asher and Ray's couch. "We split up between both houses so everyone could shower and get ready for tonight. _I_ finished, so I get a treat," she spoke in a very sing-song voice which furthered their friends' daughter very much.

"Your treat probably doesn't screech as much as mine does," he breathed, which got her laughing. "How long until the deadline?"

"Can't see the time right now but I'd say a little under twenty minutes now," Maya sighed. "And, oh, I know this face, I think my treat is about to poop, gotta go. Love you, make good choices!"

As anticipated phone calls went, it had been a long time since Maya could say she felt tangible relief for hearing her ringtone. Willow had secured her replacement. They were good to go.

They picked her up on the way, having spent part of the day – along with rehearsals minus their guest sixth – tracking down an outfit for her to wear to integrate her into the look the rest of them had going. To her credit, she surprised them for how quickly and deftly she was able to get changed, right there in the back of the minivan and beneath the makeshift curtains of Rosa and Kayla's coats. She'd showered at the hospital and, once she'd gotten her new outfit on, Kayla had seen to her makeup with the most stable hand they'd ever seen in a moving car. Next came the hair, which had gotten pretty long as of late but usually sat in a very basic bun or braid when she worked, so tonight she would get to give a sort of wink to her husband, unleashing something of a lion's mane.

"What do you think, can I still pull this off?" she asked as they arrived. The others looked at her and were of a singular mind: she most certainly could. "Great… Now I just have to hope I can also pull off the stage part."

They had to say, as much as this show, like the one before and the ones who'd come over the following two nights, was about enjoying Kayla's presence while they had it, and basking in their state as a band of equals, the highlight of the night was having Willow up there. Specifically, it was having her up there and knowing from the bursts of extra cheers that there were people out in the audience who had been fans for a long time, long enough to know that this had been one of their members, even if she hadn't been among them in a while. They knew her, and they were _thrilled_ that she was there that night.

It gave the whole show its own special kick, and it really felt as though they all got that much more into the songs, the six of them together. If they'd managed to get Isadora out here for this, they could have had every single member, past or present, and it was weird to think how unlikely it would get to be for them to make that happen in the future, what with one being in another city and officially retired, one across the country, and one across the ocean… They didn't rest on the thought too long, not here, not in the middle of their show. The spirit around them was almost a living thing, and it commanded attention.

"Tomorrow morning, we sleep, yeah?" Riley asked, when they finally arrived back at the house, feeling almost as though they'd stepped back in time, when it was _their _home.

"We are definitely doing that," Rosa told her, already moving to the couch and dropping to her 'bed' of this night and the next.

"You heard the lady," Maya nodded, signing a good night to Kayla before leading Nadine up the stairs. "Got it?"

"Yes, I promise," Nadine laughed.

X

_Day 5, Friday. Concert – Houston Night 2_

"Boarding call! Shayla Blake! Let's go!" Maya called out, stretching over the passenger seat and to the open window when they finally spotted her coming out of the high school. She was with a couple other girls who looked to be in her grade, and they startled and looked to the minivan when they heard the call. Every other student who was out of the building looked over, actually, and Shae jogged over after saying goodbye to her friends. Maya pushed the passenger door open and the girl hopped in.

"I thought you were going to pick me up from my house," she breathed, though by the smile on her face it didn't look as though she minded this one bit.

"Yeah, well, this way you get a bit of mystery going," Maya told her, smiling back. "Do you have your things for tonight?"

"I think so," Shae pulled her gym bag open and showed what was inside. "I didn't really have anything else that felt right, or…"

"No, that should be good," Maya promised. "Unless… I mean, we've got time for a quick stop at the mall if you want to." Shae's face said 'can we?' but it also 'I don't really have money for that.' "It's on us," Maya squashed the second part at once, and they were off.

She was starting to think she had something in her that loved playing a bit of Fairy Godmother sort of role with people. She liked to make dreams come true, whatever those may have been, big or small. And right now Shayla Blake needed to access her inner lead singer. So, off to the mall they went, and with the rest of them already dressed for the night, they had the extra perk of many amusing looks from passersby. It also helped Shae to pick out a few things to make her one of them.

"I can't wait to be done with school…" she sighed, as she went on taking in her reflection in the outfit she'd selected.

"High school?" Maya asked, and Shae nodded. "What happens after that?"

"More of this," she gestured at herself. "I guess I want to go to college, yeah, but I don't have to go right away, do I? I could really give it a shot, make things happen now… or then, after I graduate."

"My husband didn't go until after the rest of us," Riley offered. "If this is the way you need to go, then go for it, yeah?" Off the relief on the girl's face as she nodded, they could guess she didn't expect this choice to be a big hit with most people… especially her father.

"Alright, well, for now, we need to get a move on, get you all the way ready before tonight," Maya led her to the cash register, getting them to ring up the items without her having to change.

There was no doubt in Maya's mind that Shae had their songs down, so much that she could have replaced her at a moment's notice. There were the new songs, but she was a quick learner, too, and all she had to focus on were the vocals. Maya had sent her all she'd need two days ago, when they'd invited her to take the stage with them, a guest sixth just as Willow had been. Looking around, it felt as though the whole band enjoyed having an extra for one-off shows. It might have been something for them to explore in the future as something they did from time to time.

It had been some time since Shae had joined them for something, and never had it been for anything of this magnitude. The idea of it all had been one she eagerly jumped to accept, as she was very much of a mind not to let an opportunity go by when it dropped in her lap like this. She wouldn't leap without looking, no, but this was absolutely one where blind faith was warranted. That being said, the band definitely got a kick out of seeing her reaction, standing backstage with them and realizing how many were out there, feeling that presence…

"Are you okay?" Maya asked, smiling. Shae nodded, still looking.

"What if they don't like me?" she finally looked back at them.

"Then they're in the wrong place," Rosa told her, always to be counted on for plain honesty. The others nodded, showing full agreement.

"Band hug?" Nadine asked, as they were a minute off from getting on stage.

"That means you, too, kid," Maya pulled Shae along to join them.

This mini tour of theirs, after it was over, would have left them with more than one idea for the future, for things they might do as they went forward and turned a new page after Kayla would be gone. How long it would be before they made it happen, and whether they'd make it happen at all, that remained to be seen, but the whole experience would be one that stayed with them.

This night would absolutely stay with Shayla Blake, as she took her place as TXNY's guest sixth for the night. The audience was absolutely in the right place and not the wrong. Shae took to that spotlight and she showed what she had to share, and the crowd was right there with her. By the time they drove her home after the show, it was just as well that it would be Saturday… or already was. She'd dozed off almost as soon as she'd climbed into the minivan. She was carried into the house by her father, who had been at the show, too, in the audience, but let her travel with them, with her bandmates for the day. As they continued on toward Sophie and Chiara's for one last night, they hoped Miss Shayla had the best of dreams, reliving her turn for glory.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	323. Their Growth in Encores

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

November 18th 2020

_Chapter 323  
Their Growth in Encores_

_Day 6, Saturday. Concert – Austin Night 2_

It had been a long time since TXNY had given shows on three consecutive nights, and after the second of these they could easily have been given a pass for taking a lazy morning. Instead, they were up, and dressed, packed, fed, and giving goodbyes and great thanks to their friends for hosting them all by nine that morning. They were going back to Austin for their next and final show in this whirlwind mini tour. They were going home, to husbands, to a fiancé, and a girlfriend, and a baby daughter. Sleep was less important.

Where their drive into Houston had been near silent, moonlit, this one was under an agreeable sunlight and it was full of song. They could not have found more homebound conditions.

It was a no-brainer that their first stop would bring Nadine back to her husband and their baby girl. Everyone was to be left at home to refresh and regroup before heading back to the Hex for their final rehearsal before the evening's performance.

"You're going to let me get the car to a stop before you jump out, right?" Maya asked as they approached the house.

"Yes, yes," Nadine promised, her tone suggesting she'd be especially agreeable to this if she'd just hurry up about it.

Nadine was true to her word, waiting until Maya had parked before getting out and heading to the door. Maya jumped out, too, collecting Nadine's bags and following after her. By the absence of his car, she knew Lucas was already gone off to the bookstore for the day, meaning _her_ reunion would have to wait a while longer… unless she made a stop on the way…

Bringing the bags inside, she found mother and daughter had been happily reunited, with Nadine almost dancing as she held Mia. The little one was bright eyed and content as she looked back at her, and whether or not her three-month-old brain could understand her mother had been gone and was now back, the way she looked back at her… Oh, that was love alright.

Dropping off Riley, Rosa, and Kayla, Maya was now had to decide: bookstore or home. Oh, she wanted to see Lucas so bad, even if just for a couple minutes, but who was she kidding? After being apart for the last few days, that part of her heart that turned into a lovesick teenager without him was going to rebel and make leaving him again feel impossible, and then she'd probably stick around the store for a while, and then it'd be lunch time so of course they'd go eat, and then… Yeah, she had to go home.

"This is Lucas, how can I…"

"Hi, I'm looking for this book, it's called 'All the Best Husbands Are Cowboys,' you wouldn't happen to have it in stock, would you?" Maya asked in a solid drawl.

"I don't know, let me have a look," he laughed. Alright, so the whole reason he didn't have his cell on him was to prevent personal calls, but this didn't count, right? He was being a good salesperson, doing his job. "Are you near the store now?"

"Could be considered that way, yes, but getting more distant every second. I just got the others back home, I'm doing the same now."

"So you won't be in the vicinity today," Lucas continued.

"We really need to cut that game short, because you're really good at it and I haven't seen you in four days," Maya pointed out, grinning to herself. "Anyway, yeah. I wanted to go, I really did, but that would not have gone well, throwing us off schedule when we're so close to the finish line."

"That might be the best choice though," he told her.

"How do you figure?"

"Every time I see you on a stage, it's like everything you see, everything you feel, it all comes out twice as strong, like fuel… And if you miss me that much, then what's it going to do for your performance when you see me out there?" After a few seconds' silence… "You're smiling now, aren't you?"

"Big time."

"Good. Too bad about that book though, I don't see it anywhere," he played up again, making her laugh.

"The real thing's better anyway."

Husband or none, driving up the lane toward home definitely made her feel plenty, as did spotting familiar faces running around outside the house, playing catch with the dogs. When she gave a honk, Sam and Dora looked up, while the dogs barked excitedly. They'd been trained not to run after the cars, which was good, especially when they were this jumpy.

"Make a hole, come on," Maya looked out the window when, once the minivan had stopped, the dogs had rushed the door. "Yeah, I missed you, too, but move," she laughed, while Sam and Dora came up, scooping two dogs each and allowing her to get out from the driver's seat. Sam put down Crowley and Trix before moving to embrace his older sister, herself already reaching for him. "Hey, you, I know you," she smiled, squeezing tight. "Did you have a good few days?" she asked, pulling back, and he had to shyly avert his eyes, so at least on this he was and would continue to be her Sammy.

"Yeah, you know," he scratched at the back of his neck.

"Yes, yes, I do," she nodded at him, knowing it'd get him to look up at her again, almost pleading for her not to go there. "Hey, Dora," she turned a smile to Lucas' cousin. "He wasn't too much trouble, was he?" she asked, moving to hug her, too, after she'd set down Archer and Lou.

"No more than usual," Dora promised. At least _she_ was catching on to the reasoning of her teasing meaning all was well between them. "We came back to get the dogs from the farm, figured you'd be home soon."

"Thanks for that," Maya nodded, crouching to let the dogs greet her to their hearts' content.

Giving no more than brief attention to that feeling of being back home, back in her room, her own bathroom, after being away, Maya went and brought her bags inside before heading to the shower. She had hours still until the show, so for the time being she only dressed for the day, detangling her hair but then letting it to dry as she headed out of the house and into the Hex. It was a toss-up really as to what she'd missed the most, between the attic and the studio, but right now this day was still about the music and if she went up to the attic, well it would not be unlike what would happen if she went to the bookstore to see Lucas. She'd be up to her elbows in paints or pencils when the others came back, and they couldn't have that.

"One thing at a time," she muttered to herself, sinking into her chair and opening up her laptop to get started.

Even though she would not be leaving for months still, that morning at breakfast, Kayla had stated that tonight would be her last show. The way she saw it, they would not have a better send off than this past week, and she wanted to leave things on that high. As sudden as it felt for the rest of them, they understood her all too well, and they respected her choice.

Now that they knew this though, there was that much more need for them to make this _the_ show, one to go down in history, in TXNY history at least. Maya had asked permission to flush their intended song list and create a new one, which they would rehearse today, until the show that night. They all agreed. Now, she was here, with her laptop, with her catalogue of all their songs, so many of them over the years. She looked through them, from the very beginning, pre-dating Kayla's being in the band, up to the very most recent, the ones they had been debuting here and in Houston. She wanted to find the ones with their very best drum solos, their very best drum beats, the better for Kayla to show them what she could do. Once she had those, they could build the new list around them.

They arrived, one by one, and the list came together very easily, as Maya had hoped. In some ways, it almost felt like it was too easy, too fast. This was the last time they'd do this, the five of them, so shouldn't it take longer so they'd be able to enjoy themselves longer? Seven years… They'd been going long enough now, they were already halfway in each other's thoughts when they worked on things like this together. Whatever they did next, whether they brought on a new fifth or not, they were going to need a time, to stay the four of them together, to adjust to Kayla's absence before they could think about any new person.

When they finished the rehearsal, they just sat and stood there for a minute, silence falling over the Hex once more, and looking at each other… Oh, there were tears, just a bit, here and there, and eventually someone had to do something, to pull them back from the edge, or else they'd be useless that night. It was Kayla herself who did what had to be done, sniffing back, wiping at her eyes. She took up her drumsticks again, and she put down a beat. Rosa picked it up, and Riley joined her, and Maya, and Nadine, and then they were just doing what they did, all of them together.

They went back into the house for dinner, and then they had to change for the show and head out to get to the venue. There was no putting into words the feelings, the knowledge that this was their last show with Kayla, but there was no space for sadness here, no. That was behind them. Whatever was left had to be kept to themselves, on the inside, and it couldn't be left to come and disrupt the show.

"I don't think we'll be able to take a picture out there," Nadine declared as they approached, and she didn't have to worry that the others wouldn't know why. The audience had already started to arrive, the line stretching out along the street. It was not the first time that they'd seen something like this, knowing it was for them, but… yeah, it was still pretty awesome.

"Hey, there's Missy," Riley pointed out the window, and Maya barely managed to see her as she drove them by, but that brief look alone had allowed her to catch a few other faces she knew in that line, faces she hadn't seen in a week, and finding them here… It reminded her of what Lucas had told her earlier, about her stage 'fuel.' A part of her would probably think it weird to have some of her students out there. It wasn't as though she was usually meek and mild-mannered, but they had definitely never seen her in this way before, some of them maybe, if they'd been to any of their shows before…

Taking the other door into the building, TXNY headed backstage, going through the last steps before the show started, especially factoring in the changes they had made to their songs list. They hadn't hidden the reasons for it, and at least this made everyone there very understanding.

"What are you doing?" Rosa asked, coming up behind Maya as she took a peek out the curtains to check that they hadn't started letting people in yet before scurrying back on to the stage and fixing something to mic stand. When she stood back, Rosa could see the pocket watch now dangling down the front of the stand, the cover open and well in view.

"Personal touch," Maya smiled, hurrying back out of view and pulling her along. "No tossing that thing around tonight, whoever goes up there, yeah?"

"When have we ever?" Nadine laughed, sneaking a look out to see what she'd done and then ducking back out.

"They're coming in?" Riley asked, and Nadine nodded. Minutes later, Kayla went and snuck a look, too, turning back to her bandmates.

_"Band hug?"_

_"Big one,"_ Maya replied, and they huddled up together, just about forehead to forehead times five even as they were being announced and the audience cheered. Time to go.

There were too many people by now to really find anyone unless she knew where to look for them, so even though she knew she'd seen several of her students outside, she never spotted them in the audience. She _did _however find Lucas, almost so front and center that everyone else might have been superfluous. Oh, she smiled with her whole face, her whole body right about then, and she tipped her head as though to say 'oh, hey' all casual like, when her expression was anything but that. He was a giant smile, too, and he nodded to the mic stand, showing that he'd spotted the watch. She gave him a good raised eyebrow, moving into place and soon greeting the audience, giving for the last time the discreet cue she'd been giving to Kayla for seven years, signalling her to start playing, to kick them off. And for the last time, she did just that.

If they'd wanted an electric performance, a memorable one, they gave it and then some. Very few people in the building knew that this was Kayla's TXNY swan song, and if they had it might have given the night a different vibe, but that wasn't what they wanted. They just wanted to give the best of themselves and let their audience enjoy that. By the end, as they had their last look of everyone out there before leaving the stage, they were confident enough to say they had done what they'd set out to do, for the audience and for themselves, too. They were exhausted, still flooded with adrenaline, sweaty, but oh they needed another band hug, to hold to one another and give this night one more moment to exist before they'd leave here and go their separate ways, back to their everyday lives, knowing they'd never have this again. They felt just a tiny bit silly for not wanting to let go, but then what else would they expect?

"I believe this belongs to you," Maya found her smile again as she found Lucas on her way out. She offered out the pocket watch, taken back from the mic stand on her way off the stage. He took it, kept hold of her hand even as she leaned in to kiss him, and after four days apart, and the show's energy still coursing through her, oh how she let him know how much she'd missed him…

"Kinda liked seeing it out there," Lucas told her, arms around her waist, smiling as she was.

"Good, then I might have to do it again next time…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	324. Their Possibility to Discover

November 19th 2020

_Chapter 324  
Their Possibility to Discover_

As school years went, this one had really felt as though it flashed by so fast even back in October and November. Now all of a sudden it was March, and it felt like more of a flash, more like they wouldn't have been surprised to hear someone had been playing an elaborate trick on them, and it was still only halfway through at the most. But then plenty had happened, and they'd lived it all, hadn't they? And time and the days _had_ been passing along, some more straightforward than others, and some easily distinguishable from the rest.

For example, the Monday when Maya had gone back to work after the week she'd taken off with the band. It had already become more of a thing that the art teacher was also, on the side, a singer and songwriter, working with some big names, giving shows… There had been those interviews regarding Ree's album and the tour, and now they might have seen her on television a week ago, or heard her on the radio, or they might have been to one or the other of her Austin shows… Some of her kids had definitely been to the second one, which had left her wondering what that first day back would be like.

"Mrs. Friar!" she'd heard the call, just coming up to the school, and there was no need to ask who this would be or whether she would have been there. Phoebe was hurrying over now, with Stella trailing to keep up with her. When they reached her, it was just too comical to see the one barely managing to express herself coherently, while the other looked on and tried to keep up with this as well, startling at each outburst. Maya was having much of the same issue, though on the whole she could surmise that Phoebe had been there _and_ it had been nothing short of the best night of her life thus far. What _was_ surprising was the realization that Stella had been there, too.

"Wait, you went in there? With all those people?" Maya asked her, and Stella nodded with a smile.

"Like on the side, close to the walls, not in the middle," she explained. "Helena brought all of us," she went on, which confirmed Maya's assumption that she might have seen the senior girl, along with Rochelle and Ariel, in that line outside. She hadn't seen Stella and frankly hadn't expected to see her, but she was glad now to hear that she had been there, not so much for herself but for what it meant for her student. "It was fun," Stella beamed, and it made Maya laugh, glad to hear it.

As the morning had gone by, she'd seen others who had either seen or heard the interviews, or to one of the shows… The other teachers had mostly just caught the interviews, except for Morgan, who had been to the first show and was now in awe of seeing her friend in this guise. And then the students… It felt sort of like the first day, last year, when she'd been new, like even for those who had known her for nearly two years already she had gone and taken their initial awareness and perception and tweaked it, adding a new facet which forced intrigue and fascination into the mix. She wasn't going to suddenly ditch her lesson plans for a Q&A and a song, but it was definitely harder on that first day to get everyone to focus.

"I'd never been to a concert before," Rochelle revealed, when the freshmen started to arrive after lunch. Somehow, that didn't surprise Maya, and she smirked as she took the returned book and the paper she was handed before moving to the bookcase with her to replace the book and select another.

"Was it a good experience?" she asked, handing this one over. Rochelle briefly looked at the cover before looking up again.

"It was kind of loud at first, like really loud," Rochelle declared.

"Yeah, it is," Maya agreed.

"And I'm not big on music," Rochelle went on, eternally truthful, to which Maya nodded. "But it wasn't… I mean… A lot of it I just find kind of weird, like it doesn't do anything to me, it just… rolls off." Again, Maya nodded, knowing what she meant. "I wasn't sure if it was being in the middle of all those people all excited like that, but I did sort of get into it after a while."

"Well, coming from you, that means a lot," Maya promised.

It hadn't been long that this speedy little year got to feel like The Year of Born Curious, and it continued to be, though before the team's first foray into an official match, the girls, like much of the school, was soon taken along into that potentially strange adventure known as the Valentines' Dance.

As had been predicted, three quarters of the team came to hold down the drinks table. Only Ariel had come with a date, and while Think Tank Neil was a good guy and the two of them were having a good enough time, the 'real' party seemed to be going on at the drinks table, enough so that, by the end, Ariel and Neil had just gone to join Helena, Stella, and Rochelle, foregoing the dancing part of this dance.

"I should get them to go out there, shouldn't I?" Maya asked Lucas, looking on from where the two of them _were_ dancing, the better to act as the chaperones they were, keeping an eye on things.

"Why? They're fine," Lucas pointed out.

"They're going to turn this into a quiz match soon if I leave them there," Maya frowned.

"We'll break it up if it gets real rowdy," he promised, and she squinted up at him.

"Funny," she 'accused.'

"Just call me Chuckleberry," he grinned, then off the immediate spark of giggles it caused in her, "Actually maybe forget I just said that."

"No chance," she breathed through the laughter, which she tried to bury as some of the kids around them would look her way. "It'll be perfect for you to dress up like a clown at kids' birthday parties," she suggested, basking in his look of sheer self-inflicted embarrassment.

Future clown opportunities aside, the night _had_ been a good one, no troubles, which went a long way in making this less of a work thing and more of a fun evening as husband and wife. Maya had to notice the couples either forming or growing, knowing full well the power of teenage love drama. Here were Missy and Kai, eternally hard to classify but nevertheless together at this dance where the dates felt like something a bit more involved than bringing someone to dance with. There were Daphne Brett and Dakota Day, looking entirely more decisive in looking like they had met Cupid's arrow. Here was Phoebe, with another sophomore from Maya's classes, and a member of the boys' basketball team as Phoebe was with the girls, though possibly _they_ had just wanted to dance, by the looks of it. There was Leon Morales, accompanied by a fellow senior who did not take art and Maya only knew from having seen her and Leon in the hallways, this year and the last. Here was Khalil Russell, and he also came with a classmate Maya knew by sight alone, though she'd heard Khalil mention now and then how he had been hanging out with a girl from his year whose parents also served, and evidently it had been good for him to find someone here he could talk to, who would understand some of what he'd experienced, being on this side of things.

And there was Derek Boggs, accompanied tonight by none other than the Think Tank's Eric Wilshire.

From what she came to learn upon stopping at the drinks table later on, from Helena, Eric had been at the heart of what had brought her and Derek to be best friends. All three of them being on their respective basketball teams, back in middle school, her and Derek at one school and Eric at another, the boys had played opposite one another many times, and there had been an instant attraction between them, but Derek resisted it, wasn't ready to accept or understand any of it. Helena had caught on to this quick though, and she'd helped him come to terms with it, until he could get to a point where he could assume his bisexuality. He was attracted to girls, yes, but also and maybe a tiny bit more to boys, too. That initial stretch of refusal had put some distance between him and Eric for a long time, but after Helena and Born Curious had come to have their friendly rivalry with the Think Tank, well… a new bridge had started to form between them. This dance was the first time Derek was ever seen by his classmates with another boy, and if any of them had any issues, he sure as hell didn't look like he cared.

Derek and Eric were both at another event not long after this, in the audience gathered to watch Born Curious take on a brand-new opponent for the first time. Maya found she was so thankful for having them there, and the rest of the Think Tank boys as well. It sort of calmed her to see them and remind herself that, while this match would count in moving them forward or not, when it came down to it the status did not make it something so different than what they'd been doing, all this time, against the Think Tank. The girls had more than earned her confidence, and so her nerves didn't afflict her the way they'd done back in November.

"Did it start yet?" a whisper startled her, and Maya turned and smiled upon finding Lucas, sitting one row behind her in the auditorium.

"About to," she told him. "Aren't you supposed to be at work?"

"Maeve owed me one," he explained. "Anyway, had to be here for this one, you know, to make sure you'd keep it together."

"Yeah, we'll see how that goes," Maya breathed, looking around again to the stage, where the teams now sat on either side of the lectern. Just seeing the four of her girls come along, having gone fully into team mode with the addition of matching ties, shirts, skirts, socks, and shoes to go along with their jackets… They could present an impressive front all on their own, but this way? They said 'you might not know us yet, but that won't stop us coming out on top.' The other team had looked just a bit more experienced and sure of themselves at first, but it hadn't stopped a couple of them from looking suddenly uncertain, much as half the Think Tank had once crumbled under Rochelle McNeil's gaze.

Maya and Cory had watched intently, and after a while there _was_ reason for just a bit of breath holding… because their team was coming up ahead, and staying there, and seeing the gap grow and shrink, shrink and grow, but hold, and hold… And by the end, Born Curious were declared the winners, much to their supporting friends and family's cheers. It would be impossible to top this memory, right here, when this year would be over. This would forever be the first thing that came to mind about the 2028-2029 school year, just those four girls on stage, so happy with this victory and most of all with one another's part in it.

The year had been going so fast, and the way it was going Maya knew it wouldn't be long that she'd find herself saying goodbye to her seniors, packing up and heading off with Lucas for the summer and the tour. It was all happening…

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	325. Their Possibility to Try

November 20th 2020

_Chapter 325  
Their Possibility to Try_

The week following Born Curious' most recent and biggest victory had been made no different by it on the whole, but it had been a good one anyway. The girls were happy, and while they all understood the notion that it shouldn't go to their heads, that they could and would lose matches, too, they wouldn't chastise themselves for just enjoying this giddy feeling in them. Right now, for a little while, they were invincible.

On Thursday afternoon, after school had let out, Maya was on her way to the mall for a supply restock when her mother called.

"Hey, Mom," she answered, over speaker.

"Hey, are you still at school?" Katy asked.

"No, no, I just left, why?"

"Can you come by the house on your way home? I need to run something by you." Maya was glad to be stuck at a red light for once as she looked around, considered her options. She was much closer to the mall than her parents' house at this point, and she really needed to go…

"Uh, is it okay if I stop somewhere on the way, I was just…"

"Sure, yeah, no problem."

"How come you're not at the theater? You okay?" Maya asked, seeing the time.

"I am, yes. I took the afternoon off, that's all."

"Okay, well… I'll be there in like half an hour, forty-five minutes tops."

After they hung up, the running impression was that something was definitely going on, and her mother could downplay it all she wanted, but if it was nothing then she would have just said it over the phone, wouldn't she? Her brain went a tiny bit ridiculous, pondering whether her parents had gone and conceived themselves a surprise baby. No, that wasn't going to be it, would it? Then it could end up with the two of them pregnant at the same time, and _that_ would be too weird. Besides, after Haley, her father had… well… closed-up shop, so if there was a baby then this was a whole other story. Even more ridiculous than that idea was just how long it took her to come up with other potential reasons for this summons out of the blue. They weren't splitting up, were they? No… No, they would want to talk to her together if that was the case, unless her father had done something really bad, and that wasn't going to happen. So what was it? She was pretty relaxed on the phone, so… it had to be good news.

After a stop at the art supply store made even faster by her curiosity and the need to get to the bottom of this, Maya arrived at the Hunter Hart house. No one else was around except for the dog and her mother, so she guessed that her father had gone to collect the kids from school… maybe took them out somewhere to allow the two of them to talk…

"See, I did this all wrong, I should have gone to you instead," Katy almost chuckled, seeing the traces of dire 'I have to know!' thoughts on her daughter's face.

"That could have been nice," Maya agreed with a nod. "Can you just… put me out of my misery now?"

"Just come here, okay?" Katy motioned for her to follow and sit on the couch. Once she did, joined by Una the dog, her mother let out a breath. _Here we go._ "We need you to take the kids for a few days again," Katy revealed, and if Maya's thoughts had been racing in circles in her head, now they'd started to slow to a stop.

"Oh… That's it? Sure, no problem. I mean, I'll check with Lucas, but it should be fine, I…" Now that the first part was out though, the implications opened new doors. "Los Angeles again?" she asked, and her mother nodded, smiling. "New role?" Maya smiled back.

"Same role, they want me back," Katy told her, soon caught up in a hug with her daughter.

"That's great! Doctor Jenny, making a comeback," Maya intoned. Katy laughed.

"Yes, she is," she nodded.

"How many episodes this time?" Maya asked, and right there came the crack in the road, the one she'd been waiting on without knowing it anymore.

"This is just a meeting for now, discussing a few things before moving forward. Apparently, when they cast me and brought me on, they were waiting to see how things would pan out, how I'd be received… I guess it all worked out, because they're offering to have me on as a regular."

If any of her thoughts were still coming around the course in her head, then they got their feet caught in the crack and came crashing down, toppled over one another in a heap… It didn't take much of a leap to go from what her mother had just said to what she'd be saying next, and as happy as she had been for her and should continue to be, she was terrified of what it would mean for the family on the whole, and her place with them. The last time she'd gotten a job that big, they'd moved from New York to Texas, and even though it had all worked out in the end, this time… This time…

"That's… I mean… That's great, I… I'm so happy for you," Maya nodded, and oh how she wished her voice sounded anything like what the words were supposed to sound like. They didn't sound like that at all though, and no doubt the one thing they'd match right now would be her face, where she felt the sting of incoming tears.

"Baby girl…" Katy breathed, reaching over to touch her face, to hold her hands… She'd known this would be how she reacted, hadn't she? And _that_ was why she couldn't say it over the phone.

"No, I shouldn't be…" Maya shook her head, tried to make herself calm down again, but it wasn't so easy. "I know how much you've wanted something like, for… so long, I know… I was there, wasn't I? The rough parts… the Law & Order disappointments," she managed to make herself laugh and then her mother, too, which helped, too.

"I think after all these years I'm ready to give them a pardon. Thinking back on it, I wouldn't have hired _that_ Katy for anything except an already dead victim." Maya breathed a few times, feeling the tears had stopped, for now at least.

"So… You would have to… to move out there for this, you and dad, and… and the kids…" Oh, that was the part that hurt the hardest, she couldn't even pretend like it wasn't. The thought of being so far from them, to not get to see them grow up and become… not strangers, no, but not nearly as close and part of their lives as she was here. When she'd moved back to Austin and they'd been so close by again, it had meant so much, and they'd been only two hours away before that. Now, between Austin and Los Angeles…

"Look, I don't know _what_ we're going to do yet, not for certain. That's why Shawn and I are headed there, so I can talk with them, and then figure out what we'll do."

"Mom, let's be real, you can't commute from Texas to California every night, and if you're a regular, that's going to be months on end, isn't it?"

"I know that, I do," Katy replied. Clearly, she was very aware of how likely it was that she and Shawn would have to relocate themselves and the kids out there if it all came together, but at the same time Maya had to realize she was fighting to find the best option for everyone. So the least she could do was to give her mother the chance to pull it all together, right?

"What did Dad say about all this?"

"That he can be a photographer anywhere, and in LA, well…"

"Yeah…" Maya nodded. There would definitely be opportunities. After a pause, she had to state the obvious. "He doesn't really feel all that 'LA' to me."

"No, not even a little," Katy agreed with a laugh. "I told him they'd eat up that whole vibe of his, they'll love it."

"What about the kids?" Maya slowly asked. Her siblings meant the world to her, which wasn't to say they didn't mean so much more to her parents, of course not, but their well-being was the part that felt just… vital. "Are _they_ going to love it?" Katy sighed. She'd been thinking about that ever since she'd gotten the call.

"MJ will, for sure," she stated, the notion making her smile. It got to Maya, too.

"Star boy," she nodded. "I guess Haley might do alright, she's still so little," she went on, trying not to let this get her started again.

"Yeah," Katy smiled, the next thoughts breaking through. "It's the twins I worry about." Maya was on that same page, absolutely. She hadn't been that much older than they were when they'd moved here… just four years more… _That_ was strange to think about.

"I know how they'd feel…" she simply said, and her mother's nod suggested her mind had gone to the same place.

"Do you know what's kept _me_ struggling to commit to the offer?" Katy asked, finding her hand again. Maya looked at her and, oh, that look… That look was hers alone, grown from years when it was just the two of them. It didn't matter that she was twenty-seven years old now, not a small girl scared of storms in the night. She was and forever would be her baby girl, and the thought of going anywhere without her for so long… It was unsettling. It dislodged a breath from deep within Maya's lungs, she felt, as she leaned to hug her mother. "I think about being so far away, and then when you and Lucas go and have a baby, and we won't be there, _I_ won't be there…" Katy went on, almost more to speak aloud the thoughts running through her mind. Maya hugged her tighter at this. She hadn't even thought of that yet.

They were forced to remember the world around them when Katy's phone buzzed.

"That's Shawn, they must be on their way back," she told Maya, and they pulled back so she could look and confirm it. When she nodded, Maya reached up to her own face, looked at her mother's.

"We need to do something about all this or they'll think someone's dying."

They'd hurried over to bathroom, resetting their faces as best they could, as quickly as possible. As they did, Maya had one more thought which needed to be expressed before the others arrived.

"I'm guessing we're not telling them anything about this until you get back?"

"No, yeah…" Katy confirmed. "We'll just say I have an audition. It's not a total lie, right?"

"No, that's good," Maya promised. They looked to one another as they'd finished.

"How did I do?" Katy asked.

"Should be okay… Gracie might bust you, but if you get past her then you should be fine," Maya appraised, and her mother laughed. The little detective was as sneaky as they came, sneaky little Mouse Mouse… "Maybe I should go. If I'm here, they'll wonder why, I don't just drop in like this on weeknights unless there's a reason."

"Good point," Katy replied. She didn't want Maya to go, but she kind of had to.

So, they hugged once more and Maya headed out, getting in her minivan and hoping she wouldn't cross her parents' on the way. Her siblings were very good at spotting good old Sparkles. Thankfully, there was no encounter and she got away in the clear. As good as that was, now she had to drive home with this bubble of weirdness in her gut.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	326. Their Possibility to Lose

November 21st 2020

_Chapter 326  
Their Possibility to Lose_

When Lucas came home that day, he had barely walked through the door that had to stop at once, finding his wife and his brother-in-law in the midst of carrying one of the guest bed mattresses up from the basement and now toward the second floor.

"Woah…" he blinked, and Maya turned her head, saw him, nearly dropped her end and then just as quickly caught hold of it again. "Can I…" Lucas pointed, and she sighed, nodding, so he went over and took her place.

"I could have done it, I just… Yeah…" she turned on her heel and headed back down the basement steps. Lucas looked up to Sam, crouched in hold of his end of the mattress. His brother shrugged, showing he didn't have much more in the way of clues as to what this was about.

"I got here and she made me start helping her. The frames are already up there."

"Okay," Lucas nodded for him to keep going and they brought the mattress into the third room, across from his and Maya's. "You got this?"

"Yeah, I'm good," Sam promised, pulling the mattress on to the empty frame, the first of three.

Lucas went back down, all the way into the basement, where Maya was in the process of sliding the third mattress to join the second, ready to be taken up. She looked at him when he sat down in the stairs._ What's up?_ She stood quietly for a moment.

"I should have waited for you to get here and asked you if it was all good, I figured it would be and then I… I don't know, I needed to do… something, and I didn't trust myself not to do anything super depressing if I went to the attic or the Hex." Lucas didn't like seeing her this way, but the only way to get her to the other side was to go through, wasn't it? He reached for her hand, led her to sit with him, which she did, landing in his lap.

"Going by the beds, I'm guessing the kids are going to be staying with us for a bit?" he got her started, clearing up the question of whether it would be 'all good' or not at the same time.

"Yeah," she replied. "My mother has to go to LA again, Dad's going with her. The people from Heal Thyself want her back, as a regular."

As much as it took him by surprise, too, it couldn't affect him nearly the way it did her, and she only needed to tell him this for him to fill in the blanks. She was looking at the very real possibility that the Hunter Harts would leave Texas. He had gained siblinghood to those kids solely through his marriage to their big sister, but they were family all the same, and he would hate to think of them not being nearby. But Maya…

He put his arms around her now, and she set her head against his, neither of them saying a word for a time.

"When are they coming?" Lucas asked after a while.

"Sunday afternoon, they'll all have dinner here and then Mom and Dad will head home, flying out early Monday morning," Maya stated flatly. "Can't tell them any of it."

"Okay," he breathed, kissing the side of her face.

It was a good thing they were just a day off from the weekend at this point, and Maya had no idea how she'd managed to get through Friday without being the art teacher who'd lost all her colors. The only place where any of her students came anywhere near that hidden dark cloud was at lunch, with the girls of Born Curious, but she didn't see her getting them involved in this, like they were her girlfriends instead of her students, so she navigated around the subject.

The one thing that helped to at the very least look forward to the next few days was that, on the very little information her siblings had, her siblings were all excited about staying with her and Lucas. As much as they'd missed their parents the last time Katy and Shawn had gone to LA, they'd gotten through it, and they'd seen that it was fun, and on the end they got to swap stories with their parents about all they got to do, so that just made this like a little adventure, and they were eager to have another.

The room had been prepared for them, and Maya and Lucas had gotten hold of everything they'd need to host the little Hunters from Sunday night through Wednesday evening. If they could focus only on this part until after Katy and Shawn returned, too, maybe they'd have a shot at making it through, too, and this could be an adventure for them, too.

Sunday afternoon rolled around, and clearly the kids had decided that 'right after lunch' was sufficiently part of afternoon so that they could head out to their sister's house, as that was exactly when they arrived. Lucas was still at work, Sam, too, so the welcoming committee consisted of Maya and a quartet of dogs soon made five. The minivan's sliding door had barely been open that Una hopped out, barking eagerly, soon to be met by Crowley in a similar spirit, the brother and sister coming together in a tumble of canine joy, leaving the others laughing.

After this, MJ had climbed out, and he was already looking for something, which Katy went and got out of the back for him. It was his small suitcase, which he brought along the grass and then the gravel, whether or not the wheels responded to his prompts.

"You're all set, huh?" Maya laughed, holding out her hand, to which MJ quickly tossed a high five. "You just want to go unpack, don't you?" she guessed, and her brother nodded at once. "Alright, are you okay to carry that up the stairs?"

"Maya, I'm _seven_," he reminded her, smiling nonetheless, and she could only accept this with a nod.

"I don't know what I was thinking. Go ahead, Mr. Hunter," she swept her hand toward the door, and off he went.

Less concerned with suitcases and more so with hugs, Haley came barrelling toward her sister, who caught her up and brought her into her arms, holding her close and pressing a sustained kiss to her squishy little cheek, swaying along with her. Haley held on fairly tight, too, and right then Maya's resolve was strongly challenged, thinking of how she might not get to hold her this way for weeks and months at a time. The kiss migrated to the top of that blond head, maybe to better hide the shadow of that thought from this sister or either of the others as they went out and helped their parents with the bags.

"Una, come back!" Haley called, and Maya looked back, setting her down and watching as she quickly ran off to stop the dog running behind the house.

"I'll get them," Katy smiled to her eldest, running after her youngest. "Haley Hazel, stop there!" she called, jogging the last bit and scooping her up, making her laugh, which in turn made the dog turn back and run up to Katy. Haley was set back down again, and now was able to lead her dog back toward the house and go inside, soon followed by the other dogs.

"Maya," Nellie appeared at her side. Once she'd turned to find her there, she was compelled to lean in. "I didn't finish all my homework," she whispered. "I said I did so we could go. Can you help me after they go?"

"You got it," Maya whispered back, trying to keep her smile down. She was fairly certain that their parents were well aware of this but, maybe out of some compensating mood, they'd let it pass, deciding they trusted their daughters enough that it would get done in time in the end. Nellie rejoined Gracie at this, the two of them joining forces to carry their things and the others into the house.

By the time Lucas came home from work, Sam was back, and evidently had inherited the contract of helping Nellie with her homework. Maya would later explain how they'd finally gotten her to 'own up' and tell the truth, the better to keep her from having to do it when she'd be too tired. Nearby, MJ was practicing his reading with his mother. In the meantime, Maya was in the kitchen with Gracie, Haley, and their father, preparing dinner together. Whether they knew it or not, the Hunter-Harts were enjoying the kind of family time those who _did_ know about the potential move could only seek to hold and cherish.

There was nothing fun about saying goodbye to family for any extended period of time, whether or not they looked forward to the things they'd be doing in that time. When it came time for Shawn and Katy to head home after dinner was over, the hugs were long and often repeated before they managed to go. Haley didn't want them to go all of a sudden, and she had to be held in Maya's arms for a long time after the parents had gone away before she'd stop crying as she did. Maya poured in as much love as she could ever have within her for her littlest Hunter sister, patiently enduring those screeches, thinking what it would be like for her if/when she went to live in California.

She remained sitting with her after she'd stopped crying, didn't let her go so long as she didn't show any signs of wanting to be let go. In that time, Lucas and Sam saw to the other three, getting them sorted through bath time and into PJs before bringing them back downstairs for a movie until bedtime. In time, Maya felt Haley had turned her head, the better to see the television, but otherwise she didn't move from her hold, so there she stayed, until in time she was found to have fallen asleep, and rather than bringing her upstairs and leaving her all alone when she was fragile from the split, she simply stayed upstairs with her, laying her at the heart of the big bed and lying at her side, humming and gently tracing her finger along the bridge of her nose.

"Did they all…" she whispered, later, when Lucas came to join her. By now, the other kids should have been put to bed, and Lucas confirmed it was done with a nod. "Sorry I couldn't go and help," she told him, but he shook his head. She was right where she was supposed to be.

"Did she wake up at all?" he quietly asked.

"Little bit earlier, when I got her changed, but she went right back to sleep." She was curled up at her side now, clinging to her big sister but sleeping peacefully. "I always think she's getting so big, but I look at her right now and… She's actually so small, isn't she?" she asked, never looking away from her.

"No doubt," Lucas agreed, sitting on his side of the bed and looking to the sleeping girl, his pensive wife along with her… There was no question that the next few days would prove more of a challenge than she'd anticipated. She would be with her siblings, and she would be happy, so happy… but she'd also be reminded each time, sooner or later, that they could all have been on borrowed time as far as living in the same state, and then she'd have to work her way back to that old happy feeling. She was looking at her now, and she was barely keeping from crying, seeing the way the four-year-old held to her.

"I know I'll still see her, talk to her, if they really go, but… this, here…"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	327. Their Possibility to Hold

November 22nd 2020

_Chapter 327  
Their Possibility to Hold_

The next day didn't go exactly as planned. It started off well enough, with a bed hopping and smiling Haley Hunter back among them, and a chaotically crowded breakfast table filled with conversation. Soon, Maya had gotten her siblings buckled into the minivan and she was off to play school bus. They went to the elementary school first, dropping off the twins and MJ. They waved and ran off, looking forward to her picking them up in the afternoon as they'd been promised pizza.

"Alright, next stop, pre-school," Maya looked into the back, to Haley in her seat. She seemed happy enough about this… at the time.

When they arrived, it became a whole other story. She refused to be taken out of her seat, and she struggled and cried to stay right there. As much as Maya tried to reason with her, she was staying stubborn about the whole thing, so that every time her sister so much as tried to reach for her anymore she would screech. Maya could feel eyes on them from all around, whether they were really there or not.

"Haley, come on, you like pre-school, don't you? What about your friends?" She shook her head. "Why not?" Maya pleaded, desperate. Haley looked at her as though it was the most obvious thing.

"I want to stay with you." Maya sighed.

"I want to stay with you, too, Shutterbug, okay?" she smiled at her. "But I have to go to work, and they're waiting for you in there," she pointed to the building. Haley shook her head, and Maya dropped hers with a sigh, lifting it again to try and think of what she was supposed to do now. "Okay…" she finally had to relent, especially if she expected to make it to first period on time. "Here's the deal," she climbed into the backseat next to her sister and tried not to think of how she was having to negotiate with a four-year-old. "I'm going to take you to school with me, and I'm going to need you to look especially cute so I don't get fired or anything, yeah?" Haley smiled and nodded at once. "What am I even saying, you're always cute," Maya chuckled to herself. "You'll stick with me this morning, and then this afternoon Lucas will come and get you, okay?"

"I want to stay with you," Haley repeated.

"If you go with Lucas, you'll get to see a horse…" Maya countered. Oh, she had her now. "Now, this is the important part. I'm giving you a pass today, but tomorrow you have to go in there when I bring you, okay? If you don't, then they won't let you stay with me again the next time." Whether or not that was true, it was compelling enough that Haley accepted. "Pleasure doing business with you," Maya breathed out, climbing into the driver's seat again and taking off for the high school. On the way, she called the pre-school, telling them Haley wouldn't be coming in that day, sparing them the detail of how she'd been played by a small child.

She didn't figure she'd be late at this point, but she'd definitely have to hurry to get everything set up before everyone arrived and all the while have to explain Haley's presence…

"Please, please, you're always there…" she muttered under her breath, carrying her sister at one hip as she hurried from the parking lot.

"Mrs. Friar!" she heard and let out a sigh of relief almost all at once. Moving along, she came up to Phoebe and Stella, turning to the latter. "Can you write to Helena, see if she's here yet, and whether or not she is, have her go to the art room as soon as possible? Tell her to bring Derek if he's with her?"

"Uh, she's right there, actually," Stella pointed past them, while Phoebe was all smiles for Haley, who had waved at her in greeting.

"Great, see you in third," Maya nodded to the girls before moving toward Helena, even as _she_ had stopped, sensing her teacher was seeking her. "Need a small favor."

Having passed her keys into her student's hands along with instructions, Maya headed for the administrative office. All the while as she moved through the halls, Haley looked around the school, so different from her own with vast curiosity. The principal was not in yet, but Vice-Principal Ríos was, and Maya was eternally grateful that she took one look at her slightly harried art teacher and her small sister and, upon hearing of the situation, promised to handle things with the principal when he'd arrive. With many thanks, Maya continued on toward the art room, where she found Helena, Derek, and a couple others of her seniors just now finishing the set-up.

"Thank you, thank all of you," Maya breathed, taking her keys back and putting them away before sitting Haley on her desk. "This is my sister, Haley, the pre-school truant," she gave her a funny look, and the girl cluelessly laughed.

Giving her class became easier once she'd managed to sit Haley down in her desk chair and equipped her with crayons and paper, so she might create her own work of art. She still had to keep an eye on her as much as she could, though naturally by now she was very calm… She'd gotten what she wanted, and Maya couldn't even be that upset with her, thinking of what was potentially about to happen with their parents.

"Hey, you know how you're the best husband in the world and I love you so much and all that?"

"You've never let me forget it," Lucas confirmed, chuckling. She'd texted for him to call her when he could, while she had second period off, and now here they were. "What's happening?"

"Well…" Maya sighed, looking to where Haley was presently being entertained by Morgan, doing a disappearing act of the 'what's that behind your ear?' type with a quarter. Haley _loved_ it.

She explained what had happened at the pre-school, and the decision she'd made, bringing Haley along with her. As understanding as he was about it all – and he really was – it was easy to give him a pass on the slight comedy of the 'problem.'

"Any chance you can come and get her, keep her with you this afternoon when you're at the ranch, and the Sanderson farm with Troop? No pressure, but I already told her she'd get to see a horse and she is on board, big time." As expected, his response came with no need to consider.

"I should be there right about when lunch ends for you."

The next class went by even easier than the first, as the sophomores came along and Haley spotted Missy. She knew Missy, she _loved_ Missy, and she ran up to the surprised girl at once, raising her arms in the well-known 'pick me up, please?' signal, which Missy knew well.

"Hi, what are you doing here?" she asked, lifting her up.

"I'm in school," Haley beamed.

"Truant," Maya whispered, shaking her head.

Their small visitor did not content herself to simply sit and color this time around. Once everyone had been set to picking up brushes and paint, she started to walk around, looking at everyone's work like this was _her_ class all of a sudden. Either that, or she fancied herself a critic in a museum.

At lunch, Morgan came around with the order from Ma Maggie's which her boyfriend had dropped off, now also including a kid's meal. Maya worried that this treatment would only convince Haley to pull a tantrum again the next morning, but there was no point turning the food away when it was already here.

Lucas arrived, as promised, just a few minutes before the freshman class was set to start arriving. Haley saw him and once again ran and demanded a lift. She received it, and once she was nearer to her brother-in-law's face she had one question alone: When could she see the horse?

"You're going to see more than one," Lucas stared her in the eyes, and he grinned, seeing her shocked reaction.

"Don't have _too_ much fun, please?" Maya came up to them, with 'pleading' eyes.

"We'll do our best," Lucas assured her, leaning over to kiss her. "Hey, Morgan," he greeted the other teacher, who waved back. "Going to need her seat from the minivan," he turned back to Maya, who was way ahead of him.

"Class is about to start, can we just switch?" she asked, and they swapped keys. "I'll get you back for this… Wednesday night," she nodded, trusting he'd catch her meaning.

"Your credit's good," he smiled, and she stretched up to wish Haley a good afternoon before the two of them took off.

Setting off with his little sister-in-law, Lucas set out for Sullivan Stables. The whole ride over, all Haley wanted to hear about were the horses. She'd been there before, at the wedding, whether she remembered it or not, and then looking on sometimes when Nellie had her riding lessons, so she'd seen the horses before, but if she knew one thing about her big brother-in-law it was that he was The Horse Doc, or he would be, a distinction which did not exist to the four-year-old. As such, he would know so much about the horses and would be able to tell her about them. So, as they rode toward the ranch, Lucas told Haley about some of the horses, from Gideon, to Ricky, to Jewel, and Blanca, and Hopper… He told her what they liked to eat, what tricks they were good at… Now she couldn't wait to see them even more.

Lucas took her along once they arrived, holding her hand and letting her walk along, looking to this and that. She'd been told not to run because it would scare the horses. Whether this was true or more of an effort to prevent her running somewhere she could get hurt, she didn't need to know. She understood, and she kept a steady pace as she held his hand, and they were good to go.

"Who's that?" she asked as soon as she spotted a horse, pointing her free hand toward it.

"That's Hopper right there," Lucas nodded, and she gasped, like this was an old friend she knew all about. When they saw another, she asked again and was told it was Jewel.

Haley Hunter was a big hit around the ranch, as she had been at school, with everyone from Donna Devereaux the dance teacher, to Doctor Alvarez, and Juliet, too… And she was as gentle as ever with each horse she met and got to interact with, an affinity Lucas knew to nurture. Maybe someday she'd want to take lessons like her sister. She was clearly a natural, at least at being around the animals.

In time, they got back in the minivan and made their way to Sanderson Farm and Trooper up in his stable. Oh, she knew _him_ most of all. Whenever she and her siblings would come to visit their sister, since he'd been up the road, they would go and say hello to old Troop. If Haley loved hearing about the horses, oh, how many stories he could tell her about this guy… He told one and another and many more after that as the afternoon went along and he finished his usual tasks, looking after the old horse. Haley stood by, and watched, and listened. He picked her up before leading Troop out to walk him around, and as they went, him and the girl and the horse, it was just about impossible not to think of days like this, not too long from now, when he might get to do the same with a little son or daughter of his own chatting his ear off and asking him questions he'd gladly answer.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	328. Their Possibility to Wait

November 23rd 2020

_Chapter 328  
Their Possibility to Wait_

Maya wouldn't say that she had been afraid her little sister would be upset at her somehow, after having been sent off with Lucas, far from that. He'd been sending her pictures of Haley with the horses throughout the afternoon, each one as sweet as the last. The thing she did worry about was what the evening would look like, and especially the morning after. It was one thing to have gotten the word of a four-year-old on one morning. It would be another to have it kept on the next.

Just to put every chance on her side, she'd reversed the drop-off order the next morning, so Haley would be first and, if she tried to repeat the previous day's tantrum, Maya would have some backup in getting her to go into her school. They were never needed in the end, as they arrived and she allowed herself to be unbuckled from her seat and lifted out of the vehicle and on to the ground. Maya hurried her inside, and then it was off to the elementary school.

"Can _we_ go to your school like Haley did?" Nellie asked.

"Don't even tempt me right now," Maya squinted at her in the rear-view mirror, knowing she was messing with her, especially for how Gracie was barely keeping from laughing.

So, they'd headed to their school and she'd gone on to hers for an infinitely more relaxed day than the one before. Sure, once she got past the fact that it was not the way were meant to go, and she had to keep a closer eye on her than her actual students, she would have to admit she had liked having Haley with her, but it hadn't done a whole lot for her actually getting to do her job, had it?

Bedtime that night had been made trickier for the fact that the kids knew their parents were coming home the next day and they were excited, but they'd gone off in the end, paid in stories.

Wednesday morning went off without issue like the day before, and as she went off to work, Maya was thinking about her parents' return, too… especially the information they'd be bringing back. Knowing when their flight was set to land, she was ready for the message from her father, saying they had landed. They were heading back to the house now, the better to freshen up post flight and unpack without four kids demanding some attention or assistance. Maya told them to just aim to get to her house for dinner and she'd take care of picking up the kids from school, seeing as she had their minivan.

At the end of the day, she went and collected Haley from pre-school, bringing her along with the picture she'd drawn for their mom and dad. It was a horse, of course, and actually more or less recognizable as such. Next, they were off to the elementary school, where Maya found her siblings in the gym. The twins were playing with Desi Russell, not too far off from where MJ was looking through a comic book with Mikey Winger. As soon as they saw their sister, the three Hunters said goodbye to their friends and the teacher looking after them before running to her.

"Are they back?" Gracie asked.

"They'll be at the house not long after we get there if they're not already there," Maya promised them and Haley, too, as she kept her perched in her arms. There was no point passing her off to Zay like they usually did, not when everyone wanted to get out and back home as soon as possible.

Coming up the lane, Maya was happy to point out that their parents had in fact arrived already, laughing as Sparkles the minivan was taken with much high-pitched cheering. It was a free for all as they pulled up to the house and they were able to jump out to the waiting arms of their mother and father. Sure, if they'd come just for dinner they wouldn't have been here for another hour at least, but then they'd missed the kids, too.

The time spent waiting for Lucas and Sam both to get home, which tonight also brought Dora and Cecilia as well, went by like the snap of fingers once the stories started to come out, all from the kids' side for now, as Katy and Shawn were more than happy to indulge them. And when the others did arrive, Lucas last of all, the decision came that they would go out to eat instead of staying here. Between all that and then the drive over to the Hunter-Hart house afterward, Maya was left to cultivate her patience, waiting to find out about her parents' trip to LA and what they now brought back as news. Eventually, while everyone else pitched in for a sort of group homework session with the little Hunters, Katy and Maya walked out, trailing along the street together. They would go up a certain distance before coming back around, passing the house, eventually turning again…

"I took the part," Katy came right out with it, and Maya smiled, much as she couldn't hide the immediate concern this brought from her. "They would have recast if I couldn't do it, but they really wanted to have me back. They said that the work I did on those episodes I did before was what got them to come up with an actual extended story for the character, that she would fit into the core team, so they were very motivated to get me to agree."

"You _were_ really good in those episodes," Maya agreed. "Even if you weren't my mother, I would have loved Doctor Jenny enough to hope she came back."

"I never would have believed anyone would like me so much that they'd want to bring me back like that," Katy gave an awed sort of laugh, and Maya was really best placed to understand all that.

"When do you have to go?" she asked.

"July, when they start on the next season," Katy told her, and hearing this, Maya felt like a new boulder had gone sinking to her bowels. She'd be on tour with Ree by then, she'd be in _Asia_ by then, far away from home and the ability to see them all off if they moved to LA, which was looking more likely by the minute, just hearing the way her mother went on about her meeting, how much they wanted her. "I know," Katy told her, grasping her hand. "Look, I don't have an exact date yet, you won't be doing shows every day, will you? Maybe you could come back, or…"

"Won't make much difference by then, will it? Might as well tell them goodbye when I leave for the tour," Maya bowed her head, thinking of Kayla, going out on her own terms with the band.

"Look, I haven't figured out what I'm going to do yet," Katy touched Maya's arm.

"Doesn't seem that complicated though, does it? This isn't the first time…"

"That was different," Katy cut in. "I was getting a full-time job, in an office, all to give you a better life than I'd been able to give you until then. And I did that, didn't I?"

"Of course, you did," Maya breathed, hating to be in any way short with her mother.

"Good," Katy nodded. "This is something else, okay? It's a different opportunity, and, well… it's about me… and what I wanted to do…"

"Which you _should_ do," Maya added, rather than to listen to her go down any route suggesting that her following her dreams was in any way selfish and would ruin her family's lives. Katy smiled back at her, looping her arm with hers.

"And I won't be filming the whole year… or forever. The show is in its third season, fourth by the time I'll get there, so who knows how long it'll last."

"You're not just going to finish there and come home and go back to the theater though…" Maya countered, and even as she said this, the thought that now her mother wouldn't be working at the theater anymore either made her almost grieve for that period of their lives. So much was changing lately… "You could land a role on another show, you could catch a lead in a brand-new show that'll run for like a decade…"

"That'd be the day," Katy chuckled.

"The point is," Maya got back to what she'd been trying to say.

"I know," Katy shook her head. Much as breaks between seasons or within seasons might bring her back to Austin, for the most part she'd be in LA, and what was she going to do, leave Shawn and the kids out here all that time? It just wasn't possible. "Maya, baby girl, I need you to hold steady for me a little while longer, please? Nothing's been decided, nothing except me taking the role. Okay? Your father and I are still discussing everything, hopefully we'll have our solution very soon, and once we do, we will tell you, first of anyone. Maybe… Maybe it will be that the six of us will have to move out to LA," she stated, knowing it was the option that Maya dreaded but she had to say it anyway. "But we might come up with something better. Are you with me?"

They stopped walking now and, turning to look her mother in the eye, Maya could do nothing but be truthful. So, she hugged her.

"I'm always with you," she vowed.

When they returned to the house, homework was done, and the pre-bed 'sequence' was underway. As much as they had loved staying with their sister, the kids were all clearly very happy to be back in their home, too.

"Maya?" She looked over to find Gracie stood nearby, now in her PJs and holding a pair of elastics in her hands.

"Want me to…" she pointed to her hair and Gracie nodded. "Okay," Maya smiled. "Just the two?" she checked, as always, and Gracie smiled back and nodded. "Sit, turn." The braids were quickly formed and bound off with the elastics. "Ta-da. Where's my tip?" This had been the joke, about as long as she'd been fixing up any of her sisters' hair. The 'tip' was usually a hug, or a high-five, a fist bump or a kiss on the cheek. Lately though, Nellie had apparently learned another alternative, and when asked about a tip, she would tell her she was all out of change and run off laughing. Gracie still very much believed in a good hug as _her_ tip, and this was what Maya got that night. As had been happening too many times for her to count over the days where her siblings had stayed with her and Lucas, the small moment went and struck right at the part that couldn't forget about their mother's secret, and it made her hold on that much more to her Mouse Mouse. How she would miss this, miss her… so much…

Gracie was holding pretty tight, too, and Maya realized her little sister's grip felt a bit shaky. She didn't need to ask. Somehow, she'd heard something, or she'd pieced it together, or it was a bit of both. Either way, she knew something was up, something that could take her away from here, and she was confiding her fear within the breadth of her nine-year-old arms. _You'll be ten this year… ten already… Where are we both going to be when that happens?_ Maya kissed the top of her sister's newly braided dark brown hair, feeling an immediate call back to Sunday night, when she'd had to do hold Haley as long as she did. The reasons were completely different, but at the same time weren't they so, so similar, too?

"Hold steady, Mouse Mouse. It's not over."

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	329. Their Possibility to Grow

November 24th 2020

_Chapter 329  
Their Possibility to Grow_

Getting back into the day to day as they awaited some kind of update from Katy and Shawn wasn't exactly easy, but then there was nothing else for them to do really except to get on with things. And as March progressed, this meant at least one thing that would serve to lift spirits. It was time once again to get their pumpkin patch in order.

After the success of their small harvest the previous fall, the plan had immediately become that when spring rolled around they would plant even more. They wouldn't go and try to grow dozens of them all at once, but at least _one_ dozen might have been an attainable goal for this second year of it. Maya and Lucas had taken a look at the land behind their house, the spot where they'd grown last year's batch, and how far in any one direction they'd be able to take it. They had a better idea of how much space would be needed now that they'd done this before, so in time they had their plan all set.

Last year, when they'd had their 'seeding day,' as they came to call it, Milena Janacek had been back in their kitchen, doing the assignment Maya had given her as part of her punishment for her assistance of August Matthews' actions, coerced as they'd been. Maybe for that reason, Maya's former student had remembered about the pumpkins, and via August she'd reached out to her, asking if she would be doing it again. When she was told that yes, she would, Milena asked if she could help.

Before they knew it, Maya and Lucas – who had the day off from the bookstore – were joined by a veritable crew to tend their field, between Sam, and Milena, and August, and even Tony, who'd been talked into joining his sister and her boyfriend. It didn't matter that they did not exactly need that many people. They were thankful for them and, more to the point, it made them realize something they hadn't considered up to now. They would be gone over the summer, once the tour started, and then Sam wouldn't be here either, would he? But the pumpkins would be, and they'd need tending, preferably by people who knew what they were doing. In no time, they had essentially hired the trio, the better to then show them what they'd need to do.

After they'd done everything they could do that day, the accomplished crew united for a lunch inside the house, which ended up being take-out they had delivered. They ate together, exchanging stories which ranged from the former students catching up on their old school. Milena expressed how much she would have loved being part of Born Curious if she'd still been around, to which her brother tossed back the fact that she could have been, if she hadn't gone and skipped a grade. She laughed, as he did, too, messing with her. The three graduates in turn told their former teacher about college, and how that was all going for them. Maya kept from bringing up Cecilia and Tony's growing friendship, likely as some residual caution, for Sam's sake, even if it wasn't necessary. If anything, Sam could easily have asked it himself, of Tony or Cecilia herself.

When August and the Janaceks had gone away, Lucas had gone off for a few errands, for them and his parents. Having nothing particular to do for the rest of the day, Maya considered heading up to the attic, or maybe into the Hex. Instead, she found herself sitting outside, with Lou not so much sitting as standing on her lap for a while, looking on to their pumpkin patch just waiting to sprout. In time, Lou sat down in Maya's lap, submitting gladly to some scratches before just dozing off there.

"I thought you were upstairs," Sam came walking up from the house. Maya looked back at him.

"Yeah, no, I was going to go there, but… this here's good." It was, truly. Sometimes, she just had to stop and look around, actively noticing how beautiful it all was, right here, just about every which way you could look around their house, their home… It was peaceful, and it kindled so much of that fire in her heart and mind, in so many ways, whether it had to do with anything like creative endeavors or not. Whatever anxieties she might have had inside her mind, if she just sat here, and she let her surroundings slip along her senses… It wouldn't feel so bad anymore. She would hate to think that she came out here just for that reason, and she didn't, not all the time. Today though…

Sam didn't so much ask her what was wrong. Instead, he sat down next to her, pulling up another of the chairs from the storage box next to the back door. He set it there next to his sister's and sat down, looking out the way she did and just… waiting. Maya might have told him he wasn't subtle at all, but he would just have said that he was aware, that he was trying to be as unsubtle as one could. The thing was that, much as Maya wasn't exactly resisting talking to him, she would sit here and think of what she meant to say, what was the thing inside her mind that troubled her, and if she tried to speak any of it, her throat would feel as though it refused to speak the words. Speaking could lead to more feelings, none of them good.

_But if anyone here is going to know what this can feel like, it's going to be him, isn't it?_

Sam had been out here now, almost four years, while their other siblings remained in Tucson. Teddy, Cara, Eliza, Emma, Wyatt, Maisie… Yes, he went back and saw them whenever he could, but that was mostly over the holidays and the summer. Beyond that, he'd sometimes gone months without seeing them anywhere but on a screen. And it was not easy on him. The two of them had always been very much alike as far as just how much they cared for their brothers and sisters, and when Sam had come to live with her and Lucas, Maya had known what it would be like for him to be here while they were out there, from the time when she'd been in Houston while her Hunter siblings were in Austin, and that only to a point, as they were only two hours apart, but then her Hart siblings, in time her Hart-Lane siblings…

They had never lived _near_ her. Yes, they were in Tucson now, and that bordered on a manageable distance, but compared to them, having been two hours away by car from her Hunter siblings felt like they'd been next door. And before they'd moved to Arizona, her father's children had been all the way in New York, and she'd be lucky if she saw them once, maybe twice a year. That was really what it felt like now, as she considered the prospect of her Hunter siblings moving to California. If that wasn't enough, of course, it wouldn't just be them. It would be her parents, too, her mother who had never been more than two hours away in all twenty-seven years of her life, and her father all the same, in nearly half of that. Maybe it would have felt different if she'd been the one to move far away, just her and Lucas, but that wasn't it. Instead, she was staying, and they were the ones going so, so far away.

The worst thought was how much this notion seemed to reach down and touch a very, very old feeling, one which had long died, one she'd assumed could not even have been in her still. It reminded her of the time after her father had left… after he'd left her behind, and… and it reminded her of learning that he was out there, with a family of his own. Oh, she hadn't thought about her Hart siblings with any kind of 'me versus them' sensation for as long as she had actually known them, and she would _never _feel that way about her Hunter siblings if they went off to California, but… there was still that old feeling, the one where the separation would feel like isolation.

"Maybe it's taking this long for them to get back to you because they have to work out some way that they won't all go and…" Sam spoke after the silence had stretched on a while. Maya looked at him. He and Gracie really could be so good at picking things up, better than the rest of her siblings on either side. This one might have not been so hard to pick up on, sure, but all the same he had made this opening volley, an appeal none of the others would have felt able to deliver.

"If it's taking this long, what's to say the real problem isn't just that nothing they've tried has worked and they're too stubborn to admit defeat?" she told him, and by the look on his face she could see him having no choice but to accept it as a valid point. Maya looked to the sleeping dog in her lap, gently brushing at her with her fingers. She looked like she was dreaming, nuzzling away at some invisible thing, and it made Maya happy, just as the view around the house did. The little dog had been with them for so long now, and the idea that she might have been coming along in her years was not one they stopped to think about very often, but that would only work for so long. It didn't matter, not here, not today. Lou was here, she was good, just like old Trix.

"Do you know that Eliza and Emma are already asking me if they'll get to come and live here, too, like I did, and Cara is going to?" Sam asked her, and it pulled a smile from her.

"I didn't," she replied.

"I told them it was still a few years away, and by then they could change their minds and want to go somewhere else, and also that it might be more complicated by then, if you and Lucas have a kid or two by then," Sam went on, and Maya's smile held on, imagining it all.

"We'll find the space," she declared, a statement which could very well come back to bite her in a few years, but really in that moment there was absolutely no other way for her to go. She'd let them all come and stay with them if she could. "Having you here, it's been one of the best choices I ever made," she looked back to her brother. "I got to really know you, like I didn't get to before." Sam smiled back.

"Even with all the…" he gestured, looking for the right words.

"Girl troubles?" Maya offered, trying not to laugh at the awkward look on his face.

"Yeah, those."

"I mean…" she sighed, looking to ponder. "I could probably have done without some of _that_, but… even with all those, yes. And now I get to look forward to knowing Cara like that, and I really do look forward to it, so much."

"You know she snores, right?" Sam joked.

"I'm sorry, are you under the impression that _you_ don't? We can hear you at night," Maya informed him, giving a brief rendition of his nightly tune.

"Wow…" he laughed. "Really?"

"Really. It's not so bad, after a while. Tells us you're breathing back there."

"Good ear training for later then," Sam offered, and his sister laughed some more. She reached out between their chairs until he'd give her his hand and she gave it a squeeze. As much as she looked forward to having Cara here, she would miss him being in the house just as much.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	330. Their Possibility to Help

**_A/N: _**_The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!_

* * *

November 25th 2020

_Chapter 330  
Their Possibility to Help_

Lucas had made as quick of a go of his errands as he could, down to his stop over at his parents' house to drop off what he'd picked up for them, all for him to then head on back home as soon as he could. He knew Maya struggled with waiting to hear back from her mother, and even though he didn't _worry_ about her, not so much as to make him want to stay close all the time, but he still preferred to be back there with her right now. So, he did what he had to do and then he started back for home.

He was about halfway there when she called him and let him know that her mother had just called. She wanted them to come over for dinner if they could. They didn't have any big plans to begin with, were probably going to reheat their leftovers from lunch, and even if they _did_ have plans, unless they'd been remotely unbreakable, the answer would have been the same. Of course, they would go. So, he carried on toward home, and from there he picked up Maya. Sam was staying behind, might see if Dora wanted to come over.

The ride to the Hunter Hart house was about as quiet as he'd expected it would be, with the wait for the news existing within his wife's heart as it did. She would do her best to let nothing show in front of her siblings once they got to the house, but she would still be thinking about it all inside her brain, waiting for the answer from her parents.

As it turned out, they wouldn't have to wait all too long, showing how equally aware Katy and Shawn had been. They would undoubtedly have wanted to make this wait a lot shorter, but this had been the best they could do. When Maya and Lucas arrived, they learned that the kids were down the street still, playing with friends. So, the four of them were free to sit around the kitchen table, to speak freely without concern of little ears catching anything they weren't yet meant to hear.

"Did you figure it out?" Maya asked, starting them off. She knew they'd have to say yes, that this was what it was about, but she asked it anyway.

"We did," Katy nodded, looking briefly to Shawn, who met her gaze with his own. "At least, we're hoping that it will work out this way. At this point, all we can do is try, and if it doesn't work out, well… We'll find another way."

"So what does option 1 look like?" Maya looked from one to the other.

"We talked about it… a lot, broke it down as much as we could, between what we needed, and they needed, and _you_ needed, and what should or shouldn't happen, could or couldn't happen," Shawn started. "It was kind of a mess. But then there were the big things we both agreed on right away."

"Whatever we decided, the two of us weren't going to let ourselves get split up, with me out there and him back here," Katy nodded. "Send me out there with no backup and I won't last a week." Maya could only agree on that, giving a small nod.

"And then we thought about the four of them," Shawn breathed out. Oh, how much he loved those kids… He would do anything for them, no question to it. "This is the only home they've had, and it's a good one. Neither one of us had that growing up, not the way they do. It wouldn't be fair to take it away from them."

At this, Lucas could just see the tiniest glimmer of hope return in his wife's concerned face. Maybe there was a chance.

"Taking things from there…" Katy followed, looking very much like now _she_ had concerns to air, "We realize it's one thing to say we won't make them go anywhere, but it's still going to be very hard on them to be away from _us_ for any period of time."

"It is," Maya nodded.

"I'll do my best to come back for a few days whenever I can," Shawn revealed, and to Maya it called up memories of the early days, when he would drop in on her mother and her from time to time, for 'assignments.'

"And when the studio made its offer, they really wanted to make sure I'd take it and come aboard for the series. So, I made certain that I'd be able to fly back from time to time while we're shooting, when the schedule allows it," Katy followed. Maya and Lucas both nodded. "All that, me and Shawn, that's one thing, and it's not the main thing."

Of course, it wasn't. The main thing was and always would be Nellie, Gracie, MJ, and Haley.

"Knowing what we knew already, I left that up for her to decide, and I would back her up," Shawn looked to his wife with a look of complete confidence. Katy smiled at him, looking back to their daughter and son-in-law.

"I did something I probably hadn't done in more than… thirty years. I asked my father for his advice," she revealed, and this caught Maya and Lucas' intrigue.

It was still not so long ago that Katy and her family had been reunited, after they'd all gone up for their anniversary, and from there they'd all been building and fixing bridges, each of them at their own pace. Maya knew that her mother and her grandparents were talking from time to time, though she never pried to find out any part of it unless her mother felt like sharing.

"How did that go?" Lucas asked. It was a valid question, knowing how things had been between the two of them, all those years ago, bad enough that Katy had felt compelled to run away to New York and never return, not until very recently.

"Honestly, I was scared, like I was a kid all over again. I could just see the look on his face whenever I'd bring up wanting to be 'a big star,' so I didn't figure he'd have anything good to say about me wanting to go out to Los Angeles to be on television and leaving my kids back here in Austin without their parents."

Without needing to say a thing, Maya and Lucas were both of a mind that, based on the words alone just about anyone would think she was crazy, but then to people who actually knew her, knew the family… It was more of a sound thing than people would think. They were all just sort of in the middle of a very big jump, they were spinning in the air. Now they just had to stick the landing.

"What did he say?" Maya asked.

"He asked a lot of questions," Katy tipped her head, recalling the conversation. "About the show, about the kids… He told me that he'd seen the episodes I did before. I knew that, Charlie told me he and Mom went to her house when it aired, but it was important now that he said it, too, and that he told me how he liked what I did." As much as it had meant to him to say it, they could still see how much it had meant to Katy to hear it, too. "Then, he told me that he'd call me back."

"How long before he did?" Maya had to ask.

"Oh, maybe ten minutes?" Katy looked to Shawn and he nodded. "He said that he and Mom spoke, and they had… an idea. They said that they would be willing to come up here, the two of them, and they would stay here, in the house, and they'd look after the kids while Shawn and I were in Los Angeles."

Maya received this news with a feeling of complete relief mixed with complete disbelief, the good kind, if there was such a thing. Meeting her maternal grandparents had been the forever unexpected delight she had sort of given up on until it had actually happened. They'd keep in touch, as best they could, but there was still so much she didn't know about them, and wanted to know, and oh… she really wanted that for her siblings. They'd never had grandparents, not until the Clutterbuckets had come into their lives, and it had been something so good for them, in ways that could really only be seen in how they interacted, those times they saw one another, or spoke to one another, or when one of the kids would mention their grandmother or grandfather off-hand, like they were wonderful giants in both stature and importance. If they lived out here, with them… It would give them this opportunity… not unlike the one Maya and Sam had over the last few years.

"They're moving here?" the words stumbled from her mouth.

"Oh, well, not exactly. I mean, they're not selling the house back in Arkansas. They'll go back over the off season, and whenever the series or my time on it ends and Shawn and I come back. If something else comes along then and we need them again, then they'll return. That's the plan for now at least. Maybe in the long run they'll decide to stay here for good. Or maybe it won't work for them, this whole arrangement… But they would both very much want to try," Katy explained. "To help us, and to get to know their grandchildren," she smiled back to Shawn, even as Maya and Lucas shared a look and an accompanying thought. _And their great-grandchildren, in time._

"When are you going to tell the kids?" Lucas asked his in-laws. It brought them back to a more serious demeanor. It was all well and good that they'd come up with this plan, but they still had to let the kids in on this major change coming into their lives. If they didn't sell the four of them on it, this whole thing would bring them very little in the way of comfort or reassurance. No amount of grandparents in the world would fix it.

"Soon. Not yet though. We want to be able to tell them more. The last thing we need is to get stuck with an 'I don't know,' we'll lose them after that," Shawn shook his head.

"You know Gracie knows something's up, right?" Maya told her father.

"Sherlock Hunter? We figured as much," Shawn sighed, and she tried not to be too amused for his own nickname for another of his girls.

"All we could do right now is let her feel safe, no matter what. We're working as fast as we can to get to the point where we can talk to them. If that fails, we'll at least talk to her, but we don't want to put the pressure of keeping secrets on her, even if she'd do it if we asked her to," Katy went on.

"Okay…" Maya nodded. "Have you started looking at houses, or… an apartment?"

"We did, a little," Katy replied. "Obviously, it'll just be the two of us most of the time, so we don't need anything that big. We're not settling down anyway. But we still need room, so when we bring the kids over to visit…"

"And that includes you," Shawn cut in, pointing to both Maya and Lucas. "And anyone else who might come along…" he 'subtly' added, earning a chuckle from his son-in-law and a squint from his daughter.

"So, we're looking," Katy pulled the conversation back.

"If you need opinions, please do send all that to me," Maya told them, and they gave a look to suggest they were already way ahead of her where this was concerned.

With what they had to share for the time being now out on the table, it was finally time to go and bring the kids back around for dinner. Shawn went and got them, and they must have spotted the familiar car outside, as they came into the house already looking to find their sister and brother-in-law. MJ had won the race, hurrying to Maya and locking his arms around her waist to embrace her.

"Hey, bud," she laughed, hugging him back, and maybe for knowing now how very small the odds had become that he wouldn't be here when she came back from the tour… It became nothing short of an unforgettable hug. She held him, kissing his forehead when he lifted his eyes up to her… The more he grew, he really looked more and more like a miniature version of their father, except with their mother's hair. She also had a feeling he might have inherited some of that Clutterbucket stature, either that or the relief in her just now made him seem taller all of a sudden.

Those feelings carried well through dinner, making the whole thing feel like such a return to form, to happy conversation interspersed with some funny little thing one of the kids might throw in. They were all on board for this, although both Maya and Lucas and Katy and Shawn had clearly caught on to the occasional looks thrown around by Gracie. She was checking them out, little Sherlock that she was, like she felt that something had changed and she wasn't sure yet what it was.

"What's up?" Lucas asked when he felt a tap at his arm, midway through the meal. Looking to the side, Haley was looking back at him, all the while pointing to a section of her plate, which had been emptied almost in exclusivity, where the rest remained sampled at best. "You finished your tomatoes, huh?" he asked, and she nodded. If Lucas knew one thing about that kid, it was that she loved her tomatoes, cherry ones especially. So he had no trouble interpreting her sustained look as 'I would like more of them, please?' "You gotta eat the rest, too," he pointed out, and for the next minute, Haley speared and ate several more bites, eventually tapping Lucas' arm again. "Alright, that's fair," he laughed.

"I'll get them," Maya got up, heading to the fridge. Spotting a pair of shoes from under the open door, she was therefore not startled when she looked back and found Gracie standing there with an empty bowl.

"For the tomatoes," she insisted.

"Right, good thinking," Maya chuckled, and they went to the counter so she could cut a few pieces and put them in the bowl. When she was done, she turned to face her little sister, leaning in for a bit of 'privacy,' the better to give her a look she hoped would read as 'all is well, just you wait.' Gracie smiled now, nodding before she hurried back and presented her little sister with the extra tomatoes. Haley descended upon the offering, and dinner carried on.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	331. Their Story of April

November 26th 2020

_Chapter 331  
Their Story of April_

It came to Maya, the very morning of the anniversary, that it had been five years since her father had died. No, she'd known before, she had, but it wasn't until that morning that it really got to feel real, weighted. Five years… She got out of bed, even as Lucas went on sleeping, went down into the kitchen to find Sam was up and in breakfast mode, as usual, and with little preamble she embraced her younger brother, and because he felt it, too, he set down his wooden spoon among the eggs and turned to hug her back. Not too long after, they called to the Hart-Lane house, to check in with Abigail and the other kids.

So much of this year already felt like a turning point, like one chapter ending, making way for another, and this was almost like that, too. Far above, naturally, there was the Hunters' chapter, too, as her parents were preparing to make that part-time move to Los Angeles, all the while seeing to the eventual arrival of Katy's parents and, more than anything, the preparation of the children as they would soon find themselves without their mother and father here with them every day.

It had been tricky, explaining it all to them, hoping that they didn't get too upset, though they would have understood if they were. On the whole, it had gone a lot better than they'd expected, though they also imagined that, the closer they'd come to the move, the departure, the more it would start to sink in what they were headed into, for Haley and MJ especially. The twins had the benefit of not only being the oldest of the four Hunter kids but also having each other to turn to, as they were told about their mother's role and what it would mean. And they did look forward to having their grandparents here, though it would still be hard on them. In time, they had seen this all as a time for them, as the eldest, to ensure that their little brother and sister would be alright.

Katy and Shawn had found what was to be their home away from home, in Los Angeles, which had involved the eight of them, Katy, Shawn, the little Hunters, Maya, and Lucas to head up there for a weekend, to see it for themselves. It was their hope that, in keeping the kids involved, to show them this place that would be theirs as much as their parents'. Whether or not it was any sign of their being on board for the move and the changes it would bring, or whether it was simply the wonder of novelty, of taking in the new space, finding where their room would be and picturing where their beds would be, and their dressers, their toys, and oh what they'd put on the walls… It would be just as they wanted it, Katy and Shawn would see to it, all the while knowing the large room would rarely be used and that what it would _really_ be most of the time would be a monument to their children, all the way back in Texas as they missed them every day.

The day Katy let Siobhan know about the role, and what it would mean for her place at the theater, the woman who had brought the mother and daughter from New York to Texas all those years ago about immediately went and called Maya. Katy had been with the theater for nearly fourteen years, and if she was to leave them, then she deserved a proper send-off. It was a no brainer, and Maya was on board for a bit of secret party planning.

Now, it was out in the world that Katy Hunter was to return as a regular cast member in the upcoming season of Heal Thyself. So, naturally, because there had to be reporters out there worth their salt, the connection was discovered between the actress coming upon the scene and the songwriter and musician collaborating and soon touring with Ree Forster. It was possibly the wildest, most surreal moment in all this, thinking of their journey from being a failed actress and struggling single mother with a young daughter, the two of them making their own way in the world, getting by as best they could, eventually finding themselves here… with the world turning its eyes upon them.

"Remember once, we were at the diner, after closing," Katy recalled, when Maya had brought this up to her one day. "You would stand up in one of the booths by the window, and you'd just look at the stars in the sky. I'd watch you there, and I'd wonder… Maybe she's making wishes. I definitely made a lot of those… Never thought they'd actually come true."

"I remember," Maya had smiled, though she couldn't say that she remembered what she'd been thinking, or what compelled her to go up there except that the stars were pretty, bright, and far… so far away. Right now, she liked her mother's version better.

And if everything with her family's shift in circumstances wasn't enough to keep her caught up in the motion of time and constant changes abounding, well, she had school for that, too. Her lightspeed second year was getting closer and closer to its end. Soon, another group of seniors would be going on its way. It wasn't nearly as difficult as the first year, but it was still hard to see them go. Every additional year she got to know those kids, it would only make the goodbyes grow heavier, wouldn't it? Looking at it from this side, from having watched her first group of kids go off into the world, it actually left her with something like optimism, and if she remembered that, then she'd be alright. She'd done her part, little as it was on the whole. Now it was all in their hands.

"Hello?" Lucas called as he arrived home from university that night. "Anyone?"

"Up here, hang on!" he finally heard Maya's voice. Seconds later, she came bounding down the stairs. "Hey," she smiled, coming to a stop just in front of him and rising up to kiss him. "Sorry, I was in the attic," she gestured back up.

"Hey," he echoed. "Sam?"

"Study group," Maya replied. "He'll be back late. I was thinking maybe we could just go out to eat somewhere, little… impromptu lowercase date."

"Sounds good to me," Lucas nodded. "I'll just go change," he looked down and pointed to a pair of stains on his shirt and pants.

"Lunch or…"

"Or."

"Oh…" Maya stepped back, making him laugh.

"Be right back," he nodded, grabbing his bag back up and climbing up to their room.

Unfortunate stains aside, he didn't actually mind so much that he'd ended up in any situation that led to his having those on him for the rest of the day. It was and would be part of those things that came with the profession he'd chosen, and if he lost it when something like that happened then he wouldn't get very far, would he? He remembered very well how some among his class had struggled in the beginning with the more hands-on portion of their classes, though in time they'd all more or less gotten around to where they barely batted an eye.

Of his friends, he had to say, the least squeamish of them by a mile – much to their surprise – had been Josie. She had come a long way since the Houston days, but this was something they'd known about her even when she'd been the one they referred to as Voldemort. If there was ever anything to suggest the possibility that there was so much more to the girl than the way she behaved back then, it was how very matter-of-fact and sure of hand she'd always been. It had been so easy then to reconcile this with who they'd come to know her to be when she'd let the mask fall away and she'd let them see who she was underneath.

They were all so close to the end now, graduation was just a couple months off, and he wouldn't have thought that the staining incident of the day would have fit in as a memory of 'the good days' he would look back on in the future, but it actually did, to him anyway. They'd laughed… the kind of laughter where it only got harder to stop the more you tried to be quiet. It was a good thing that their professor was not the type without any sense of humor, though by the end she _was_ starting to give them looks that said 'alright, stop it.'

Thinking back on it now, as he finished dressing back up again and gathered his clothes for the wash, he also remembered how the incident had cost him just about everything he'd had in his pencil case. The cause fell squarely in the 'better left unsaid' category, and it sufficed to say that he now found himself in dire need of replacement materials.

"Keep that far away from me," Maya declared with a vaguely accusing finger pointed in the direction of the clothes in his hand as he came down again. "Don't know where that came from, and I'm not sure I want to find out, especially before dinner."

"I really don't think you do," Lucas had to agree, moving to quickly head down the stairs and drop the pile in with the wash before climbing up again, passing his wife once more to head up to the second floor.

"Where are you going now?" she called after him.

"I just need to take care of something real quick before I forget," he explained, stopping at the top of the stairs and turning to go back down enough to see her. "Do you still have some of those pens you bought last month? You know the 'these are the best pens ever' pens?"

"It's a possibility, yeah," Maya declared, leaning to the bottom of the rail and staring back at him like they were in the middle of working out a shady deal. "Why?"

"I would like to take one of them, please?" he chuckled. "I'm all out, as of today."

"Because of…" she gestured to his clothes, tacking on a scrunched-up face, recalling the non-descript stains. He nodded. "Alright, but they're going to cost you a pretty penny. What do you have to offer?" His response was to stand there, very much in his most Huckleberry pose. "Well… Call me crazy, but I'll let you have _two_ of my very good pens, if you're willing to toss _that_ into the mix."

"You are most generous," he tipped his head as she laughed. "Where are they exactly?"

"Uh…" she thought for a moment, "Attic, second drawer… first? I kind of need to clean up in there," she admitted.

"I'll find them," he went back up.

"The ones in the box!" she called after him. "Haven't started those."

Lucas went up the attic steps and over to the desk, covered with a few recent drawings. Opening the first drawer, then the second, he saw what Maya meant about her needing to clean up. She was very orderly on the whole, but there was something about those drawers that invited complete and chaotic disorder.

"Wait, no, that's not where they are!" he heard Maya's voice float up from below, suggesting she was headed to join him up here, too, just as he opened the third drawer.

"Found them!" he called, spotting the box and picking it up before opening it to fish out a pair of pens. He'd probably go and buy her another box or two in thanks, she was almost out and there didn't seem to be another…

Just as he went to put the box back, Lucas noticed a strange sort of bundle lying further in the drawer. It wasn't so closed up though that he couldn't see what sat inside the hand towel. Two sticks… Two… Familiar… And both of them positive.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	332. Their Story of Life

November 27th 2020

_Chapter 332  
Their Story of Life_

"Well… Call me crazy, but I'll let you have _two_ of my very good pens, if you're willing to toss _that_ into the mix," Maya spoke, her 'serious' tone barely holding together as she stared up to Lucas at the top of the stairs. All her face wanted to do was smile. _He has no idea…_

"You are most generous. Where are they exactly?"

"Uh… Attic, second drawer… first?" she tried to picture the inside of those drawers. It was not a pretty picture. "I kind of need to clean up in there."

"I'll find them." Yeah, that was probably the best course of action. She'd reorganize everything this weekend, that was going to be the plan. She went to head into the kitchen, then doubled back to call out.

"The ones in the box! Haven't started those."

As soon as she walked into the kitchen, it felt like her heart had felt guarded enough that it could finally beat with the anticipation she had been feeling, knowing what she'd get to tell him that night. She'd barely had time to process any of it, to figure out where to go from there, when she'd heard the dogs bark, telling her they had spotted someone coming to the house, a very particular someone… and she was still holding the tests. At least she'd had the presence of mind to go and hide them… in the attic… in her desk, the drawer…

Oh…

She hurried back out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

"Wait, no, that's not where they are!" she called, almost leaping on to the steps pulled down from the attic…

"Found them!" Lucas called back. He expected she'd be downstairs still, instead of coming up, just on to the attic floor, to see him, standing by the desk, looking into the open drawer, the third one, with the pens and their box in his hands.

He'd seen them… _He knows._

"No, no, no…" Maya gave something near to a whimper, suddenly so disappointed, even as Lucas turned to find her there. "I-I was going to do a whole thing, you know, the big sort of 'surprise!' thing," she mimed, finding her hands were unable to just stand still at her sides. "Like, what were the odds that of _all_ the things you might need, of _all_ the places you would have…" she sighed, gesticulating along. "Can't get a do-over on something like that, I…"

"Maya…" he spoke her name, slow, almost dumbfounded. She stopped all at once.

"Yeah?" she blinked, looking at him, seeing him in the midst of this moment for the first time. He looked like he had forgotten how to breathe, forgotten to do a whole lot of things, as it all settled in his mind. He looked back into the open drawer.

Two tests. One had a plus sign, the other simply read 'pregnant.' After the initial shock, this seemed to knock a new breath into his lungs, and then he looked back to his wife and his feet remembered walking, remembered hurry, and suddenly she was in his arms, as he was in hers. He couldn't stand still. His arms would be draped around her shoulders, hands at her back, but then one would come and cradle her head as he'd lean to kiss the crown of her golden hair, before returning to sit about her waist, and then he just sort of lifted her off her feet as she held to him, the brush of her hair against his face making him discover he'd started crying. He laughed, finally setting her on to her feet again and pulling back to see her face.

For having had so little time to go from finding out herself that she, that _they_ were having a baby, to then decide in the very moment she realized that he was arriving home to come up with some scheme to give him the best possible surprise baby reveal, Maya wasn't that far behind him as far as taking in information and feelings. And then, because in all the jumble that was her mind, much like those drawers, she'd accidentally led him right to where she'd gone and hidden those tests, she'd ruined her surprise, she'd been crushed, just a bit.

But to look at him as he'd hurried and taken her in his arms, to feel the way he held her, embraced her, kissed her, lifted her up… She'd wanted to give him a big surprise, hadn't she? This wasn't the one she'd had in mind, no, but there was no doubting that Lucas was properly surprised at the news that he was about to be a father. So, really, what had she failed on?

"Surprise…" she quietly spoke, smiling. There were tears on his face, and she was sure there were some on hers, too. He laughed, coming another step back toward clear thinking, and he leaned to kiss her lips, holding her close once more, as she responded in kind. "You're shaking," she chuckled.

"I'm sorry, I'm not…" he shook his head, trying to come up with the words.

"Hey, this is new to me, too," she reminded him.

"No, you're right, I…" he looked to the open drawer again, back to her. "How long have you…"

"Officially, about half an hour," Maya revealed.

"That's… Okay, wait, let's just go downstairs, yeah?" Lucas blinked, and she had to feel for the guy, still standing there and looking like his brain had imploded.

"Yeah, come on," she went and led him to the steps heading out of the attic.

They could still have gone out to dinner… It would have been a celebration now, not just a dinner. But then maybe for that reason, erring on the side of caution, not shouting anything from any rooftops just yet, and so that they could just stop, and sit, and talk, they'd ordered in.

"Wait, maybe there's things in there you're not supposed to eat," Lucas stared at the phone, just after he'd hung up.

"Can you just come over here and sit?" Maya laughed, his sort of hyper undercurrent being as amusing as it was hard to follow.

"I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm being so… erratic, I mean this is…" he came and sat next to her on the couch.

"I have never seen you like this. It's kind of cute, actually," Maya stated.

Lucas took a breath. He had to relax, had to focus again. He looked at her sitting there, and there were so many questions in his head. Two tests couldn't lie, right? And anyway, it wouldn't be possible for those things to say they'd found the thing that proved she was pregnant if she actually wasn't, would it? So those questions could be pushed aside, unnecessary. Now he wondered things like 'how far along is she?' and 'when is she due?' and they were only the beginning. They had been trying to make this happen for months, and in all that time they had somehow never done anything that would get them started once they reached this point. They'd have to read up…

"How are you feeling? Are you… okay? I mean…" he asked.

"I'm good, yeah," she promised, smiling. "Honestly, it took me a while to even decide to get those tests. Wasn't until today that I finally just had to go for it."

"What happened?" Lucas wondered aloud.

"Let's just say it was a big day for undesirable stains," Maya frowned. "And if you don't want an encore, you won't go digging for details on that," she waved her hand toward him.

"Got it," he nodded and gave a sympathetic look. "At school?" he asked. She gave him a look. "No details," he held up his hands. She sighed.

"Yes, at school," she confirmed, drawing the line on recalling the incident any further. "I promise, I will tell you the whole thing, but can we wait until after dinner? And after I have time to digest?"

"Absolutely," he smiled, reaching for her hand. She upped this by scooting over to lean at his shoulder, so he draped his arm around hers. In those few moments of peace, it did just feel like all of a sudden the shock had washed away and they were moving into the next stage of… everything. They would both remember it, for years to come.

When the doorbell rang, Maya bolted up to go and answer. Whatever 'incident' had happened earlier, clearly she was over it and now she was just starving.

"Does anyone else know?" Lucas thought to ask as they settled down at the kitchen table.

"I didn't get to talk to anyone between the tests and then you coming home," she reminded him.

"No, I know, but…" he stalled, not wanting to bring up the school thing, especially not while they were about to eat, but then how was he able to sidestep it when it tied directly back to his question. "Back when you just suspected," he finally asked, and she understood.

"Oh… Yeah… Not for sure, but enough to suspect," she told him. "Now," she indicated the food, as good as pleading for him not to say anything that might keep her and this food from interacting.

"I hear you," he promised, and he tried to think of what to do, to make himself have a conversation with her that didn't involve the thing he was dying to hear about. "What do we do about Sam? Guessing we won't be telling people yet, but he lives here, he's going to know, isn't he?"

"Oh…" Maya hummed. In all this, she'd sort of forgotten that part, hadn't she? "I think… Maybe we don't tell him yet, not until we don't have a choice."

"Okay," Lucas nodded.

"_Or_ we just let him figure it out. He's so good at that," she smirked, making him laugh.

"It'll either be him or Gracie," he teased, and now she was laughing, too.

"Let's just try and stump Sherlock Hunter, alright?"

"Deal," he agreed, even as another wrinkle came to him.

"What?" she asked, seeing it at once.

"What about Ree? The tour… You might have to tell _her_ sooner than later. We leave with her in… eight? Nine weeks? And you're going to…" he nodded down to her, and she saw what he was getting at.

How long had she been joking how they were going to have to let out her clothes for the shows, before she'd ever known for sure that there'd be reason to? But now here they were, and it wasn't just going to be about costumes, would it? There'd be other things they'd need to do, to adjust. She could only guess at when this baby had started and how many weeks would have gone by once the tour started and by the time it ended and she and Lucas were back home. This wasn't even touching at fall and the new school year. For now, it was just the tour…

"I'll think about it," she nodded. She wanted to tell their families first, of course, but telling Ree was about obligations, while their families… The time had to be right. "I think I need to start making a list, there's too much…" she admitted, chuckling, especially for seeing how he nodded in total agreement.

Somehow, they'd gotten through dinner while avoiding anything potentially disruptive to an untrustworthy stomach, before settling in front of the television for some digestion. Quite possibly, Lucas was working through a list of pregnancy books he was aware of from the store, all the while thinking of a way for either of them to keep this baby a secret when most of the employees at the store knew Maya as his wife, and all of them definitely knew him…

"Okay," Maya sat up all of a sudden, and he looked at her, blinking. "Do you want me to tell you or what?" she gave him a look. Yes, he absolutely wanted to know, every detail, right down to what had gone down at school that day.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	333. Their Story of Wonder

**_A/N: _**_Dear guest reviewer, no, this is not the same baby :)_

* * *

November 28th 2020

_Chapter 333_  
_Their Story of Wonder_

_Two days earlier_

"Morning, Mrs. Friar," Leon Morales appeared in the doorway, even as Maya herself had barely entered the room.

"Hey, Leon," she smiled back at him. "Came in early this morning?"

"Yes, I… I wanted to talk to you about something. If it's too early, I can…" he moved to leave.

"No, please, come in," she moved to intercept him before he'd go. "Come, sit. What's up?" The boy was so much taller than her, giving airs of the likes of Bishop Nicholas, in both stature and form, though Leon was definitely a more quiet and precise sort of person on the whole. His impressive size tended to throw off a lot of people, maybe thinking him to be rough, clumsy, when he was anything but. Right here, he was almost shy, looking down to his art teacher. "Everything alright at home? Your mom…"

"No, she's good," Leon told her, the call to his mother's care working in its own way to get him talking. "It's just that… the program that I applied to, for college next year, they want me to provide a few references, letters… And I was wondering if maybe, if you were able to write one for me."

"I'd be happy to, Leon," she told him, no need to even consider it. "Can you write down all the information for me? If you're not done before class starts, just, you know, use your judgement for when you can finish up, then get to me before you leave?"

"I already have it," he pulled open his bag and pulled a sheet from a folder. "I thought it would be helpful for when I asked people," he explained, passing her the sheet.

"You thought right," she smiled. "I will get on it as soon as possible. When do you need… Ah, never mind, it's here," she nodded to the sheet with a laugh.

It wasn't the first time she'd suddenly found herself looking at a date and feeling like the world had slowed to a stop, forcing her to do some math all at once. But now it happened again, and in no time she was brought to the realization that she was late, and by a few days at that. This had happened before, yes, but so rarely that it always felt like there had to be a motivation it. More than once before, the conclusion had been that maybe she was pregnant, but it had never been right in the end, so what was she supposed to think now?

"Mrs. Friar?" Leon asked, pulling her out of her thoughts.

"Huh? Oh… Well, like I said, I'll get it to you when it's ready. I… Thank you for asking me," she smiled at him, seeking to steer the conversation back on track.

"Well, I just thought… You're one of the only teachers here to actually look at me," Leon told her. "Most of them, I don't think they know more about me except my name, my grades, and that I'm 'the big guy.'"

She was aware of this, to some degree. It was always a bit strange to hear the way some of the other teachers would be speaking about some student or another, and it would take her a while to realize they were talking about someone who was in one of her classes. They would have such a different view of them, and protective as she was of 'her kids,' she'd have to choose between holding her tongue and speaking up. More often than not, she'd land somewhere in the middle, couldn't help it. Leon… She'd heard them talk about _him_ a few times, too.

"The sad thing is that, in a couple months, you'll have graduated, and they won't get to know you the way I do," she gave the boy a smile. He didn't look so sure if he was worth knowing, and if he wasn't her student she might have gone and hugged him. It made her wish that they would have had this conversation so much earlier, that she could have done something more for him in the two short years they'd had together.

Morning moved onward, and she didn't stop to think about the thing that happened earlier until the lunch break. She'd had to get things done in the period between her class with the sophomores and lunch, so only then, as she got to stop and sit, did it all come prodding at her again. There was the sheet Leon had given her, among her things, and it had reminded her of the dreaded 'period math.' It was almost as though the world conspired for her not to even notice when these late days came along, not until later, when she'd then be baited into thinking something was happening when it wasn't. Then everything would right itself, and she'd just have to carry on.

So, what about _this_ time? Except for the tardiness, she saw no reason to think she could have been pregnant, except of course for the fact that she and Lucas were trying to make it happen.

No… No, she wasn't going to get ahead of herself this time. All she'd get in the end would be disappointment. She was going to ignore it, and then when everything went back on track she would have saved herself and Lucas the trouble of unnecessary hope. There, it was settled. She was going to get through the rest of the day and that would be that.

If she wanted to be kept busy so she wouldn't have to think about it, she got her wish and then some. Roman Day came into class after lunch and almost immediately ended up with a nosebleed. It wasn't the first time it had happened, actually the third by now, something to do with some recurring issue with his nose. Even though he was used to dealing with it, the whole thing had inevitably disrupted the rest of that period.

Then, as she looked forward to some quiet time in her back-to-back afternoon free periods, the better to write Leon's letter, someone had gone and pulled the fire alarm, forcing them to evacuate. By the time the fire department had come around and determined there was no fire or any other problem warranting the pull of that lever, everyone had been made to go into the gym, to get to the bottom of who had done it. There was a lot of finger pointing, from many sides over, before finally a sophomore boy admitted he'd done it. He was in Maya's class just that morning, one of those who gave her the impression he'd only been taking art because they figured it would be an easy grade, passing the time. She never made it that easy for them, and the same went for this boy, who had only joined the group this year, and she doubted she'd see him in next year's juniors carrying on. She treated him as she did all her students, but sometimes it just couldn't be helped, and she couldn't force it on him.

It took long enough before everyone – except the boy, who would be suspended by the time his parents came to get him – was sent back to class that Maya didn't get to start the letter as planned. She doubted she could have gotten anything worthy of this letter out of her brain right about then.

Last period, her juniors came along, still talking about the fire alarm. Maya checked with Dakota Day, confirming that Roman was doing alright now. The day's final period felt like it had lost the ability to fly before it even started. Everyone was still too wired, and she couldn't blame them. So, she found videos to show them and hoped they'd at least try to pay attention.

Back home that night, she was spent, and she told Lucas and Sam all about what had happened that afternoon. Sam shared a story of a similar incident back when he'd been in high school. They'd tried to pin it on him, the 'genius' trying to get attention to compensate for his being a few years younger than them. Maya and Lucas had heard about this at the time. They remembered how it had taken a few days before the real culprit was found, how it had gotten to the point where the school genuinely suspected Sam and were about to suspend him if he didn't confess.

"What's that?" Lucas asked, later on, when he came back from walking the dogs and found Maya on the couch with her laptop.

"Letter for Leon Morales, for college admission," she told him without looking up or stopping to type. "Can you read it when I'm done?"

"No problem," he leaned to kiss the side of her face. "I'm going to go shower real quick," he told her before heading up the stairs. Maya turned her head to watch him go after he'd gotten halfway.

The afternoon may have worked overtime to keep her distracted, but now that she was here, she was still thinking about the possibility. What if this time the reason she was late was actually because they had succeeded and she was expecting? Sure, she'd been wrong every time before, but sooner or later there had to be one that was for real, no? This could be the one. She could be pregnant right now.

"No…" she finally shook her head to herself. "Not buying it this time."

"What are you muttering about?" She almost literally bolted in the air, startled to realize Sam was sitting at the other end of the couch. He jumped from her jump. "Sorry, I…"

"H-How long have you been there?"

"I don't know, like a minute or two?" he shrugged. "Do you need me to go?"

"No, no, it's fine, I… It's fine," Maya breathed, pressing at the side of her head like she had an ache. "I was just thinking out loud," she told him, which was not wrong. "Working on a letter for one of my students."

"Yeah, I heard before, when Lucas was here," he told her, holding up his bowl of cereal, which she took to mean he'd been in the kitchen at the time. "He's nice," Sam added, and it took Maya a moment to remember the two would have met on a few occasions related to the decorating of the Fall Festival and at the festival itself.

"Any chance you want to play undercover high school guy and go tell some of the others?" Maya asked him. "You've still got that baby face, they'll buy it."

"Because I'm their age, too," Sam pointed out. "Anyway, I could say the same thing about you."

"And don't you forget it," she gave him her best 'innocent school girl' look.

"See, now you made it weird," Sam laughed.

She finished the letter shortly after Lucas rejoined them, and both he and Sam gave it a read. She still felt like she could rework it, add something to make it feel more personal, more connected, so they'd know Leon the way she did, but both guys insisted that the letter was fine the way it was. The only things to fix were of a grammatical nature, and they were few and far in between.

"Big day today, huh?" Lucas asked Maya after she'd set the laptop aside and Sam went upstairs. Maya looked back at him, chuckling when she caught the look on his face.

"Are you trying to bring me comfort?" she whispered.

"It's a gift," he shrugged, sidling closer. "I can just listen… I can do other things, too."

"Yes, I'm familiar with your work," she reached over, brushing at his still drying hair with her fingers. _Hey, Lucas, I'm a few days late…_ No… She had to wait. "Let's maybe not risk permanently scarring my kid brother," she leaned over to kiss him before standing up, holding her hand out to him to lead them upstairs.

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	334. Their Story of Signs

November 29th 2020

_Chapter 334  
Their Story of Signs_

_The Day Before_

It did not surprise anyone to return to school the next day and still hear teachers and students alike discussing the incident with the fire alarm. Of any number of things they could have been talking about, from the basketball teams' latest games, or the approach of prom season, to what would there'd be for lunch in the cafeteria, or how they'd done on some test or another, it was the alarm, and the evacuation, and then the 'interrogation' in the gym. This especially had settled like a cloud of suspicion over the student body, some of them having leapt from 'who pulled the lever?' to 'I heard this person kissed that person' or any number of other blindsiding accusations.

Maya had never seen anything like it, not even when she'd been a student here, and as soon as she clued into it, her mission became to keep the air clear wherever she sensed trouble brewing. It wasn't what she _wanted_ to be doing, especially today. All she could think was that the previous day's events had really wiped her out. She'd woken up today, having never felt quite so resistant to the idea of getting out of bed, not when she had by all accounts had gotten a perfectly good night's sleep. Lucas had had no notion of it. He had a late start to his classes today, and she had allowed him to go on sleeping as she got ready to head out.

"Mrs. Friar?"

"Huh?" she looked up, blinking, before shaking her head to get back her senses as she found Daphne Brett, Ariel Su, and Phoebe Monroe had come to her class, just after the lunch period had started. "Sorry, yes, hi. What's up?" she asked. The girls shared a brief look, wondering what was up with their teacher, before Daphne addressed her once more.

"Well, us and the rest of the girls' team thought we'd have a sort of no-stakes game against the boys before we went and ate," she explained. "Everyone's kind of weird out there today, so we thought it'd be something for us to do to clear our heads."

"Sounds like a good idea," Maya hummed. Sounded like something her own team would have done, too, back in the day.

"Yeah, well, we're one short today, Becca twisted her ankle a bit. She should be fine for the next game, but she can't be out there today, so we were thinking…" Ariel continued, looking to her teammates.

"You were on the team when you went here, we know that. Everyone says you were one of the best," Phoebe grinned. "So we were wondering if you might go out there with us, help us beat the boys."

"That _is_ always fun," Maya chuckled, making them smile and nod along. She sighed. "I wish I could, today's just not good for it, I'm afraid," she told them, and seeing the slight disappointment on their faces was as good of a challenge to her resolve as there could be. She came so close to changing her mind, but she was really that tired, and she could imagine herself out there, not so much showing the boys off as embarrassing herself and the girls. "Another time, alright?"

"Sure," Daphne smiled.

"You know who you should ask though," Maya smiled now, the thought coming at once.

Soon after, she sat up on the bleachers, eating her packed lunch and watching the girls and the boys out on the court, including one Helena Zimmerman making a brief but nevertheless triumphant return. Maya had never actually seen her play, and for someone who hadn't been on a team in over two years, she had either been playing in secret or she was just that good that she went back out there and absolutely owned the court. In no time, the friendly game started to draw a crowd of spectators, climbing to sit in the bleachers, cheering on one side or the other.

"You looked great out there," Maya smiled as she came down after the game's end and joined Helena. The girls had crushed the boys, halfway between sheer talent and the boys almost crumbling under what felt like the shockwave of Helena's return. She was like a speedster out there, finding ways around obstacles like no one Maya had ever seen.

"Felt pretty great, too," Helena breathed, and Maya could see it on her face. If nothing else, she'd gotten to play one last time in this gym before graduation.

Heading back to the art room now, to prepare for her class with the freshmen, Maya watched the video on her phone. About as soon as it started, she just wanted to be able to show it to Lucas, to the others from the old teams, like 'hey, does this take you back, too, or what?' She didn't know when she'd started focusing on Helena especially, but there was so much of her in there, and looking at her, she could think of only two things.

The first was that, as late as it was in the year to make anything happen, it felt to her as though this was a sign. Someway, somehow, Helena Zimmerman deserved to carry on playing, in college, maybe even beyond, if she so desired, and looking at her out there… She'd never seen the girl so deep in her element. And Maya… well, she knew people out there, didn't she? Former teammates, former coaches, potentially well-placed enough that they could see a player like Helena and recognize what she could become. She'd been out of the game since halfway through sophomore year, no one had seen her that might have said 'you should come and play with us.' But what if they saw her now?

And the other thing… The other thing went back to yesterday, and the ever-tardy arrival of her period. Now, today, as she considered this sudden fatigue on top of it… Maybe she wasn't wrong this time? Maybe… No. No, she still didn't believe it, she couldn't.

X

_Today_

For some reason, she couldn't get Wyatt out of her head as she drove in to school that day. When she and Sam had spoken to him that morning, asked him how he was doing, his response was so different from his sisters Cara and Eliza's. They had to remind themselves, time and again, that he had been four years old when their father had died. And as much as he was aware of what was happening around him, and understood part of it, and was affected by it, before long it was clear that it would never sit with him quite the way it did his older siblings.

Now he was nine years old, which meant he'd lived longer without Kermit than with him. At this point, James Lane had been his father for almost as long as he had memories to remember. He knew that Kermit had been his father first, had some memories of him, but it was just not the same. But now… He was getting just about to a point where even _he_ was aware of the difference, and he was starting to ask more questions about his birth father. Today, he'd asked Maya the question she'd expected would come up sooner or later, just not this soon. He wanted to know about their father when he had been _her_ father. He knew, even if he had been a year old when she'd started seeing them all, even if as far as he recalled she had _always_ been there, that there had been a time when it wasn't that way.

She hadn't known what to tell him on the spot, and certainly it was not a conversation she was able to have with him like this, when they all had to go to school or work. All she'd been able to do was promise that they would have a talk when he and the others came down to Austin for the upcoming Sleepster. Now that she'd promised, she actually had to think about what she'd say, and it was not coming easily.

It consumed her thoughts so much so that she got lost in them, sitting at her desk while her freshmen were coming into the class after lunch. She still felt sort of tired, as she'd been the day before, and given a few minutes more she could easily have dozed off for a nap. She wasn't even aware of the kids coming in until… the smell.

It curved its way around her senses like a slug, nasty and pungent, and even as she blinked and sat up, realizing that the freshmen were arriving, taking their places around the stations, her stomach gave its first sign of distress. Oh, she had smelled some unpleasant things in her life, but they had never been so triggering as to make her feel the way she felt now, like she was going to be sick. She got up now, scanning the room like she might have been a hunter, searching for its prey. What was it? Where was it? Who had it? She almost didn't want to find out, to get closer.

She didn't want to ask the kids, didn't want to draw attention to the situation. Clearly none of them had either smelled it or been so offended by it as she was. Bearing that in mind, she now had to wonder… again, _again_… if this was possibly one more sign, her body shouting at her. _What more is it going to take for you to understand this is real, Friar?_

No one looked to have food out in the open, and they knew she didn't mind them eating in class if they hadn't had time to finish over lunch for some reason, so long as they did it quickly and didn't disrupt the class, fall behind the work, or cause spills without cleaning them right away. Maybe they had something in their bags, leftovers or an empty container in their bag? The more exposure she had to the scent, much to her aggravation, she became convinced it wasn't food, almost more like… Oh, no, she knew that smell now, although it had never afflicted her in this way. _Dirty gym clothes. Dirty gym boy clothes._ How were they not smelling _that?_

"Who's got their gym stuff with them right now?" she finally had to ask, and the shake in her voice was barely containable. The kids looked at her, even as one of the boys near the open window raised his hand. "Do you mind putting those in your locker?" He reached into his bag, pulled out the smaller one from inside and made his way to grab the hall pass. Just him passing by her, she had to pull back, try to block the smell even as it made her stomach twist.

She had some of the others nearby open the rest of the windows, and for a while she seemed to be able to soldier on well enough, but then all it took was for her to catch some lingering notes of the stench in the air, and it was like she'd hit pause on a big action sequence in a movie, and now they'd hit play again and she was back right in the thick of it. And now… oh now there was no stopping it…

"I'm just… I just need to… to step away for a… minute, uh…" she blinked, trying to keep her composure, really pulling every last thread of self-control left in her. "Khalil, will you… will you go and ask… Mrs. Anderson across the hall to… keep an eye on all of you?"

She barely waited for him to answer, though she was about certain she'd heard him say yes. She was already on her way out the door. When she crossed into the hall, it was like the last shot came and finished her off, as she caught the trail of when the bag had been carried out of here. Right about then, the priority became to find the very nearest bathroom and hope no one was inside when she got there.

_Okay, okay, I'll do it, alright? I'll get a test, I'll even get two, so there._

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


	335. Their Story of Positivity

November 30th 2020

_Chapter 335  
Their Story of Positivity_

_Today_

The very important part was that she'd made it… mostly. There was that tiny bit of time where she felt like she'd removed herself from direct involvement with what she did, so that she skipped directly from busting into that bathroom to then sitting there, kinda shaky, definitely clammy, but at the same time relieved that the earlier feeling had left her. If she was very lucky, it would not make a comeback.

"Mrs. Friar? Are you okay?"

She paused. She did not remember having shut the stall door, but she had. Also, she recognized the voice as being that of Khalil Russell. Of all the things she might have thought in that moment, the one thing that came was how she didn't even know if this was the girls' room or the boys'. She looked around the enclosed space, and she was almost certain this had to be the boys'. _Well, this just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?_

"Mrs. Friar?" the boy asked again, and now she could see his sneakers, standing in the next stall over and moving about, like maybe he was debating crouching and looking to make sure she hadn't passed out or anything.

"Y-Yeah… Present…" she gave a limp wave of her hand before thinking how he – thankfully – couldn't see her. "Did you… Did you tell Mrs. Anderson to watch the class?"

"I did, yeah. But then you looked like you might be sick, so I came to find you. I forgot to take the pass," he added, as an afterthought.

"I'll write you a note," she groaned, reaching to grab some paper from the dispenser. Khalil walked out of the stall, and a moment later she could hear water running. After it stopped, he returned, and he passed her a few hand towels he'd run under cold water. "Thank you," she took them gladly. She was not aware that he had gone away and returned until his hand appeared again, this time with a sports bottle.

"It's clean from this morning, I just filled it with water." As crappy as she felt, this made her smile, and she took the bottle, with well-earned thanks. "I can get the nurse."

"No, no, that won't be necessary. Just go back to class, I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Wouldn't feel right to leave you like this, Mrs. Friar," Khalil spoke after a second, and a very slight pause on the end made her chuckle.

"You almost called me ma'am and changed your mind, didn't you?" she asked.

"Yes, Mrs. Friar." He wasn't going to leave so long as she could go, too, she could tell.

"This is going to sound weird, but you really remind me of my husband when we were your age…"

"That's good, right?" Khalil asked, sounding like he was smiling.

"Coming from me, no higher compliment. I call him Huckleberry," she told him, and he laughed.

Later, she'd figure out she would have been in the bathroom about fifteen minutes before she returned to class, Khalil at her side. The last few of those minutes had been out of the stall, as she'd gotten up and walked out of there, heading to the mirror to try and do her best in looking as she'd done earlier. By the end, the best she could say was that she mostly got it right. Meanwhile, she had her vest on her arm as she went back, as she'd noticed the unfortunate stain and had to do her best to rinse it off without making things worse.

Returning to class, she could only imagine what the rest of the class had been thinking. They were smart enough to connect some dots as to what had pulled her out of here, and the last thing she needed was gossip. Whatever they did or didn't think though, the class had greeted her return almost as though they'd made a pact to pretend as though nothing had happened, and she'd simply stepped away. She was very thankful for that, and in a way entirely unrelated to the incident itself, she was also thankful for what happened at the end of the period, as the class emptied out.

"Are you okay, Mrs. Friar?" Rochelle came up to her, and she looked so wholly focused on the moment, like she had no mind of 'I should go, I might be late for my next class,' which so often acted like some rocket boosters at her back as soon as class ended. If she ever had to stay back a minute, she'd look like she was stalling her rockets' take-off just by standing still, and the second she was clear to go… It was the most still and open she'd ever seen her be. And it made Maya so very happy.

"I am, yes. I might put a sign about no gym clothes in here from now on, but I'm good. Thank you for asking." Rochelle nodded and smiled, and finally she went on her way.

The rest of the day had been spent with one singular thought ruling her mind, either right up front in her extended break after the freshmen's class, or hanging back up on its throne as she taught her last period of the day, with the juniors. As far as she could tell, there hadn't been much talk of her mad dash, if any. No questions, no funny looks… So, she left the school at long last, bound for the drugstore. She felt a lot better by now, though she'd feel even better than that once she found out the answer to The Question. _I swear, if this is another false alarm, I am going to eat my hand._

She'd bought two, after having spent way too much time trying to pick 'the very best two' out of the available types, like she was in a casino, placing bets. After she got back in her minivan and turned for home, it felt like her mind was completely empty, incapable to commit to a thought except those tests. She had done this enough times by now, but like the last time her mind immediately went to her husband. Lucas had to be there with her, they had to find out together.

"That's what I said the last time, too," she muttered to herself, walking into the house. She had her own bag, and then the plastic bag holding her vest. The boxes were in her school bag, the better to keep their presence a secret if anyone was inside.

But she was alone. No Lucas, no Sam, just dogs crowding around her feet. When they dashed away almost all at once, she was convinced they had gotten a whiff of her vest.

"I know, right?" she sighed. First things first, she went and tossed it in the washing machine and got it started.

Climbing back upstairs though, she was back with the eternal trouble of wanting to find out what the tests would say but also wanting to hold off, to wait for Lucas to be here with her.

"Because that worked so well the last time…"

She had to do something, to occupy herself, distract herself, but then just telling herself this… She knew that was pointless, that she'd flit around like a hummingbird, from task to task, but she'd never find anything to hold her attention long enough. She couldn't help herself. The longer it remained a possibility, even unconfirmed, it would begin to sit and take hold in her, this idea that she could actually have a little start of a person inside her, a person who would be half her and half Lucas. How could it not unnerve her to not know, to have to wait?

The next thing she knew, she was upstairs, in the bathroom, opening the boxes, laying out their contents. She would take the tests, but she wouldn't look at them. That was the new plan. This was better, wasn't it? If she had to do this when Lucas would be there with her, she'd probably be unable to pee or something, and it would be awkward. Right now, it was just her, it would be fine, and the hard part would be over by the time Lucas came home.

So, she took the tests, and when she was done she set the sticks next to the sink, washed her hands once again, and walked back down the stairs to get her bag. She'd just take out her laptop, look into a few things for her mother's party at the theater, or she'd put together a few names for her to contact regarding Helena Zimmerman and basketball. She'd already taken a few quick notes on her phone…

… which, for some reason, she had left in the bathroom.

She genuinely considered just leaving it in there and working from memory, as though the bathroom was off-limits until after Lucas came home. But then what if he called or wrote her on his way home? With an overly exasperated sigh, Maya returned to the bathroom, looking so intent on grabbing her phone and leaving immediately, not even glancing in the direction of those sticks.

Probably, if she hadn't done _that_, she wouldn't have inadvertently knocked them off the edge of the sink and send them clattering to the ground. It made her jump, surprised. Cursing under her breath, she held to the sink as she crouched to go and grab the sticks, hopefully not seeing anything.

"And somehow this isn't the most ridiculous part of my day," she groaned, right before letting out a few more curses in earnest. She'd accidentally sent them sliding further away. "Are we really going to do this?" she frowned, looking down to find…

When she'd get to this part of the story that night, she would be stood in the middle of the living room, re-enacting the whole scene so Lucas might be able to picture her, crouched in a little ball, clinging to the sink's edge above her head, in the exact moment she learned she was pregnant. She spared him the part where she immediately lost grip and thumped down, her butt at least hitting the carpet in front of the sink instead of the tiled floor.

Much as she'd tried not to look, and oh how she had tried very, very hard, it had been inevitable, as she spotted the sticks on the floor in one second and then saw what the first one said, the word as clear as ever. The drop to the carpet had knocked the immediate shock out of her and she'd crawled the small distance to collect one and then both of the tests, looking at them in turn now, finding no point to obscure the second's result. _They_ were both positive, while _she_ sat there, mouth gaping, eyes fluttering.

"Oh…" she breathed, her hand moving to cover her mouth but then, unsure what she'd touched at this point, her arm took up the task, and breathed into the hairs on her forearm, which were all standing at attention right now, amid a field of goosebumps. There was a rumble of tears seeking to bloom, and right then she took a deep breath, to try and hold them in. Not yet, not…

Right then, she heard the dogs barking. _Lucas… He's home…_

It was a scramble to stand up, pick up everything she'd left lying around, and leave the bathroom. What was she going to do? What… _Surprise him…_ Oh, she liked this. It was no point to mourn the finding out together part, because getting to spring it on him, coming up with something clever… and cute… and memorable… That was possibly even better. Thinking fast, she hid the bag with the empty boxes and everything else at the bottom of the trash before darting out into the hall. Her first instinct carried her up to the attic. Once there, she didn't actually know what to do, but then…

"Hello?" Lucas' voice called up.

Without thinking, she opened a drawer on her desk and pushed the little bundle at the back before closing it again and climbing down. Lucas was calling again.

"Up here, hang on!"

_TO BE CONTINUED_

* * *

_See you tomorrow! - mooners_


End file.
